[rescue] VxWorks?

[Barry Fujii]

On Sat, 2002-10-12 at 18:15, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Saturday, October 12, 2002, at 08:48 PM, Barry Fujii wrote:
>    So what's stopping you from working with it again?  (What, you mean 
> you didn't take a copy with you when you left?! ;))
> 
if i had only known... this was back in 94 and i was just a pup
in the software industry combine. wide eyed working at nasa.

the project itself was quite cool - it was a chassis floating on
a bed of compress air on a perfectly level piece of granite.

the chassis had a replica of what was supposed to be the ISS centrifuge.
down to the little cages that would house animals... and i shit you not,
vibrating plastic rats.

our job was to write the code that would move the counter weights that
ran parallel to the arms of the centrifuge that would balance the
centrifuge in real time. vibrations in space are a bad thing, they cause
stuff to fall apart and fall out of the sky.

i also ended up coding the testing UI using World Tool Kit, a VR
package. we displayed the centrifuge in VR and tracked its movements
to help verify the 'non motion.' we used another windriver product
called NDDS to deliver data from an early wireless ethernet link 
onto the regular wired network and to the SGI workstations. 

we werent allowed to be in the room when the model was running because
of OSHA regs. hence all the VR stuff.

it was quite a learning experience.