My students will be launching their Eagle V space probe this Friday, February 19, 2016 at 7:45 AM CST. You can watch a live stream of the launch at:
They are attempting to reach an altitude of over 100,000 feet, while maintaining live telemetry. Please tune in for the live launch and wish our Space Cowboys well!
As most of you know, I teach High School, and in addition to all the engineering and math classes I teach, I have a class where the students design and build sophisticated instrument packages, and then launch them to the edge of space on High Altitude Balloons.
Students must apply and then be accepted into this program, and the class is a block that takes most of the afternoon. The program is called the League of Extraordinary Space Cowboys, and the team usually gets two launches off a year. Pictured above is this year’s group.
I am really looking forward to working with this group of talented young people . . . they are among the best students I have ever had. You can follow their work on facebook HERE.
While making a quick run into Uganda, ended up getting my car commandeered at a Military checkpoint. Soldiers wanted us to take them to Kampala, but we ended up at the Nile. They made arrangements for transport by boat, and we steamed up to the headwaters of the Nile River. We collected water from the headwaters of the Nile for a Souvenir.
As most of you know, I teach High School Engineering, so I am always looking for exciting platforms from which I can make Match, Physics, Engineering and Programming Fun and Exciting. I have done a lot of work with Edge of Space Ballooning, but was looking for something that would allow more flights, and more COL (Cycles of Learning) per year.
I think I have happened onto something that might be the ultimate Engineering teaching tool for High School. This is the 3DR X8+ Unmanned Aerial Drone.
I have spent about six months working with this unit, and am very excited about it. I consider it to be an exceptional teaching platform and the students like it.
This is something they have to put together, read instructions carefully, and learn in order to get it up and running. This though, is one of the things I like about it. We need to teach Engineering, and some of the really ready to fly out of the box drones like the Phantom are fun, but do not offer the same educational opportunities.
I have gotten excellent technical support from 3DR when I hit a snag I can not figure out. We have had dozens of successful flights on this platform, and are now starting to build our own instrument packages to fly on it.
It requires attention, but mastering the use of this unit is well withen the skill set of motivated High School Students.
I do plan on doing lessons on some of the things we do with this drone in the future.
In the earlier lessons in this series we learned how to hook the Adafruit Ultimate GPS up to the Beaglebone Black. In these lessons we got the hardware working, got to the point we could take data, and then got the NMEA sentences parsed, so that we could display understandable data for Latitude, Longitude, and Altitude. In this lesson we will show you how to create a GPS tracker, by logging your GPS data to a file on the Beaglebone Black. Then when you get back home, you can load the data into google earth to see an interactive view of where you have been.
