Welcome Back to school everybody!! This is the GP RATz blog! For those of you who don't know we are the Grosse Pointe Radio Astronomy Team. We are the only group of students that built a radio telescope from scratch. if you are new to radio astronomy take a look at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's (NRAO) information on radio astronomy at: http://www.nrao.edu/whatisra/index.shtml also take a look around the site.
This will keep you informed of all the recent events in the club if you are in the club, this is really for you if you aren't in the club, but go to Grosse Pointe North or South High School you can come to the new members meeting, check the school announcements for more information.
And for even more information you can check out our web site at gpratz.org and go join the forum over at forum.gpratz.org.
We have already chosen our officers this year. they are, President: Bartos, Co VP: Miller and Co VP: Bakowski.
That's all for now but take come back!! The blog will be updated Every Thursday, if not Thursday it will be on Friday.
Hope to see you all this thursday at the new members meeting
Cheers
E. Bartos, Tech Guy.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Project update #1
Hello again! Its Thursday, and the first RATz meeting (returning members only) is in one week!!!
anyways, registration went good we had about 13 total people sign up. thats all thats new with the whole club, but the research project is getting along in the early stages nicely! Until yesterday i could not test the parts due to the fact that we being RATz are always doing things that involve COM/serial ports...well i dont have any of those, and until i got one i only knew that the kits would turn on and i could get a signal. Well now that i was able to get into school/the RATz room i haz a COM port! last night i ran the first 24 hour test with all the sensors connected to the master hub, so far i have found out that with the current power situation my temp/humidity sensor is a bit sketchy, meaning it is dropping out every time its capacitors run out of charge. this only happens because the current program i am using scans the channels on the master hub rather than leaving all of em on taking up major bandwidth that the network cannot handle. That just means i have to power cycle the hub every 2 min. Once i got past that problem, i got around to finding a good program that will work for just logging until we can actually get our real program written and find a programmer. Until we get the program made it will take a TON of work to manually remove all the spikes and equalize the curve of the temperature in the scan. For now we will just have to plan out, and work out the formula that the program will need to use, also figure out how the hell the logging program is saving the files so we can compare everything and try to get a general idea on how it should work and what elements we need to put into the program itself. We will also need to get a idea of how the Spectra Cyber works with the computer so we can actually make a decent interface to replace the current program and add in our own stuff. Tomorrow I am going to try to plan the first official meeting to get all our stuff together and all our ideas down on paper. so until then thats all!
Cheers
-Barts
anyways, registration went good we had about 13 total people sign up. thats all thats new with the whole club, but the research project is getting along in the early stages nicely! Until yesterday i could not test the parts due to the fact that we being RATz are always doing things that involve COM/serial ports...well i dont have any of those, and until i got one i only knew that the kits would turn on and i could get a signal. Well now that i was able to get into school/the RATz room i haz a COM port! last night i ran the first 24 hour test with all the sensors connected to the master hub, so far i have found out that with the current power situation my temp/humidity sensor is a bit sketchy, meaning it is dropping out every time its capacitors run out of charge. this only happens because the current program i am using scans the channels on the master hub rather than leaving all of em on taking up major bandwidth that the network cannot handle. That just means i have to power cycle the hub every 2 min. Once i got past that problem, i got around to finding a good program that will work for just logging until we can actually get our real program written and find a programmer. Until we get the program made it will take a TON of work to manually remove all the spikes and equalize the curve of the temperature in the scan. For now we will just have to plan out, and work out the formula that the program will need to use, also figure out how the hell the logging program is saving the files so we can compare everything and try to get a general idea on how it should work and what elements we need to put into the program itself. We will also need to get a idea of how the Spectra Cyber works with the computer so we can actually make a decent interface to replace the current program and add in our own stuff. Tomorrow I am going to try to plan the first official meeting to get all our stuff together and all our ideas down on paper. so until then thats all!
Cheers
-Barts
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