Tweaks and fixes 
Tuesday, February 12, 2008, 09:14 PM
During the test firing in November we burnt up one of the Accelerometers (it was mounted close to the mouth of the motor). So we wired up a new Accelerometer. The Prop team tweaked the main valve actuator so that it take ~3 seconds to open. We modified the LabVIEW code to take this into account to determine when to turn off the ignitor.


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Test Firing 
Sunday, December 2, 2007, 09:07 PM
We successfully fired the motor for the planned 20 seconds. The computer system worked well. A few minor issues included:

- Our video machine hung up. That is the computer at the test stand that has a Web Cam and a digital camera connected via USB. We were controller that PC using VNC. We lost connection to it and did not recover. It turns out the driver for the USB Ethernet stick has bugs causing occasional hang-ups
- Our Motor display had connection problems. We found out that we added a new parameter to the display. It worked fine on the computer that controlling the firing but not remotely. Reason was that we did not include that additional parameter into the LABViews data socket server.
- During the 2 days of testing and setup. The PC that controls the firing lost connection twice to the monitoring computers (~600 feet away). Same problem as the video PC. Bad driver for the USB Ethernet.

These minor things are fixed and ready for additional testing with the propulsion team.

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Test day one 
Saturday, August 25, 2007, 11:36 PM
This is just a quick entry to report on test day one. HOT! Spent 1/2 of the day setting up and configuring the test stand. We got our control computer setup... tested the wifi back to the control area. All looked good. Helped the Prop team do a lot of configuring. Some of the Prop guys went off in a corner and did nothing but LOX cleaning for hours. Also spent time chaining down the trailer. We did ignitor testing, looks to be reliable and ready for the event. Tomorrow morning we're getting out there early to setup for a set of cold flow/pressure tests and do a 5 second burn. We'll spend 30 minutes with the team doing a couple simulations to ensure everyone knows their role...

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