Ryan M Sutton

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Finally Some Good SNOW!

Published on January 23, 2012, by in Uncategorized.
Summit of Cannon Mountain, NH

Summit of Cannon Mountain, NH

We finally had some good snow move in, in the last 3 days around 12″ fell making for some good skiing. I logged today with the Skiing GPS Logger in it brand new case and got a TON of data.   In previous runs the datalogger would periodicity reset, I’m guessing due to a short in its old case or need to be manually reset for what ever reason.  After moving to this new case, it did not need to be reset all day! Also all of the data was written in a single file indicating that it did not reset it self all day.

Cannon - 2012-01-22

The days data.

 

I managed to cover a good part of the mountain today.  The image above was generated by Merkaartor.  There are a couple bugs in my software right now where it doesn’t close some tags, but the idea is that the files generated should be able to be opened directly by anything that can read GPX format, so I have some things to look at there.  After running a quick sed script to close the tags the data imported nicely.  I believe this is the first run I have done since upping the sampling rate to 5hz and it makes a huge difference. (more…)

 

GPS Logger Hardware v4.2

Published on January 23, 2012, by in Arduino, Hardware, Hardware.

DSCN0923

I didn’t change anything with the electronic parts, but did get a new case for the data logger.  I tried long and hard but could not find a way to fit the GPS antenna inside the case.  The Molex connector goes to the  status LED and switch shown earlier.  The switch I changed from being a run/stop switch to just switching power, which allows me to get everything packaged up the night before. The usual status LEDs are inside the case, but are not visible during operation, which seems to be ok.
DSCN0929

The board doesn’t line up with any of the mounting holes, even REV:B which I added mounting holes do not line up, I am pretty sure I can modify the board to fit these mounting holes though.  Over all this case it larger then I would like, hopefully with some other modifications I can get the size down a bit.  Putting it into this case did stabilize the device quite a bit, I had a good run which I will talk about in another post where it did not reset all day and churned out some very nice data.
 

 

STOP SOPA

Published on January 18, 2012, by in Uncategorized.

While it looks like congress is back peddeling pretty quickly, they are still going forward with SOPA/PIPA which could fundamentally break the internet. Messing with the distributed nature of the internet will but the United States on par with some of the most aggressive censorship countries.  In an open letter signed by the 83 high profile internet engineers including Vint Cerf a co-designer of TCP/IP explained their concerns that such legislation would damage the internet.

Below is a while a little outdated a very good explination of what SOPA/PIPA is:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

 

No More Flying Wires!

Published on December 13, 2011, by in Arduino, Hardware.
No more flying wires!

Finished board, I don't think the date is correct should be 11/19. Least the rev code is right.

Now on REV: C finally no flying mod wires on my accelerometer / gyro board. Only the accelerometer is populated as I left off the RC filter for gyroscope, so the board is only half working. With the micro, xbee, and accelerometer it draws 57.4ma. Since the xbee claims to take 50mA, 7.4mA for micro and accelerometer seems pretty good.
DSCN0905

 

Skiing Data

Published on December 13, 2011, by in Arduino, Logging Data, Software.

FullTrack-121211
The first trip I took the data logger proved that for some reason there is an error that stops it from logging after about an hour and a half. Since I powered it up before leaving home it had stopped before getting to the mountain. Went out again yesterday and this time powered up the logger in the parking lot and actually got some data! It did stop again after about an hour and a half so I only captured the first three runs. I did reset the main processor at lunch, but it did not start back up so I am guessing it is something on the sensor processor which does narrow down the issue at least.
ZoomTrack-121211
The detail was good, especially after the initial run, I’m guessing it locked some additional satellites once I reached the top of the mountain, as the initial chair lift up track has about 20ft error the west. The one of the tracks does show crossing the trail to stop show above. I want to get the timestamps and speed working next, and hopefully figure out why it stops after an hour and a half.

 

GPS Logger Hardware v4.1

Published on December 4, 2011, by in Arduino, Hardware, Hardware.

