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9:48 pm
August 22, 2010
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rwryne
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Post edited 9:52 pm – August 22, 2010 by rwryne
Hello:
I just saw a post about this on reddit and thougth I would help contribute!
I have a Bachelor's in aerospace engineering and currently work doing computational fluid dynamics (CFD). I also have interests/experience in CAD modeling, 3d printing, programming, spreadsheets, composite materials [mostly graphite/epoxy (aka carbon fiber to most) and fiberglass], etc.
I am still working my way around the site trying to catch up; I would appreciate any pointers in the right direction!
Thanks,
Ryne
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10:11 pm
August 22, 2010
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Luke Maurits
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Hi Ryne,
Thanks for your interest and willingness to help!
I'm sorry to say that you are probably going to have a hard time catching up on everything – this is entirely our fault, not yours. CSTART is in somewhat poor shape at the moment. Organising a project of this scale in an ad hoc and distributed manner over the internet is difficult. People have come and gone since we first formed, the goals and organisation of projects has shifted, and at all times the site and Wiki have lagged slightly beyond what is currently the true state of affairs.
Here is a quick attempt to catch you up:
A lot of the earliest or most involved members have left or at least significantly reduced the amount of the time (either by choice or due to external circumstances) they devote to CSTART. This lack of resources and some lack of agreement on strategic directions resulted in us stagnating a little bit. Recently, I (as one of 5 founding members) have been trying to act fairly unilaterally (with some support from the community) to get us back on a definite track. As an essential part of this I have proposed a new suite of 4 projects to effectively replace our previous 2 (OHKLA and CLLARE, which you will find the Wiki dominated by). The new suite is in some sense a scaling up of OHKLA, a scaling down of CLLARE, and an addition of some new things. You can read a bit about the new suite and its motivations in this forum thread. Recently there has been some work done on getting public pages for these new projects built. In parallel with this restructuring of our projects, we have been talking with another open space organisation Mach 30 about developing some software to coordinate working on open source hardware projects over the internet. This is tricky and relatively novel, and in the past CSTART has tried to "wing it" using combinations of forums, Wikis, IRC meetings and polls, to mixed but generally less than optimal results. We are hoping that a struture software platform will help us do much better in this regard. So the most likely path forward for the org now seems to be that we (i) set down a clear and structured plan for our early projects (with the suite of 4 projects discussed above) (ii) then spend time working not on those projects but on a web app to help guide our engineering work (iii) then use that web app to begin work on the 4 early projects. Hopefully we can also come up with something for non software development types to work on during stage (ii) above to help keep people involved, but that's an emerging front and we can't say much about it yet for sure.
Please feel free to ask any questions at all as you poke around the site and try to get an idea of what is going on here. Like I said, it's a bit of a mess and you may well get confused, but we are all too happy to help you out if you ask. We are really desperate for talented and committed people so will go to great lengths to help get people "inducted" into CSTART.
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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10:15 pm
August 22, 2010
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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Perhaps another thing to point out: we have been doing some work during all of the above reorganisation, on the OHKLA project (which seems slated to soon become Phase 1 of a larger project). You can follow that recent work in this thread. In this thread we basically work out relatively decent estimates of the size and mass of the OHKLA rocket and various subsystems.
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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10:47 pm
August 22, 2010
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rwryne
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Thanks for the information Luke; I plan on reading/attempting to catch up and hopefully provide some comments/insight if I have any.
Quick question: how do you (meaning the project as a whole) plan on using software? In an ideal world, all open source software would be utilized, but this does not seem feasible from an engineering perspective currently. Is the plan to do catch as catch can and use any software that is available to some contributor?
A simple example: do you dictate spreadsheets/documents/presentations use OpenOffice format instead of MS Office? [ Here OpenOffice is actually feasible]
A more complex example: what about CAD packages? FEA? CFD? As far as I understand, commerical packages are much more suited to actual tasks. [I hope no OpenFOAM, etc. users/fans jump on me for thsi!]
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10:56 pm
August 22, 2010
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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We are definitely aware of and have discussed the difficult issue of free software. It's definitley true that free software is lagging very far behind the commercial state of the art with regard to things like CAD, FEA and CFD. This was a contentious issue when drafting our Social Contract. We eventually settled on this approach as a pragmatic compromise:
"A genuine effort will be made to ensure that all computer files used in
the planning, design and construction of CSTART missions, rockets and
spacecraft shall be in non-proprietary formats which can be meaningfully
viewed and modified using software which satisfies the Free Software
Foundation's Free Software Definition. Should this not be achievable without significantly impairing CSTART's ability to achieve its mission,
a genuine effort will be made to ensure that the software required to
meaningfully view and modify these files shall be available to the
public free of charge. Dependence on software which is both proprietary
and expensive shall be considered only as a last resort."
