Sunday, April 20, 2008, 09:17 PM
Things are looking good for the next test firing in May. The Prop team fixed the leaking LOX valve. The computer team did some additional testing. Tweaked a few parameters for optimizations, but essentially it is ready to go. | permalink
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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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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