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Hello – Budding Software Engineer

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4:22 pm
January 21, 2010


Zaemz

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Hello there,

I hail from Wisconsin, USA.  I've already taken the liberty of searching through the FAQ and beginner reading materials.  I've been lurking for about a month now and am extremely excited at the prospect of being able to contribute to such a team!  I'm currently in my third year of my undergraduate and haven't had sufficient education to say that I have any specific area of expertise, but I would have to say that I'm starting to lean more toward electrical engineering than I am staying satisfied with just software.  As of the moment, I'm a declared interdisciplinary computer science major, and thinking of dual majoring in mathematics.

Although I probably cannot contribute immediately to anything too technical, I'll do my best to start getting the word out.  I've already begun discussing this with friends and family, and people are generally enthusiastic and good natured.  :)

I've been reading about concerns with people introducing themselves and disappearing after a bit.  I'll do my best to stick around and contribute.

6:24 pm
January 21, 2010


brmj

Rochester, New York, United States

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Welcome! It's great to have more people.

With that skillset, you might be a particularly good fit for the Computer Systems Workgroup, the Navigation and Guidance Workgroup (because they need good programmers for calculating orbits and such) and the Communications Workgroup. However, I'm sure there will be all sorts of stuff you can do no matter where you focus your efforts. Even if you don't feel qualified for some particular branch of the projects, all it takes to have a bright idea or catch a stupid oversight is a brain and a web browser. The word spreading you mentioned is also very important. I'm glad to hear you've been getting a good response.

Once again, thanks for coming, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we are glad to have you on the team!

Main work groups: Propulsion (booster), Spacecraft Engineering, Computer Systems, Navigation and Guidance (software)

9:48 pm
January 21, 2010


Luke Maurits

Adelaide, Australia

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Zaemz said:

and thinking of dual majoring in mathematics.


Do it! (from a maths major :p)

Welcome aboard, as brmj has said, it's great to have more people.

The problem with people introducing themselves and then disappearing has actually happened with software oriented people more than any other skillset, as far as I have sees.  I think this is because right now, for someone who can program well but doesn't necessarily know much maths or physics, there's been nothing obvious to do.  I'm really keen to correct this because there are, in fact, productive programming tasks people could be doing, they just haven't been well publicised, which we should try to change.

Do you know any Python, per chance?  A while ago I wrote a very brief Python program to simulate the trajectories of uncontrolled suborbital rockets – it seems to work fine from a physics point of view but it's very inflexible and not very user friendly.  It wouldn't be a lot of work at all for someone who knew Python to put a nice GUI around it and get it to draw graphs, etc., instead of just spitting out text files of data.  If you'd be interested in working on this I'd be happy to give you some guidance on how the physics code that is already written works.

Alternatively, if you don't know Python but you are comfortable enough with the physics code to translate it into another language you do know and could do a GUI etc. in, I don't think anybody would have any objections to that.  The physics code isn't all that fancy, it just uses the Runge Kutta numerical integration algorithm to solve fairly basic equations of motion – constant thrust from a rocket engine, constant gravitational acceleration and varying drag proportional to velocity squared and to atmospheric density.

If you're not interested in this little sub project, that's fine, just say so and I'll try to think of something else for you to do.  I think it may be handy for us to have a library for translating the output files of these various little simulations into a file format that can be understood by Google Earth, I think it's called KML or something – one of the Google Lunar X Prize teams use it to visualise their flights and it looks pretty cool, may be slightly more interesting/fun for you.

Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.

7:44 am
January 22, 2010


Zaemz

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Thanks for the warm welcome!  Although I'm more than interested to hop on and get to work right away, I unfortunately don't know any Python yet.  I installed the Pydev plugin for Eclipse and I'll get to teaching myself.  Credit-wise I'm a junior, but because my first two years were spent at a small local college I didn't have the chance to take any advanced math classes (vector calc, multivariable or beyond), or beginning programming classes.  This last semester, other than teaching myself a small bit of C++, was the first semester I had taken any good classes.

I apologize if that brings you down a bit.  I'm learning, and interested!  So if you don't feel like it's a waste of time, send the code my way and I'll look at it.  Otherwise in the mean time, sure, give me something to do.  I wanted to introduce myself and let you know that there's an extra hand around if you need it.

Glad to be around.

12:30 am
January 24, 2010


Luke Maurits

Adelaide, Australia

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Since yourself and one other person have expressed interest on working on the suborbital simulator project, I have made a dedicated thread for helping you get started on donig useful work.  Please check it out and ask any and all questions you want to so that I can best help you get started. :)

Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.

3:02 am
January 24, 2010


Zaemz

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Awesome sir!  I replied, and as soon as I'm rested and able, I'll check it out and get chuggin'.

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