Learn Something

Angel, Doug, and James with our payload

Short version: Me and two other NMSU students designed, built, programmed, and delivered, in six weeks, a rocket payload that will fly into space on May 1st 2010.  We called it the Fachaba Project, which stands for “Fast, Cheap, and Barely Adequate.”  We Rock!

Long version:

On December 2, 2009, I logged into Facebook to see this status message:

Pat Hynes is working on the student launch project. Anyone have an experiment they want to fly on our rocket?

Pat is the director of the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, who for the past couple of years has been buying space on a sounding rocket to fly student payloads into space.  NMSGC got me my two summer internships at Spaceport America, and they’ve been generally wonderful and helpful to me as I work to find my place in the space industry.

So I made an appointment to talk to Aaron Perez, the guy running the student launch project.  After Christmas vacation, I sat down with him to talk about my payload idea.

Which was pretty vague.  Last term, I helped James and Angel in my Experimental Methods class with their class project, which was flying a model rocket with a temperature sensor on board and logging the temperature during the flight.  I did the programming of their Basic STAMP micro.  It was a great project, and we decided to do it again sometime.  Except this time without the rocket crashing into the desert and destroying the data.

I had already seen the standard payload that the students build for the launch program, and it seemed to take up a lot of room compared to our little model rocket payload.  It took up most of a 10 inch diameter plexiglass shelf, and it seemed (from our lofty perspective of one unsuccessful model rocket flight) that we could do a lot more with that much real estate.

So I told Aaron that I planned to slap an Arduino and an Inertial Measurement Unit from SparkFun Electronics on one of those shelves and record enough data to track the trajectory of the rocket.  (I knew that Spaceport America needed this capability from my last internship there.)  He told me that it sounded good, and if I could come up with $12,000 for our part of the cost of the launch, he’d let me do it.

I mumbled something about not having that kind of money and slunk out of the office.  Then I started thinking about what would have happened if I’d have had to actually produce a space-going payload filling up a $12,000 slot, in a town full of people who could actually make a good case for their payload being worth that much money.  I did some research on the Arduino and the SparkFun IMU, and found that the Arduino was underpowered and short on I/O pins, and the SparkFun IMU was just some sensors soldered to a circuit board and wasn’t calibrated or temperature compensated.  Plus the driver software was embarrassingly crude – just a demo program, essentially.  ”Dodged a bullet there, Doug”, I told myself.

Three days later, Aaron called me up and told me that if I could put together a team of students and get an academic advisor, they’d fly our payload for free.  And oh yeah, you need to deliver the payload in six weeks.  Looks like that first bullet was just to get my range!  But heck, this was why I moved here, so how could I say no?

James and Angel were willing, but we needed an advisor and an IMU we wouldn’t need to spend months calibrating and programming.  I set James to finding an IMU, and Angel and I went to find an advisor.

Our inquiries kept coming up dry, so finally we went to talk to Crystal Downs, the Aerospace Special Projects Coordinator for the NMSU Engineering department.  She gave us some names, and as we were about to wrap it up, the head of the Engineering department, Dr. Thomas Burton, walked in.  Crystal told him what we were looking for, and he said he’d do it.  Boom!

Meanwhile James found a sweet IMU from a company called MEMSense.  It cost $2200, but I remembered the first day of the term when I walked into the wrong classroom and listened to Dr. Edward Pines talk about Engineering Economics.  He happened to mention, offhand, that he had a few thousand dollars of grant money from Boeing that students were welcome to make a pitch for.

I made the pitch, and he said if I gave him a written proposal he’d consider it, and gave me a photocopy the relevant pages of a textbook explaining what a “proposal” was.  I followed the directions and sent him the result, and he approved our grant request.  Great.  Now we had to deliver.

Let me tighten up this narrative a bit.

MEMSense managed to deliver our custom sensor with one week left on the clock.  Fortunately everything worked with minimal fussing around.

Angel and James did a great job fabricating the payload, and I was late delivering the software, but Aaron gave me a couple of extra days, one of which I used to catch up on my sleep after the all-night hacking marathon, and the other one I used to finish and test the software.  It works!

Then we all showed up at Aaron’s office and added our payload to the stack, and it was done.

I love working with these guys.  We can do anything!

Now we wait for the launch, which is currently scheduled for May 1.  We’ll be at the launch, geeking out and taking pictures.

If you have any questions, let me know and I’ll see if I can answer them.

