Software to Hardware

Utilizing the really nice USB serial interface to the microcontroller, I managed to get a simple but effective software to hardware interface. On the microcontroller I coded a simple program to recognize commands sent as ASCII over the serial interface and respond based on the request. So the microcontroller was controlling two servos and talking with the Wii Nunchuck and would send data from the back to the computer if the computer sent a request for it.

On the computer side I wrote a .NET program in C++ that would connect to the serial port. Writing the program acted as a wonderful foundation for what will eventually be our own proprietary ground station software. The program sports a command line that you can just to write your own commands to the microcontroller. Whether it will recognize it or not depends on the microcontroller. Anyway, so it will display what is being received in one panel and a sort of orientation instrument in another panel. The orientation instrument is updated based on returning data on the Wii Nunchuck accelerometers. That data is requested by the program either by hand using the command line or about every 10 milliseconds. If the program picks up data coming back, it parses it to see what kind of data it is. If it recognizes something then it picks out the important details and does whatever it's supposed to do with it.

Anyway, I hope you guys will see the ramifications of this bit of progress. It's essentially a proof-of-concept for a proprietary ground station program. Communication with hardware, graphical display, Windows controls handling, message handling and parsing, and more were achieved with this small program. That's basically everything we need to make a bare bones system. To make a more advanced one, such as one that will utilize Google Earth and such, will take some more tinkering.

Also, on Wednesday, January 25th, I held a kickoff meeting of sorts for the project. This is our first time opening it up to other people. The attendance was nice and overall it went fine. It looks like people share the general objection to simply buying commercial products and putting it together. Hopefully that will motivate people to work hard on actually engineering a final product.