Simulation Visualization
The Duplex satellite uses the Adcole MAI-401 ADACS unit for attitude detection and control. (Here is a page about the MAI-400, which is very similar). The simulation software for the MAI-401 is very old and has a primitive display.
It always shows the default satellite shape, and it's difficult to tell what it's doing because there are no labelled axes. It's impossible to play the simulation back and watch it.
The sim program produces a plain text log file of each simulation, so I wrote a Python script that reads in the text log file and displays the information in a more comprehensible way. It can be played backward and forward at different speeds as desired.
Here is a video of a simulation playback at 100X actual speed where the ADACS is commanded to go to different attitudes. Yes, I'm a fan of Atari vector graphics games from the 80s.
Other Python Scripts
I wrote some other Python scripts for various purposes:
- Communicating with the Duplex flight hardware during ground testing.
- Communicating with the Duplex flight hardware over the web API, which is how we will communicate with it on orbit.
- Generating text files to load arbitrary waveforms into a Koolertron function generator.