A fair number of people today: Larry and I are here, Jessica and Nic left this afternoon, Steve Cohn visited this afternoon. Mark L. also dropped in. We expect Chadi back late tonight.
Spent most of the day on the Picarro.
- Serial port testing -- started by looking from data to the DSM from the Picarro and didn't see any. Thought it was a Picarro config error, but all seemed okay. Along the way found that Picarro's logmein wasn't working due to an incorrect account setting that I fixed. Now Jielun can connect from Boulder. Eventually realized that the Picarro needs prompting, which wasn't happening when I had just the Acer hooked up! Found that the DSM was prompting as it should and WAY too much later (in the early evening) realized that data were coming in (using rserial). We just needed to tweak the message parsing and all was good. Cockpit no longer has RIPs on the Picarro channels, i.e. all sensors are now coming in!
- Also looked at the rotary valve serial communications. Never saw a message out of the Picarro PC here either, but wasn't surprised since it probably turned off connection to the MPV, since it didn't detect it upon Picarro start-up. Measured voltages and realized that the MPV didn't have RS232 signal levels (no negative voltages). Removed the MPV, opened up in the lab (later moved to the dorm), and could find no negative voltages on the 232 driver chip in the (brand) VICI (model) EMTCA valve controller box, even though 5V logic levels seemed fine. Guessed that this chip was bad, so had Chris order another that should be here tomorrow. (Saunders didn't have one :( .) To test further, cobbled together a way to jumper a V2 mote's MAX232 chip in place of the bad valve controller chip (Thanks, John). With this bench configuration, was able to control the valve from the Acer. Now I know that replacing this chip tomorrow will get the MPV working.
- Finally, laid out the remaining tubing, which required some adjustment of lengths. Still need to secure the inlets (and the tubing itself under the fiber optics) and possibly rearrange inlet ports (so the sequencing makes sense). Also need to do the inlet timing tests (on the list for tomorrow).