Blogs

Notes on writing Seacat 16+ CTD driver

Here is the useful notes for writing Seacat 16+ driver:

The SBE 16plus-IM V2 SEACAT is designed to measure conductivity,
temperature, and (optional) pressure in marine or fresh-water environments in
moored applications. The 16plus-IM V2 has internal batteries and non-volatile
memory. It uses an Inductive Modem (IM) to transmit data and receive
commands over a plastic-jacketed steel mooring cable (or other insulated
conductor), using differential-phase-shift-keyed (DPSK) telemetry. No
electrical cables or connectors are required. The 16plus-IM V2’s built-in

Getting KML working

OK, starting from http://dataturbine.org/content/usage-dataturbine-kml-plugin

Modified my serial accelerometer driver to add fixed lat, long, elevation - http://code.google.com/p/oss-dataturbine/

under dev/adxl-kml

Run RBNB, source, add TrackPlugIn like so

http://code.google.com/p/oss-dataturbine/
java -cp $RBNB_HOME/bin/rbnb.jar:/usr/local/rbnb/apache-tomcat-5.5.12/webapps/webTurbine/WEB-INF/classes TrackDataPlugIn

Then the KML plugin:

http://code.google.com/p/oss-dataturbine/

RXTX glitch and fix

I was setting up the Java RXTX library on a new machine today, and kept getting 'port in use' exceptions. Turns out to be a lockfile issue, the fix is to make the directory and flag it writable:

 mkdir /var/lock
 chmod 1777 /var/lock

yeesh.

Sysadmin misc on iguassu

We seem to have lost the northern gorge at SMER again, drat. In checking, I also wrote an index page for http://iguassu.sdsc.edu/ and rewrote the smokeping config there to monitor all 3 machines at SMER. Index page now links to dataturbine.org as well as smokeping.

SNMP and status monitoring

I've been doing some reading on SNMP and its applications to monitoring and have made some useful discoveries.

SNMP (Wikipedia entry here, pretty good, and there's a good SNMP tutorial here) is an old protocol based on command/response and async alerts called 'traps.' Its insecure (based on a secret string called a 'community') up until version 3, but inside a firewall its simple, fast and very well suited to network monitoring.

Subversion stats uploaded

At the workshop I presented statistical analyses of the subversion commit logs. Those are now online at http://niagara.sdsc.edu/svn-stats-workshop/ for your amusement.

NI visit yesterday

Yesterday NI visited, as they periodically do. Items of note:
# Zack fixed an error in my code caused by the 8.6 upgrade where I was no longer able to read chassis data due to a bad FPGA bitfile. Visible consequence - as of yesterday we have chassis temp and barometer readings back. Nice.
# Long discussion on low-power cRIO hardware, discussed the fact that many of our planned deployments are Campbell-based for various reasons and that'd we'd really prefer NI if possible. Zack went over NI's options and will also talk to their staff to see if more watt reductions are feasible.

demo page using new WebPlot is up

http://dataturbine.org/content/live-web-only-demonstration

Nice, eh? Bill Finger's new code, very useful. The dropdown channel selection is magnificent.

niagara httpd is back up

Thanks to Jeff Avila in systems, httpd is up and running as before.

Smokeping deployed on iguassu

I've now deployed Smokeping on iguassu. This is a bandwidth/latency monitoring tool that we can use to keep an eye on network links and measure latency. Quite nice graphs.

Check it out at http://iguassu.sdsc.edu/cgi-bin/smokeping.cgi

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