DSC_0079
I’m now back to the same functionality I had on the version I built on proto boards though now much smaller. I added a run/stop switch on the side. Each transition from stop to run will result in a new file being started. Two lights on the top, the green one is lit when the uC is in a ‘RUN’ state, the red one flashes after each track point is written to the SD card.
DSC_0071
Since the plan is to use this while skiing I used a LilyPad wearable switch and LED sewn into a glove for status and control. The LED is just a duplication of the SD write led on the case. As long as it is blinking, there should be data being written to the card. Each push of the switch will result in a new track segment started ( and the old one closed ).  I couldn’t find any of my LED LilyPad stuff so I de-soldered one of the switches and mounted a 1206 LED across the pins. The glove is connected back to the main box with a three conductor ribbon.
Hopefully will be trying this setup out tomorrow, interested to see if it actually works.

 

More Data!

Published on December 3, 2011, by in Arduino, Logging Data, Software.

DSC_0043
Was able to get everything working enough to record some tracks today. The box I used was a bit larger then I would like but it’s the only thing I could find. The tracks came out pretty good as far as accuracy, and it does not appear that it dropped any points.  Still do not have the timestamps working so I can’t be 100% sure on that last part.   It did create three different files indicating that the main uC reset for some reason, though it did recover.
2011-12-03-161550_1366x768_scrot
There is some issue with my GPX library, I think strings have some additional overhead in the new version of arduino which is causing problems.  I was working on converting things to using pgmprint and char*s anyways so I will keep moving forward with that.  I’m going to add some switches, secure the box some more and try again tomorrow.

 

Dev Environment r2

Published on December 2, 2011, by in Arduino, Software.

Just a quick update to the Sanguino enviroment I’m working with.  Fixed an issue in boards.txt where only one of the 1284 boards would show up. Also changed some pin definitions so that hardware SPI works. Full details here.

Sanguino-0023r2.zip

 

Updated Dev Enviroment

Published on November 26, 2011, by in Arduino, Software.

IMAG0618.jpg
In order to get some of the features like serial ports and I2C working on my atmega1284p chips, I needed to update the Sanguino core I have been using. The latest one published is based off arduino 0018 which works ok, but 0018 is before they had added strings and other useful features built into the core. I initially started updating the Sanguino core to 0021 which is what I was using as my dev environment but was having some issues with some conflicts in stdio and stdlib. From looking at the release notes the arduino team moved to register based pre-compiler directives rather then the CPU based ones used before. This method seems to be much better suited to alternative processors and is illustrated well here.

So I moved forward updating the Sanguino core files to 0023 which is the current version on arduino.cc. The modifications are pretty simple, update the pin outs in pins_arduino.c and everything else just falls into place.

I am currently working through testing functions on the atmega1284p I have gotten both UARTs  working with out issue.  I did need to make some modifications to the Wire library to get I2C working.  Just needed to have it add pullups to the correct pins, this could have been done in hardware but I like using the software pullups.  I believe SPI will work, but am still testing that.

Here are the modified Sanguino files which support 644p,1284p,and 1284p @8mhz and also the updated Wire library:

Sanguino-0023r1.zip UPDATED (details): Sanguino-0023r2.zip UPDATED (details): Sanguino-0023r3.zip UPDATED (details):Sanguino-0023r4.zip  UPDATED(details): Sanguino-0101r1.zip
Wire-Sanguino-0023.zip

 

GPS Logger Hardware v4.0

Published on November 25, 2011, by in Arduino, Hardware, Hardware.

IMAG0620
After having the boards for at least a month I finally built one up.  This board dosn’t really do much new it is basically my GPS logging hardware v3.1 built onto one board.  Since I was building my own boards I opted to use a atmega1284p since I was having issues running out of sram before (though I did clear that up in software).  So there are two atmega1284p processors one to deal with the GPS and sensors, and another to talk to remote sensors as well as build and write the GPX file to the SD card. I also added an accelerometer and gyroscope to add to the data the sensor uC is collecting, I will probaly replace the atmega1284p on the sensor side with a atmega88 if the memory utilization is low enough, the 1284 seems a bit overkill for what it is doing.
(more…)

 
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© Ryan M Sutton, 2015