JPL Open-Source Rover Project Based on the Rovers on Mars

Re:JPL Open-Source Rover Project Based on the Rovers on Mars by iwakura on Friday August 03, 2018 @08:44AM (#17679343)

This is great. But it's a little discouraging to see the project only use the US Customary units considering this is a science project. I was under the impression that NASA used SI.

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Re:JPL Open-Source Rover Project Based on the Rovers on Mars by makmanalp on Friday August 03, 2018 @10:25AM (#17680090)

It's more common than you'd think - I remember sitting in a talk in college by someone from Scaled Composites (they did SpaceShipOne etc) and they had said that they use inches everywhere.

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Re:JPL Open-Source Rover Project Based on the Rovers on Mars by Cshelton on Friday August 03, 2018 @10:43AM (#17680252)

Wasn't the conversion, or lack thereof, the problem with one of the Mars rovers some years back? The one that landed on the surface, rolled off the pad and died. I'm sure someone here knows more details about it, but I remember it being something about the teams not converting correctly/at all between the two systems...

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Re:JPL Open-Source Rover Project Based on the Rovers on Mars by kgilpin on Friday August 03, 2018 @12:00PM (#17680922)

You are thinking of the Mars Climate Orbiter crash:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...

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Re:JPL Open-Source Rover Project Based on the Rovers on Mars by 0xffff2 on Friday August 03, 2018 @02:56PM (#17682585)

>I was under the impression that NASA used SI.

NASA is a very large organization with thousands of different projects ongoing at any given time. For many smaller projects like this, it's really up to the whim of the project lead what unit system is used.

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Re:JPL Open-Source Rover Project Based on the Rovers on Mars by squarefoot on Friday August 03, 2018 @09:06AM (#17679462)

I think it's aimed at students, schools etc. Its purpose should be to attract people to science so it has to be less intimidating, hence the choices of the Raspberry PI or the phone app or the Xbox gamepad to control it.

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Re:JPL Open-Source Rover Project Based on the Rovers on Mars by _verandaguy on Friday August 03, 2018 @10:29AM (#17680120)

It's a weird world where kids are more scared of the metric system than they are of a credit card-sized Linux computer with its guts showing.

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Re:JPL Open-Source Rover Project Based on the Rovers on Mars by squarefoot on Friday August 03, 2018 @01:12PM (#17681589)

It probably is just a matter of being used to it. In the EU we are used to the metric system, but are ok with screen or hard disk sizes expressed in inches to the point if some brand advertising offered a 1.5 meter wide screen TV most of us would look for a calculator to make the conversion, including myself. If we changed to the metric system also for TV sizes, most people would find it uncomfortable at first, but probably would adapt in months.

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Re:JPL Open-Source Rover Project Based on the Rovers on Mars by domtron_vox on Friday August 03, 2018 @11:07AM (#17680473)

In my experience, Xbox controllers are actually fairly common for large robotics. It is relatively cheap to buy a controller and USB wireless dongle plus there are lots of software libraries to help interpret controller input.

My main experience being my participation two years in a row in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC). A college competition to develop self-driving rovers and "cars" (golf carts). There were around 40 teams from various colleges (several international, not just usa) and many of the teams used xbox controllers for manual control including my team.

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