So we are allowing (and have, indeed, engaged in) the use of non-free engineering software (e.g. we've made use of ProEngineer before) where practicality demands it, but whenever there is a sufficiently good quality free alternative, we are supposed to use that preferentially.
Any software we write ourselves is constrained by the Social Contract to be free:
All computer code written by CSTART for planning its operations and
installation on rocket and spacecraft computers or on ground control
computers will be available under licenses such that it satisfies the
Free Software Foundation's Free Software Definition.
Hope this answers your question. :)
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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10:17 am
August 31, 2010
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Sci
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| Member | posts 10 | |
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Luke Maurits said:
Hi Ryne,
Thanks for your interest and willingness to help!
I'm sorry to say that you are probably going to have a hard time catching up on everything – this is entirely our fault, not yours. CSTART is in somewhat poor shape at the moment. Organising a project of this scale in an ad hoc and distributed manner over the internet is difficult. People have come and gone since we first formed, the goals and organisation of projects has shifted, and at all times the site and Wiki have lagged slightly beyond what is currently the true state of affairs.
Here is a quick attempt to catch you up:
A lot of the earliest or most involved members have left or at least significantly reduced the amount of the time (either by choice or due to external circumstances) they devote to CSTART. This lack of resources and some lack of agreement on strategic directions resulted in us stagnating a little bit. Recently, I (as one of 5 founding members) have been trying to act fairly unilaterally (with some support from the community) to get us back on a definite track. As an essential part of this I have proposed a new suite of 4 projects to effectively replace our previous 2 (OHKLA and CLLARE, which you will find the Wiki dominated by). The new suite is in some sense a scaling up of OHKLA, a scaling down of CLLARE, and an addition of some new things. You can read a bit about the new suite and its motivations in this forum thread. Recently there has been some work done on getting public pages for these new projects built. In parallel with this restructuring of our projects, we have been talking with another open space organisation Mach 30 about developing some software to coordinate working on open source hardware projects over the internet. This is tricky and relatively novel, and in the past CSTART has tried to "wing it" using combinations of forums, Wikis, IRC meetings and polls, to mixed but generally less than optimal results. We are hoping that a struture software platform will help us do much better in this regard. So the most likely path forward for the org now seems to be that we (i) set down a clear and structured plan for our early projects (with the suite of 4 projects discussed above) (ii) then spend time working not on those projects but on a web app to help guide our engineering work (iii) then use that web app to begin work on the 4 early projects. Hopefully we can also come up with something for non software development types to work on during stage (ii) above to help keep people involved, but that's an emerging front and we can't say much about it yet for sure.
Please feel free to ask any questions at all as you poke around the site and try to get an idea of what is going on here. Like I said, it's a bit of a mess and you may well get confused, but we are all too happy to help you out if you ask. We are really desperate for talented and committed people so will go to great lengths to help get people "inducted" into CSTART.
I hope you don't mind my interjecting here, but @Luke, have you concidered editing this into an official introduction thread and pinning/stickying it for other newbies?
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Provider of practical solutions.
Sometimes stellifying Jupiter IS the practical solution.
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2:36 am
September 1, 2010
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Luke Maurits
| | Adelaide, Australia | |
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Hi Sci, no problem with the interjection at all! Certainly this information needs to be made more accessible. However, given that it's a relatively overarching reorganisation of how CSTART runs, rather than relying on a sticky post I think it makes more sense to largely rewrite big chunks of the site ("landing" pages and the like) to help make it clear. I will try to get to work on this in the coming days. At the very least, people can expect a blog post in the very near term future.
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Main CLLARE workgroups: Mission Planning, Navigation and Guidance. I do maths, physics, C, Python and Java.
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11:57 pm
September 6, 2010
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rpulkrabek
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| Member | posts 348 | |
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rwryne said:
A more complex example: what about CAD packages? FEA? CFD? As far as I understand, commerical packages are much more suited to actual tasks. [I hope no OpenFOAM, etc. users/fans jump on me for thsi!]
Hello, and welcome. I hope you are still following along. I have devoting most of my time with CSTART to working with OHKLA. I was away recently, but am slowly coming back to designing the rocket, and I hope that you will also contribute.'
As for CAD, I have been using Pro/E. Mostly because this is what is most easily accessible to me. I also have access to a few other applications, but not many. What are you most familiar with?
As for FEA/CFD, I have been using Ansys. In the past, I have done things such as determining an optimized nozzle geometry for the fluid flow of combusted fuel. This would have to be redone once we determine final lengths and diameter. It would be great to have your input on this as well.
The current state is that we do utilize proprietary CAD and FEA packages, but we also try to share the models via our google code project, which is far outdated and could use an update once more design decisions have been made.
I understand that a lot of restructuring is going on, but I am also keen on developing OHKLA in parallel, if possible.
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