Hi, Check out this new NASA open source initiative, Called "The Plan for Code." at:

< http://open.nasa.gov/blog/2012/01/04/the-plan-for-code/ >

There is a "problem statement idea" posted that to me sounds like problem domain solvable by DataTurbine.

1.) Make All Levels of NASA Remote Sensing Data Available From a Single Pluggable System -- < http://open.nasa.gov/appschallenge/idea/make-all-levels-of-nasa-remote-s... >

Just thought I would share this interesting new resource.

Weekly status reports of the MCR and the NTL projects are posted here.
Previously, there used to be two separate reports. The previous ones are saved in the separate blog entries.

On March 4th 2009, Triton Engineering Student Council (TESC) in UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering hosted a dinner with deans for the first time. During the "green engineering" themed dinner, the deans of the engineering school encouraged multidisciplinary collaborations among students and faculties. As a computer science graduate student, I presented a short overview of a "smart building" project with Professor Jan Kleissl and Professor Paul Linden from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) department.

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

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.