Altimeter interface program and terminal program, v 1.6

This is a program which talks to the Parrot, downloads and saves raw
flight data, and does post-processing.  It calculates various flight
stats and plots the results. 

There are two distributions: windows source + binary, and source.

You can download them from my home page www.xmission.com/~jry.

For the windows binary version, right-click on parrot-all.zip on the
web page, and save it to your local drive.  Create the directory
"C:\Program Files\parrot", and move the zip file there, and then
extract-all into "C:\Program Files\parrot\lib".  The executable
program is "C:\Program Files\parrot\lib\parrot-all.exe", a windows
executable.  There's also source (Python) for parrot-all.py, the
parrot_post.py it uses, and a standalone capture program (console,
not GUI) called parrot-term.exe.

The source distribution contains the Python code.  This is the verion
to get if you want to run on Linux.  You can install the Python
interpreter and the required packages if you want to look at or
modify the program under any operating system.

Both versions contain an example Parrot raw-flight (*.par) file.

I have tried it on Linux (Ubuntu 8), and the real-time data display
crashes the gtk library.  Instead, capture data using the standalone
program (parrot-term.py), then run the GUI app (parrot-all.py) to open
and plot the result.  The FTDI driver assigns port /dev/ttyUSB0, so
capture using "python parrot.py -p /dev/ttyUSB0" if your port ends up
named like mine.  An alternate way to capture flights is to configure
verbosity to zero, which will shut up the screen echo during download,
and then the GUI program (parrot-all) can be used to capture flights.

I haven't tried Mac yet.  Don't know whether pySerial supports
Macs.  The post-processor should work.

The source code is released into the public domain under the terms
of the GNU General Public License GPLv3.   For details, see
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
Feel free to contribute.

Why would you want to use this program?

1. Downloading is easier than using Hyperterminal.  It names the file,
opens and closes it at the proper time, cuts off the download when the
flight ends, and corrects the CR/LF reversal bug in the Parrot.

2. You don't need to use (or even own) Excel.  You don't need a
computer with 1Gig of RAM.  You won't overflow Excel's 64000 line
limit.  You don't need to cut- and-paste huge blocks of math cells to
exactly match your data set, nor scroll around in huge
spreadsheets.  (Inveterate Microsoft-haters should note that Open
Office scalc does a pretty good job on Adrian's template spreadsheet.
Up to the latest version, that is; OpenOffice chokes on the new VB
macros.)

3. Plotting is automatic.  No cutting/pasting/selecting/configuring.

4. When post-processing, the program finds the moment of launch, and
stops the analysis when the rocket returns to the ground.  No
hunting.  (Sorry, it doesn't find your rocket for you.)

5. Several pieces of data are calculated and displayed: maximum
altitude, maximum positive acceleration (thrust), and average descent
rate.

6. You can save your plots to PDF files (and make prints from the
PDFs).

7. You can program the flight profile using parrot-term, but you
will still generally need Adrian's Excel template to generate the
12-character string to type.  (A few common profiles are listed by
parrot-term when you press 'P' to enter the programming phase.) 

8. You can download the program which controls flight behavior, a.k.a.
"flight-index zero" using either parrot-all or parrot-term.  You will
still need the Excel template to interpret it.

9. Configuring the comm port is easy, using the "Discover Comm Port"
button.

Questions?  Feel free to email me.

Jim Yehle
jry@xmission.com