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Mass Body Data Collection System
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General Hardware Description
Marinus Mini PC
The Marinus COTS computer is small enough and rugged enough to fly along with the mass body during flight test. The Marinus computer saved space by not having a (Peripheral
Component Interconnect) PCI bus and card slots. All I/O was conducted through the standard USB and Ethernet connections. A shareware program called VNC was used to remotely operate the Marinus computer from an Ethernet connection when the test unit was being prepared for a test. During testing, the Marinus computer ran without outside intervention from power up to power down.
The computer is a standard Pentium III, 1.3 GHz processor with 512 megabytes of RAM. The system is able to withstand the irregularities of ground and aircraft power sources and was able to record gigabytes of data without loss as the test body moved through various rigorous test points. The computer is fast enough to support two Analog to Digital (A/D) converters running at a 100 kilo Samples/second rate.
Marinus PC
The Marinus BIOS was reconfigured to boot on power up without a password and the keyboard connection was patched to allow for its absence during boot up. This novel approach allowed using a non-ruggedized COTS notebook PC that was fast enough to keep up with the data sample rates. Using USB I/O devices allowed the PC to be small since the PCI bus and associated cards were not used. USB plus Ethernet connections provided all the I/O capability needed to control, collect, record, and off load captured data for analysis.
BiTMICRO Solid State Flash Drives
To ensure test vibration would not affect the recording of data, the PC mechanical hard drive was removed and a BiTMICRO 17-gigabyte flash solid state hard drive was installed. The BiTMICRO drive could sustain a bit rate of 28 Mbytes per second with a burst rate up to 166 Mbytes per second. The rated G force is 1,500 Gs.
The solid state flash disk did not require additional drivers and fit into the same form factor as the original mechanical hard drive rectangular dimensions and electrical connections for IDE connection and power. The height of the drive was taller than the mechanical drive requiring the removal of the PC top cover. No other modifications were needed such as special drivers, to make the solid state disk operational.
Because the PC top cover was removed, the cooling fan, CPU reset switch and power on buttons were also removed. Cooling had to come from the test fixture cooling system. The BIOS Automatic Power Management (APM) feature was set to allow the CPU to reboot on initial application of power.
BiTMICRO Solid State Flash Hard Drive
USB A/D Converters
Data collection systems that used either USB or RS-232 are less expensive than converters mounted on a PCI bus. This gives the versatility to use adaptable I/O devices for different applications. Avoiding the PCI bus interface allows the PC to be much more compact.
Data Translation A/D Acquisition USB Module
The A/D converters used in this application allowed eight cannels of differential +/- 10 V bipolar, 2-wire analog inputs with a resolution of 12 bits. The maximum sample rate for the DT9801 is 100 kilo Samples/second. The sample rate had to be time shared between the eight channels. In the mass body study, the time sharing between channels was on an equal basis with the eight channels plus the one discrete channel. The discrete channel was used to monitor the pilot's RECORD ON/OFF switch.
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