Log 8

We’ve reached the mark of 8 logs (yay) and we know that 2^3 = 8. You know what that means? Absolutely nothing!

Today I was trying to fix the problem with the IMU related to that 2^14 division that somehow was working and I didn’t know why. I’m going to call this problem FUEN1 (Fucked Up Error Number 1). So as I told before, FUEN1 was a problem I was having when I divided the integer number from the gyro sensor by 2^15. I thought I’ve fixed up this problem dividing the integer by 2^14 instead of 2^15, because the test results seemed to be correct. So today I decided to crack for real this problem, cause the division by 2^14 don’t make any sense. I looked at my code to see if I could find any minor mistake and guess what? I found it! Ok, that’s not entirely true, I’ve found one mistake in the integration process that seems to be mostly (yeah, mostly, not entirely!) the cause of FUEN1. After I fixed the problem and returned the division back to 2^15, the real part of the quaternion was reduced from 1 to 0.2 after a 180º rotation around the x axis. FUCK! It’s still wrong! Ok, calm down, is only a minor problem and I have the feeling I’m gonna solve it soon. While I can’t figure out the other source of FUEN1, I’m gonna talk a little bit more about some aspects and milestones of the “Aurora Program”.

As you already know, me and my friend Nilson are trying to make a rocket model using rocket candy. You also know I am an engineer (and so as Nilson), more specifically, a control engineer (perhaps one day I’m gonna use my awesome teaching skills to teach what a control engineer does). We already tried a few rocket engines to test the burn, but all of them failed in some aspects. The first one failed because the ignition system was manual (we had to light the rocket using a match), so it melted the engine because it slowly burned from the outside. The other two almost killed us (I’m joking, but it was really dangerous!) in the sense that we weren’t expecting the engine to be so powerful. In the last on, we’ve used an electrical ignition system and ignited the engines from the inside. The result was a terrible death machine that burned from inside out in less than 10 seconds and generated enough thrust to free itself from the constraints we’ve made and began to chase us till the fuel ended. Can you imagine two guys running from an uncontrolled rocket engine burning like hell?! Ok, I’m exaggerating a little bit, only Nilson ran, I was to frightened to move! But now we have the Von Brawn measurement station with us, so I have the feeling that next time we are going to have our first success. Hopefully this week we are going to test another engine, but until there, you are going to read a lot more of the bullshit I write =)!