COSMEcopter. Prototype P04

Almost a year and a half ago, COSMEcopter was presented in this blog. During all this time a few preliminary prototypes have been developed. Now we are currently working in prototype P04.

P04 is a substantial milestone in the project. It can be described with these three points:

• RQ01: "the thing" shall be able to elevate a few centimeters above the ground, 
• RQ02: it shall be able to stay stationary for a few seconds
• RQ03: it shall be able to land softly (that is: without crashing)

COSMEcopter attached to the "jamonero", ready to perform another batch of One Axis Integration Tests.

Well, only three short one-line-requisites shouldn´t be very hard to achieve, should they?

By now, Eugenio Alcalá is struggling with a series of one axis integration tests, where two motors are running in a coordinated fashion for the first time in the project.
This test is meant not only to validate the control algorithms, but also to answer an even more important question: Is the realtime performance of the combo "Raspberry-Pi-computer + Linux-Preemptive-RT-kernel-patch" good enough for this kind of tasks?



Félix Serna

miniBlas android version

Blas is an engineering tool for the COSME platform. It allows to periodically read the values of the chosen COSME application variables organized in bags. Each bag contains an update period and a customized list of variables in which we are interested. It is possible to have different bags, each one focused in different parts of your application (e.g. one bag for inputs, another for the pneumatic stuff, etc.)

miniBlas running on an old HTC Hero phone (android 2.3.7)

Blas is an invaluable tool for designers to debug and fine tune their COSME control applications, but as good as it can be in your desktop computer, there was an important piece missing which miniBlas-android comes to fill. This android version allows you to go deep into your application using your android phone/tablet on the go.
<joke>
Now you can really have all the relevant information at your fingertips!!
</joke>

miniBlas-android is being developed by four of our students (Alberto Azuara, Julián Guillén, Iván Pita and Luis Rodríguez) for their subject "Proyecto Software". 

Is this app any good? We'll soon know, their exams are in a few weeks time... :-)

Improving the control of a wood drying furnace

Back in 2006, in the pre-COSME days, we were asked by Sarrimad (http://www.sarrimad.com) to develop an application to control their wood drying furnace (the big box on the left of the picture). Javier Silva,  one of our students at that time, used the initial COSME versions we were starting to develop, added some this and that (a lot of this and that, actually) and eventually finished his final year project. His work (COSEMA) was so good that the installation has been running smoothly during these six years.

A few months ago, Sarrimad called us again to upgrade our initial COSEMA control application to help them to optimize their energy consumption.
The task was assigned in this case to Carla Larrea, another student who is finishing now her final year project. During last christmas, the team conducted the almost final system tests at the Sarrimad facilities.
Successfully, by the way ;-)

COSME + Raspberry Pi + quadcopter = COSMEcopter

COSMEcopter is a spin-off project which mixes a few different but complementary disciplines, while assuring that everybody is having lots of fun!!


COSMEcopter is a project intended to collaboratively specify, design and build a  a slightly uncommon type of quadcopter.
Why uncommon?. Well, do not forget that our goal is not building a copter, but using it as a testbed for the COSME framework running on a small linux computer.

So, in our case, we are necessarily going to use these two products:

• COSME  as the middleware platform for the control software
• a raspberry pi as OBC (on-board computer) and communications hub (via wifi)

Keep listening. We`ll get you informed.

The first electronic components arrived a few weeks ago

A few Raspberry Pis, accelerometers, magnetometers, etc. are waiting...

Last 25-09-2012, our student César Ramos presented his Final Year Project called "ERTC", a simple POSIX prototype COSME implementation for non real time platforms.
A good addition to the COSME platform, and a real nice work. Congratulations!

A COSME demo client application shows up in a Raspberry Pi

After having installed OpenJDK, trying to execute an existing COSME client demo was the next logical step.
Fortunately, this java UI demo run smoothly but, as the X windowing is *still* not hardware accelerated, the impact on the CPU was pretty high. We look forward to see this topic solved in the near future. Then, the raspberry will be a good choice when an inexpensive UI terminal is needed (=> which is always ;-)

On the server side, a few experiments are still on the way... A non RT COSME implementation is expected to be tried in the near future.

Our first Raspberry-Pi finally arrived!!

It will be nice to have a COSME/ IEC 61499 device this cheap.
Let's see how capable it ends up being!

Another one in the planet.