Our thanks to Dr. Burton, Dr. Pines, Keiron, Margaret, and Sarah at NMSU for making this project possible, and for Chris and the rest of the team at MEMSense for the terrific IMU and the excellent tech support.

I have this extra-curricular project I’m working on this term. While I was waiting for details to firm up and parts to arrive, I thought I’d see if I still had the chops to build and program an actual machine. So I dug out the Lego Mindstorms and set about making a machine to help me make a perfect cup of tea, even if I forget to remove the teabag for hours (which, sadly, is a real problem for me).

I spent a while reacquainting myself with the hardware, built the robot, then dug into the programming.

The software for programming the Lego Mindstorms kits was written for Windows, but it was quickly reverse-engineered and improved by the hacker community. I prefer something called Not Quite C, or NQC, by one Dave Baum. Sadly, it hasn’t been updated in quite a while and I had a lot of trouble getting it to run on the house Macs. I eventually got it working on our oldest machine, wrote the code, downloaded it into the robot, and it worked. Yay!

Building the robot consumed an afternoon. Getting NQC working consumed a couple of days. Writing and testing the code took another afternoon and evening. I’ve been using it for over a week now and it’s great! Anna lets me keep it in the kitchen. She thinks I’m amusing.

Here’s a video I put together this evening, which was another struggle with old software. For some reason Apple decided to dumb down iMovie about the time we got our Mac mini, and it wouldn’t accept the video file from my camera. Eventually I learned that there was so much outcry about this that Apple re-released the previous version for free download, only to remove it from their site when the next version came out.

However, the Internet being what it is, I was able to find a copy somewhere else and install it. I’ve never used any version of iMovie before, and it was really pretty easy to throw this together.

You’ll probably want to right-click on the following link and copy it to your own computer, so you can open it in your QuickTime player. It’s about 10mb in size.

TeaMaker video

If anyone wants it, I can send you the source code. Let me know. It’s pretty basic.

Hidden feature: the body can be moved up and down on the legs, to adjust to the height of your teacups.

Major drawback: the robot is battery powered. When I swap the batteries for fresh ones, it forgets the program and I have to boot up the old iMac and upload the program again.

Bonus feature: the tea-infuser ball gizmo I got for Christmas works with it. I can load it up with loose tea, hang it on the dunking arm, and come back to a perfect cup of, say, chai rooibos.

Next upgrade: an alligator clip on a string, so I can use it with teabags that don’t have strings, like my beloved PG Tips.

Not planned: a user interface for choosing steep times, dunking frequency, or the song that plays upon completion. Such things do not belong on a kitchen appliance.

Best Cat Ever

The house is empty.  She was a small cat, and her last days were spent largely hiding.  Yet it feels like the brass band has packed up and left.

Friday afternoon the vet came to our house and put our cat Pumpkin to sleep.

It is Sunday evening, and I have spent much of the intervening time weeping.

First, let me get this off my chest.  I have three complaints to the Management.

1. Why do people have to die?
2. Why does it cause so much grief?
3. And why does grief create so much goddamned snot?

Actually, I know why people have to die.  Everything dies.  It’s built into the structure of the universe.  Science has actually quantified this property, given it a name (entropy) and described it with equations.  Philosophically, I approve of death, for without death, there’s no room for new things, and without new things, there’s no progress, and without progress, what meaning does life hold?  So I get why my cat had to die, intellectually.  Besides, she was sick and miserable and there was no other way to end her misery.

But we had been together for more than sixteen years, and I grieve her loss.  These past two days have been filled with events triggering a Pumpkin memory, followed by waves of grief and ropes of mucus hanging from my nose.  Why?  Why is there so much grief?  Actually, why is there any grief at all?  What’s it for?  Does grief have any survival value at all?  It seems like the opposite.  The average leopard would have a much easier time catching me while I’m blinded by tears.  I was actually becoming frightened of how sad I was, and how it wasn’t stopping.  I wondered how to make it stop, and my logical mind said “Suicide.”  Does that sound like a survival trait to you?

(No, I didn’t seriously entertain the notion.  When I ask it a question my logical mind comes up with answers in an internal brainstorming session, but I get to decide what to do with my conscious mind, and suicide is definitely not gonna happen.  I’ve got more to live for than there’s space on this web server’s hard disk to describe.  So don’t worry.)

Charlie Brown exclaims “Good grief.”  Is it really?  Why?  What does he know that I don’t?

We hear that grief comes in stages, and that we need to progress through all of them to make the grief stop.  There are counselors and procedures that can lessen the grief.  But nobody seems to know why grief exists.  Certainly I‘ve got no clue.

