More SpaceFish propaganda

Hot off the press we bring you some more SpaceFish propaganda, without any specific order: attitude estimation using the algorithm Héctor presented at the DLR (without any filtering yet), ground station gadgets and mission data visualization.

We are able to retrieve information saved in logs from missions and process it as needed. In this particular case we processed the GPS log and converted it to Google’s KML. This is how the ship mission looks like when exported to Google Earth:

As you can see there’s a sistematic error of 10 meter on the altitude. Fortunately, Frank gave us a very good idea to mitigate this error using a local GPS in the ground station. The next mission will probably include this correction.

The next video shows the current state of our monitoring and data gathering software. It also shows how well the algorithm for attitude estimation works (it’ll be much better when we add Kalman filtering):

Without trying to be exhaustive these are the near-future actions:

• Decide upon a company to manufacture the moulds (we have three candidates already, but nothing is set in stone)
• Add the safety microcontroller and keepalive signals.
• Translate the Kalman filter to C (it is already implemented and tested in matlab)
• Organize GUI components and widgets
• First gliding flights for data gathering
• Finish translating our SED to LaTeX because we all hate Word. This will also help improving the quality of our documentation given the fact that it is much easier to collaborate now.
• Try to get a reasonable model for X-Plane to do a hardware-in-the-loop

We’ll keep you posted when we hit more milestones or have news.

We hope everything goes perfect for those flying their experiments in October! Good Luck!

- fpereda