I've tried to keep these in chronological order from most recent to most dated.
ENSURE-1This is really of no use for anyone, but I'll write about it anyway. The programming for ENSURE-1 was done in VisualBasic 6.0 and involved:
- Interfacing with a USB Garmin GPS unit
- Interfacing with an RS-232 serial analog to digital converter
- Reading analog voltages off of the two main battery packs two temperature sensors via the ADC
- Turning the temperature readings into degrees Celcius
- Capturing, saving, and transmitting live images from a USB webcam via MMSSTV through a sound card connected to a handheld transceiver
- Recording 30-second video clips from the same USB webcam
- Transmitting telemetry via MMTTY through the same sound card
- Recording telemetry to a text log file
- Capturing images from a 1.3MP digital camera via a parallel port interface
- Cutting the payload away from the balloon in the event of an emergency via a parallel port interface
The program on the ground involved:
- Parsing received telemetry from MMTTY
- Saving a Google Earth file with updated coordinates (Google Earth would automatically refresh itself)
- Displaying telemetry in a window
Linux RTTY transmitter program I originally wrote this for ENSURE-1, but didn't need it after switching back to Windows (my experience in the linux world was very very very thin) It takes text and modulates it through the sound card as RTTY at the baudrate specified in the source code.
Here's a useful program that allows you to search for tagged photos of people on facebook. Facebook doesn't let you do this (yet), so it's pretty useful.
How to automatically backup files to a Windows serverOne day when I was organizing the My Pictures folder of my desktop computer, I accidentally deleted a whole month of pictures. In frustration, I wrote this simple Batch file that runs on my server and copies my entire My Documents folder to its large external SCSI hard drive every day at midnight.
Photogate A simple DOS command-line program using the inputs from two photogates on the joystick/game port to calculate the velocity (m/s, mph, and kph) of an object. To be used with the Photogate Project.
I wrote this back in 3rd grade to model height and velocity of a model rocket at a specified time step and generate a graph from the data. Values for all Estes-compatible engines and generic nose cone shapes are pre-programmed and all you need to know in addition is the mass and diameter of the rocket.