Altos1.3

Thu, 19 Dec 2013 02:22:57 -0800
tags/rockets

AltOS 1.3 — TeleMega and EasyMini support

Bdale and I are pleased to announce the release of AltOS version 1.3.

AltOS is the core of the software for all of the Altus Metrum products. It consists of firmware for our cc1111, STM32L151, LPC11U14 and ATtiny85 based electronics and Java-based ground station software.

This is a major release of AltOS as it includes support for both of our brand new flight computers, TeleMega and EasyMini.

AltOS Firmware — New hardware, new features and fixes

Our new advanced flight computer, TeleMega, required a lot of new firmware features, including:

9 DoF IMU (3 axis accelerometer, 3 axis gyroscope, 3 axis compass).

Orientation tracking using the gyroscopes (and quaternions, which are lots of fun!)

APRS support so your existing amateur radio receiver can track the location of your rocket.

Software FEC, both encoding and decoding.

Four fully-programmable pyro channels, in addition to the usual apogee and main channels.

STM32L CPU support. TeleMega needed a more powerful processor. The STM32L is a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 which is definitely up to the challenge.

Our new easy-to-use flight computer, EasyMini also uses a new processor, the LPC11U14, which is an ARM Cortex-M0 part.

For our existing cc1111 devices, there are some minor bug fixes for the flight software, so you should plan on re-flashing flight units at some point. However, there aren't any incompatible changes, so you don't have to do it all at once.

Bug fixes:

More USB fixes for Windows.

Turn off the cc1111 RC oscillator at startup. This may save a bit of power, and may reduce noise inside the chip a bit.

AltosUI — Redesigned for TeleMega and EasyMini support

AltosUI has also seen quite a bit of work for the 1.3 release, but almost all of that was a massive internal restructuring necessary to support flight computers with a wide range of sensors. From the user's perspective, it's pretty similar with a few changes:

Graphs can now show the raw barometric pressure

Support for TeleMega and EasyMini, including alternate TeleMega pyro channel configuration.

Bug fixes in how data were extracted from a flight record for graphing -- sometimes values would end up getting plotted out of order, causing weird jaggy lines.