Projects
The ExPRESS Logistics Carrier (ELC)
The ELC is the fork lift pallet for the International Space Station - designed to have both general cargo and active payloads mounted to its deck and to be launched by the Shuttle. It serves as a transportation system, attachment mechanism, and avionics interface. When attached to ISS it provides heater power for the cargo and command and data interfaces for the payloads. The ISS interfaces for all attached payloads share a common design so ELC has the same interface as AMS-02. I have been involved with the design and development of the Electrical Ground Support Equipment (EGSE) for ELC and ISS avionics consultation for the flight software.
AMS-02 Data Systems
As of 3-Feb-08 AMS-02 is still actively integrating with hopes of manifesting on a later Shuttle flight for deployment to ISS. The picture below shows AMS-02 during the preliminary round of integration. The electronics crates (ether side of the cylinder) are mounted on jigs and attached to the vacuum tank (the cylinder) and support structure (the other truss work). On ether side of the picture are the trunions that attach to the Shuttle payload bay sills. I am active in the design and development of the ground systems and helped with the design of the main data computers and their software.
AMS-02 Crew Operations Post (ACOP)
I recently completed my contributions to the design of a small payload for the International Space Station. I acted as the project manager and coordinator for all disciplines of this project: mechanical, structural, thermal, electronics, and software. This was a multi-national effort with industrial contributors in Taiwan, Italy, Switzerland, and United States.
ACOP is a general purpose computer with four exchangeable hard drives for use on the International Space Station. ACOP is designed to buffer science data from AMS-02.
Seen below are renderings of this design.
And here are pictures of the first engineering model.
AMS-02 Data Acquisition System
I was active in the design and development of the AMS-02 Main Data Computer systems. This system consists of four CompactPCI systems as segments on a monolithic back plane. Each MDC is capable of operating the experiment thus providing four redundant systems. Critical interfaces to the payload host (ISS and STS) are shared by the MDC computers over the back plane.
The interesting challenges were: building a system designed for three years of operations as an attached payload to ISS, using mainly commercial components, with an international collaboration of designers and manufactures. The center of gravity for the system level design effort is at CERN in Geneva and the center of gravity for board level design and manufacturing is at CSIST in Taipei.
Here is the gang at CSIST near Taipei:
On Orbit Telemetry Recording
In 1998 I completed a project which was flown on STS 91 to record high rate data from the AMS payload (AMS HomePage). The recorder project was designed to be a means to provide redundant recording as well as gap coverage. Due to the failure of the KU band system it turned out to be the prime data recording for the payload. The project was implemented using off the shelf hardware operating within NASA's standard PGSC computers (IBM 755 laptops with an expansion chassis). Data was received using Digiboard Sync/570i cards and recorded onto 29 nine gigabyte SCSI hard drives.
This is me working on the SITE stand within the Space Station Processing Facility (SSPF) at Kennedy Space Center.
Embedded Systems
I have implemented several light weight embedded systems in the past and I am moving more heavily into this area. Among these projects was a Siemens C151C (8015 family) based system for yacht instrumentation. This project is built some interesting prototypes but did not come to fruition. See BoatBrains.
Printer Drivers
I have developed several printer drivers for raster devices. I have received and seen many requests for information on this task. What I have done that works well in my environment is to use the standard UNITOOL environment to generate a GDI driver that produces just rasters (handles all fonts and drawing commands). To accommodate UNITOOLS desire to generate a "HP" like data stream I defined a simple command set that UNITOOL can inject into the data stream. This works fine in my environment because my devices require custom localport monitors to output to the device. My localport monitors parse the simple language generated by the GDI driver and extract just the data stream really intended for the device.
I have developed systems to accommodate devices in the 200-300 DPI range, 8.5 inches wide, for 1, 6, and 24 bit gray/color devices and operating between 1 to 5 inches per second with rather poor interfaces (in a multiprocessing sense) to attach them. System loading has not been onus to date and this software has proved useful to my clients. The complete development and deployment cycle for these systems is now just a couple of man months.