Does the snot have some health benefit?  And that’s not really a thought I want to pursue, so I’ll move on.

I have so many memories of her.  We were friends from the beginning, when a bold, half-grown tortoise-shell cat stepped in front of me while I was walking to the bus stop to go to work.  I stopped (because I had to or step on her) and she climbed up my jeans and jacket and settled on my shoulders, purring in my ear.  I was charmed but on a schedule, so I put her down and resumed my journey, which was interrupted again in the same way.  After a few rounds of this I put her down and sprinted to the corner, then risked a look back.  She was sitting on the sidewalk, waiting for me to come back.

We needed a cat, for our new house had mice.  We had tried to borrow a friend’s cat but it was a total failure.  The mice and the loaner cat ignored each other.  I thought about the bold tortoise-shell all day, and when I came home Anna and I went out to look for her.  She appeared in the same place, climbed to my shoulders again, and then transferred to Anna’s shoulders, and wove back and forth between our shoulders as we walked down the sidewalk.

The lady across the street had been feeding her.  ”She follows me around like a dog,” she said.  But she was moving that week and said we could keep her, so we did.  We named her Pumpkin for her Halloween coloring and the sharply-defined orange triangle around her right eye, which reminded us of a jack-o-lantern’s triangular cutout eyes.

The mice were gone in a couple of days.  Pumpkin coasted on that for sixteen years.  Smart cat.

She really was smart.  You could look into her eyes and see a person looking out at you.  She had no trouble letting you know what she wanted, with voice and actions and posture.  And she could be reasoned with.  She knew what was wrong and right, and after we punished her for a transgression she very seldom repeated it.

One of the fun things I do with cats is put my arm under a blanket or rug and move my hand like a wounded animal.  Cats love to pounce on the hand.  But Pumpkin would take one look at the situation and pounce on the part of my arm that wasn’t under the rug.  Ow.

She would leave a dead mouse in the hallway until we’d seen it and praised her for being such a fine hunter.  Then she’d drop it into the toilet.

Once I was on the computer, ignoring her outside at the patio door.  Eventually I noticed an irritating light shining in my eye.  She had moved to put the reflection of the sun from her nametag directly into my eye.  I let her in immediately.

Oh, she was beautiful.  Her coat was soft and plush, not so much silky as rich.  One visitor claimed she felt like rabbit fur.  I’ve never touched so fine a coat on any other cat.  Her eyes were large and green and looked directly into yours.  She liked being picked up and carried, but only if she could put her front paws on your shoulders and, nose-to-nose, capture your gaze with hers.  When I would lie down on the floor, she would climb on to my chest and peer into my face.  Perhaps she was imagining that she had caught me, like a leopard dropping onto an unwary hunter in the jungle.

She gave off the impression of strength.  She had a wide stance and a beefy body.  ”Cat like a bull,” Anna described her.  Her will was strong, too.  We tried to put a leash on her and take her for a walk one day.  She made terrifying growls, hissed and spat, and hung back and finally flopped on her side glaring at us.  ”You want me on this leash?  You’ll have to drag me!”

But she still had the grace that we call “feline.”  I once saw her patiently stalking a housefly until it landed within reach.  She put out a paw – not quickly, but absolutely precisely – and placed it gently on top of the fly, which did not escape.

Her voice was music, and she had a huge vocabulary.  She could talk.  She had words for “Hi!” and “Please?” and “that’s enough of THAT!” and “I’m trapped in the closet” and “I need to be rescued from this high place” and “Listen to how my voice echoes when I’m behind the TV” and “There’s a strange cat in the back yard” and “Feed me!”  Lots of different ways to say “Feed me.”  She used to sing with us.  When I would wake her up by petting her, she’d make a beautiful little sound that combined purr and song.  ”Good morning!”, she’d say.

She liked people.  She would greet any visitors to the house and accept their admiration.  She could always be found near us, curled up in a corner of the room we were in, or under the desk we were working on.  She wasn’t a lap cat, but she would occasionally climb into your lap and demand attention.  Sometimes I’d ruffle the fur on her head, like you’d tousle the hair of a child.  She’d lean back into it, luxuriating in the contact and letting go of a cat’s natural dignity.

She was a person, uniquely herself, and as complicated and individual as any human.  You could see her thinking, and you could feel the force of her personality shining out of her eyes and into yours.  It’s so hard to believe she’s gone.

