Post-Bench Test thoughts/opinions

[Skylar MSGC]

If there are teams out there has thoughts on the Bench Test held on June 13th 2017 feel free to post them in this thread.

What did you like, what didn't you like?

What was confusing? Feedback on the videos?

All of it is welcome.

[WY Katie]

Hi Skylar,
The videos made all the updates really easy to execute, I'm super appreciative to have had them. Great job to the whole team

[kendra]

We were about 75-80% successful today. I am happy that we were able to get the streaming video to work because that was the main purpose for this test. I'm a bit frustrated that we weren't able to get the tracking to work with the new updates. We had to uninstall a pyserial file and update it before the GUI even started working while hooked up to the base station. Then the IMU calibration window locked up without showing any calibration numbers. We then ran out of time and had to quit.

The instructional videos have been very helpful. I do like the updates that have been made to the tracking GUI. Anything that minimizes the amount of time of setup will help us on eclipse day - like figuring out our COM ports so we don't have to look them up and the automatic starting of the video pi. I also like that we have a place to put our APRS call sign as well as our IMEI number.

I just saw the information for recording the video in 10 min. chunks and updating the RFD pi so I haven't done either of those yet. We are planning to do a full launch (actually 3 balloons) on the day of the dry run, so I hope we can get all of these issues ironed out before then. I should have some time to work on updates this weekend before the Monday bench test.

Kendra

Edited to add: Michael and I are on a family vacation at Lake Okoboji and we brought all of our equipment with us (Now, that's dedication!). 

We took a screenshot of the streaming website showing a picture of the lake.

Attachments:

[ukyeclipse]

Kentucky was about 50% successful during the bench test. The video stream was successful, however we were not able to get the ground station to successfully track the iridium.

Video Streaming: 

We tested video streaming twice yesterday, once with strong wifi connection and once with a cellular hotspot. We found that with a strong wifi connection that we were able to stream good quality video reliably for a significant amount of time (approximately 2hr). We found that the hotspot we created during the actual bench test was not adequate to reliable stream video. We observed that stream would freeze up for 45sec to 2min then update the image on the screen then freeze again. A viewer of our stream would have basically seen a series of still images updated every minute or so. The stream coming into VLC and OBS seemed to be working fine so we think our problem was caused by a poor internet connection. We are currently in the process of switching over our stream system from the updated VLC/OBS to ffmpeg as suggested yesterday during the bench test. We plan to have all of our systems switched over to ffmpeg by the bench test on the 19th.

Tracking:

Over the past week we have been working on updating our systems to the new antenna tracking software. All updates seemed to go smoothly until testing. We continue to get "index error" when trying to update settings on the GUI. We have updated our arduinos to the newest code on github and are still receiving this error. Thus we cannot use the IMU to track payloads. We are getting iridium connection much more consistently on the new server which is good. We are not however seeing iridium location in the antenna tracking GUI, even though if we click to "point to last balloon location" we get movement.           

Much like Katie the videos on the updates were awesome! Thanks for your hard work guys!

[Sean Curry]

Much better results today. We changed to ffmpeg for video streaming, and it seemed to work pretty well. Here's a tip - test it first with an mpg video as input, so that you can get ffmpeg configured properly and test your connection to the stream server. Once that's working, you can change to the stream from the Video Payload.

Ground Station tracking also worked better today, as we were finally able to calibrate the dish, and sort of track the Iridium modem. At one point there was a 5 minute gap in Iridium positions - not sure if we were getting a bad GPS fix, or if Iridium itself was backed up. We saw this on both the GS software and the BOREALIS tracking site.

Overall, good progress.

Sean and Colin, North Medford High School Tornado

[ajarrell]

The Vanderbilt team was successfully able to stream through OBS and ffmpeg. However, both the RFD still image package and servo tracking was inoperable. The Antenna Tracking application would not start up with USBs plugged into the computer. In addition, the auto fill option for the COM ports didn't work. We were able to fill those in and get data from the Iridium and arduino GPS.

[Austin MnSGC]

Jun 15, 2017 13:37:25 GMT -7 ajarrell said:

The Vanderbilt team was successfully able to stream through OBS and ffmpeg. However, both the RFD still image package and servo tracking was inoperable. The Antenna Tracking application would not start up with USBs plugged into the computer. In addition, the auto fill option for the COM ports didn't work. We were able to fill those in and get data from the Iridium and arduino GPS.

The most common reason for the COM port autofill not working is that your pyserial is out of date. Try updating it and see if it works.