Interplanetary Roadside Assistance. Last month, I wrote briefly about Spirit's file management problems. A recent article in EE Times gives the details. The Spirit rover runs a hardened R6000 CPU from Lockheed Martin and has 120Mb of RAM and 256 Mb of flash. The OS is Wind River System's Vx-Works version 5.3.1, with its flash file system extension. After the problem was fixed, JPL engineers found a detailed log file which gave them a detailed look at the problem and that's the basis for the sequence of events in the article. [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]
I love this story. To me, this is the essence and sex appeal of well designed embedded systems software. Something I'll probably never get to work with, but I am facinated any time you can fix a system without 1) being there or 2) disrupting operations. Of course, in this scenario the operations were already disrupted. But, I think you get my point.
9:19:28 AM 
|
|