The video shows step-by-step how to get the code working, starting with the code we developed in Lesson 3. We end up with the following program:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 | import serial import Adafruit_BBIO.UART as UART from time import sleep UART.setup("UART1") ser=serial.Serial('/dev/ttyO1',9600) class GPS: def __init__(self): #This sets up variables for useful commands. #This set is used to set the rate the GPS reports UPDATE_10_sec= "$PMTK220,10000*2F\r\n" #Update Every 10 Seconds UPDATE_5_sec= "$PMTK220,5000*1B\r\n" #Update Every 5 Seconds UPDATE_1_sec= "$PMTK220,1000*1F\r\n" #Update Every One Second UPDATE_200_msec= "$PMTK220,200*2C\r\n" #Update Every 200 Milliseconds #This set is used to set the rate the GPS takes measurements MEAS_10_sec = "$PMTK300,10000,0,0,0,0*2C\r\n" #Measure every 10 seconds MEAS_5_sec = "$PMTK300,5000,0,0,0,0*18\r\n" #Measure every 5 seconds MEAS_1_sec = "$PMTK300,1000,0,0,0,0*1C\r\n" #Measure once a second MEAS_200_msec= "$PMTK300,200,0,0,0,0*2F\r\n" #Meaure 5 times a second #Set the Baud Rate of GPS BAUD_57600 = "$PMTK251,57600*2C\r\n" #Set Baud Rate at 57600 BAUD_9600 ="$PMTK251,9600*17\r\n" #Set 9600 Baud Rate #Commands for which NMEA Sentences are sent ser.write(BAUD_57600) sleep(1) ser.baudrate=57600 GPRMC_ONLY= "$PMTK314,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0*29\r\n" #Send only the GPRMC Sentence GPRMC_GPGGA="$PMTK314,0,1,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0*28\r\n"#Send GPRMC AND GPGGA Sentences SEND_ALL ="$PMTK314,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0*28\r\n" #Send All Sentences SEND_NOTHING="$PMTK314,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0*28\r\n" #Send Nothing ser.write(UPDATE_1_sec) sleep(1) ser.write(MEAS_1_sec) sleep(1) ser.write(GPRMC_GPGGA) sleep(1) ser.flushInput() ser.flushInput() print "GPS Initialized" def read(self): ser.flushInput() ser.flushInput() while ser.inWaiting()==0: pass self.NMEA1=ser.readline() while ser.inWaiting()==0: pass self.NMEA2=ser.readline() NMEA1_array=self.NMEA1.split(',') NMEA2_array=self.NMEA2.split(',') if NMEA1_array[0]=='$GPRMC': self.timeUTC=NMEA1_array[1][:-8]+':'+NMEA1_array[1][-8:-6]+':'+NMEA1_array[1][-6:-4] self.latDeg=NMEA1_array[3][:-7] self.latMin=NMEA1_array[3][-7:] self.latHem=NMEA1_array[4] self.lonDeg=NMEA1_array[5][:-7] self.lonMin=NMEA1_array[5][-7:] self.lonHem=NMEA1_array[6] self.knots=NMEA1_array[7] if NMEA1_array[0]=='$GPGGA': self.fix=NMEA1_array[6] self.altitude=NMEA1_array[9] self.sats=NMEA1_array[7] if NMEA2_array[0]=='$GPRMC': self.timeUTC=NMEA2_array[1][:-8]+':'+NMEA1_array[1][-8:-6]+':'+NMEA1_array[1][-6:-4] self.latDeg=NMEA2_array[3][:-7] self.latMin=NMEA2_array[3][-7:] self.latHem=NMEA2_array[4] self.lonDeg=NMEA2_array[5][:-7] self.lonMin=NMEA2_array[5][-7:] self.lonHem=NMEA2_array[6] self.knots=NMEA2_array[7] if NMEA2_array[0]=='$GPGGA': self.fix=NMEA2_array[6] self.altitude=NMEA2_array[9] self.sats=NMEA2_array[7] myGPS=GPS() GPSdata=open('/root/GPS_data/GPS.txt', 'w') GPSdata.close() while(1): myGPS.read() if myGPS.fix!=0: try: latDec=float(myGPS.latDeg)+float(myGPS.latMin)/60. lonDec=float(myGPS.lonDeg)+float(myGPS.lonMin)/60. if myGPS.lonHem=='W': lonDec=(-1)*lonDec if myGPS.latHem=='S': latDec=(-1)*latDec alt=myGPS.altitude GPSdata=open('/root/GPS_data/GPS.txt', 'a') myString=str(lonDec)+','+str(latDec)+','+alt+' ' GPSdata.write(myString) GPSdata.close() except: pass |
This program should create a file on the Beaglebone Black, and track your longitude, latitude and altitude.
In order to view the file on Google Earth, you will want to put a KMZ wrapper on the coordinates. A reasonable KMZ wrapper is below. Simply take your coordinates from the program above, and paste them in the file below, in the area between <coordinates> and </coordinates>
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <kml xmlns="http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2"> <Document> <Style id="yellowPoly"> <LineStyle> <color>7f00ffff</color> <width>4</width> </LineStyle> <PolyStyle> <color>7f00ff00</color> </PolyStyle> </Style> <Placemark><styleUrl>#yellowPoly</styleUrl> <LineString> <extrude>1</extrude> <tesselate>1</tesselate> <altitudeMode>absolute</altitudeMode> <coordinates> </coordinates> </LineString></Placemark> </Document></kml> |