For the last month we’d been giving her 200cc’s of saline solution through a needle into the loose skin over her shoulders.  Her kidneys were failing, and this served as a crude sort of dialysis to flush the toxins out of her system.  It worked well at first.  She would perk up and regain her appetite and be her old self again.  But as the weeks went by the treatment wasn’t helping as much, until Thursday morning she absolutely refused to let me put the needle into her.  Anna and I talked it over and we figured that she was smart enough to know what she wanted, so I left her alone.  She was sick and unsteady and spent a lot of time hiding, but sometimes she’d come out and just be with us.  Friday morning she came looking for us in the shower, saying her “Where are you?” word.  She always used to worry about us being in the shower.  She hated baths and wondered why we didn’t claw our way out of the water like she always did.

We tried to feed her that morning.  She tried to eat, but she’d put her muzzle into the bowl and just stand there, then back away with the food untouched.  I got her to lick some cream off of my finger, but I think she would probably have licked my finger without the cream.  She was telling us that she wanted to go, so I called the vet and asked them to come over and give her release.

They asked if I wanted her cremated, and I said no, we’d keep her.

So I dug a grave in the back yard, under the oleanders.  She was still alive in the house.  Digging that hole was awful; the hardest task I’ve ever done.  But what else was there to do?  Throw her out with the rest of the medical waste?  I dug the hole, and cried, and made more snot, and finally it was done.  I made a headstone out of a cedar plank and burned her name into it with a soldering iron, and then went back into the house and looked for her.

She didn’t want to move, but I picked her up and held her against me.  She didn’t have the energy to put her paws on my shoulders, but she shoved her head under my chin and nuzzled into my neck.  I laid down on my back and she stretched out on my chest and looked down at me.  I stroked her and took off her collar, and then the vets arrived.  They gave her a tranquilizer shot, to which she objected most strenuously, then retired to the living room and left us alone with Pumpkin.  We put her on the floor and she became calm and still.  We petted her and told her we loved her, and waited for her to fall asleep so the vets could administer the lethal shot.  But she began to throw off the effect of the tranquilizer.  Her head was weaving back and forth, and she got her feet under her and started to rise.  ”This is NOT what I want!”, she was saying.  We called the vets and laid her out on the daybed in the library, and I held her as they administered the shot.  She let it happen, like it had been her idea all along.  I felt her swallow once, twice.  Then she stopped, like a clock winding down.  I put my ear against her side and heard nothing.  So easy.

We took care of the paperwork with the vets and they left.  We went back into the library and Pumpkin was there, unmoving.  Her fur was still the same rich coat, but she was so still.  I wrapped her up in the T-shirt I had been wearing when I dug the grave, and I picked her up and held her to my chest for the last time.  She was still recognizably Pumpkin, but… lessened.  Her life was gone, her movement done, her person-ness drained away  Passive, as she never was in life.  I slowly walked to the grave and laid her down, then put the marker at her head and picked up the shovel.

Anna and I took turns filling the hole until it became a mound, then I sat in the sun and looked at the thing we had made.  Such a mystery.  We take a life for granted, and wonder at its cessation, but surely it’s the life that’s remarkable and not its end.  Death came so quickly and easily, while her life lasted more than sixteen incredible years.  What miracles, the lives we made together, hers and Anna’s and mine.

Goodbye, Pumpkin.  We love you.

I finally settled on a nice theme that handles my subpage menus the way I want them handled. It’s called Cordobo Green Park 2. There’s a link to it on the bottom of the page.

There was some flakiness with the way it displays the sidebar, but I sorted it out.

I miss the moon picture from my old K2 theme, but when WordPress went to 2.7 the header went all awry. K2 rc 8 fixes this (yay!) but I still don’t like how it handles subpages, so it’s Green Park 2 for a while.

Maybe GP2 will add header images someday. One can hope.

I keep playing with WordPress themes. Right now it’s a theme called Arclite, but I may change it at any moment.

Let me know if you particularly like (or hate) the current theme. Whatever it is.

Less painful than the last one, although the K2 theme I’ve been using is now pretty well obsolete. Trying a new one now called Fusion – hope you like it.

Still gotta fix the categories. I’ll probably just nuke them and start over.

I’m looking for a co-op or internship this summer and next semester if possible.

There are some great-looking ones at NASA White Sands Testing Facility. Hoping to land one of them, I’ve moved my Resume section out to the top menu and given it a bit of polish.

The Career Services department at NMSU has a neat website that connects students and employers. I’ve got my stuff posted there, too.

Don’t miss this deal, employers! You get a guy with 20+ years of IT experience for student wages!