Hey, so I’ve moved into working on developing test equipment and procedures for some of our units. I’m currently working with two projects on their testing needs and setups.

The first is a Space Integrated GPS/INS for the DoD that we need to test completely. On that project I’ve been working on making sure we are able to get the data we need on the hardware tests and be able to post-process that data after the test. The most challenging test right now is the spin test that we do on the unit.

We need to have data coming out of the spin table so we know what the true position of the unit is and then we also need to have the data coming out of the SIGI so that we can compare and measure the error as we spin it faster.

There’s a lot more to consider and look at than it seemed to me originally. All the data needs to be recorded at the same frequency and the data points need to be time tagged very accurately so we are comparing the correct data points from both outputs.

Along with that, I’m looking into the actual speeds at which we can go on the spin table. It’s not that there is a max speed, but as you go faster, you wear out the slip plugs faster (they allow cables to be connected to the device inside). So we need to determine how fast we can spin for some amount of time without decreasing the life of the machine too much.

The other project I’m working on the test setup for is the one that I had been doing a lot of documentation work on in my first few weeks here, which is good because I’m familiar with the hardware. What I’m doing with it now is setting up a computer station with the correct inputs and outputs so that we can run simulation tests on the unit and read data back out from it and see how the errors are

. The nice thing about the simulations is that we can put the unit in a variety of in-flight circumstances and see how it performs relatively cheaply.