Steve Massey

COPPER

Saint Louis University's first CubeSat, manifested for 2013 launch. Two missions: Use a low-cost infrared camera for on-orbit imaging; Begin to verify new models of radiation-induced electronic upsets on-orbit

HW/SW CoDesign

A lot of the work I'm doing for COPPER and many other projects has to do with hardware/software co-design. I'm trying to assemble all the painful problems (and their solutions!) in one place.

Electronics

Practical experience is the best way to learn a lot of ECE concepts. I'm keeping track of some of the more interesting ones.

git - bare minimum

The bare minimum commands you need to update your git repo and sync to your github account are as follows:

git status
git add <any new files>
git commit -a -m "Update Description"
git push -u origin master

There, I said it. I didn't see this written down anywhere in this order. And now it is.

mod_rewrite

I had some trouble cleaning up my URLs on my local copy of this site. As much as I wanted to use a super easy wizard to automagically make mod rewrite rules for me, nothing seemed to take.

phpinfo() showed mod_rewrite was turned on, and "apache2ctrl -M" showed the same.

So I saw if maybe my regex statements were even set up right, and put this alone in my .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule index.html index.php

And it didn't work! index.html came up with a 404 instead of mapping to my index.php. Obviously something was up with modrewrite that I didn't understand.

So then thanks to the wisdom of this StackOverflow post I was able to properly enable mod_rewrite. In short, I had to:

• Add "RewriteEngine On" to /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.conf. I had to make this file, as the only thing in mods-avaliable was rewrite.load
• Change "AllowOverride None" to "AllowOverride All" in /etc/apache2/sites-avaliable/default, in both occurances for <Directory /> and <Directory /var/www/ />
• Reload Apache using "sudo service apache2 restart"

After those tasks, I could remap index.php to index.html, thus showing mod_rewrite working.

This was under Ubuntu 11.10, but I hope this helps for other versions and distros as well.

Summer 2011 CubeSat Developer's Workshop

I had the chance to present at this past summer's CubeSat Developer's Workshop in Logan, Utah, just around the time of the SmallSat conference. This is the first public apperance of COPPER's present iteration, as both a two-mission and a 1U CubeSat. Watch for a quick overview!

Links: Presentation Video PowerPoint

lostorbit.net

I put together this website in an effort to have a central place to keep track of some of the projects I spend most of my time on, and to keep an updated resume on the web. I needed a quick-and-dirty way to update everything, and it needed to be reliable and secure. It needed to be crazy-simple to customize, and overall look professional. I really didn't want to use a pre-existing CMS like Drupal, and I didn't want to shoehorn Wordpress into something it shouldn't be. I also wanted to brush up on my PHP, as it's been far too long since I've needed to do a "real" project with it. Overall, it had to be simple to make, simple to maintain, and simple to update.

Thus, this website (in its present form) was born!

I'm using three-ish PHP files to pull Markdown formatted text files, and assemble some HTML. It's stupid-easy. Every now and then I'll run a script on my own to make sure tag links are up to date.

As for the site theme, I'm using pictures of Dione and Enceladus from the Cassini mission for background images, and tried to be as minimalistic as possible for everything else. It's partially inspired by another engineer's personal site I'd come across awhile ago, but I've since lost the link.

You can check out the github project if so inclined.

For older entries, you can browse the archive sorted by taggings.