Specifications

Results of the test campaigns
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Chapter 7. Results of the test campaigns
After completing the realization of the FASTER EM, the system was subjected to a
series of tests to verify its correct operations and performance. The tests were carried out
both in laboratory and in flight.
7.1 Laboratory Tests
During the laboratory test phase each subsystem was thoroughly tested. Initially, PC-
based boards were stressed to verify their limits in terms of cpu load and memory usage.
Already in this first test, some problems were encountered with one of the two boards, the
VIA EPIA nano-itx N10000. This board was originally selected because of its smaller
form factor with respect the EPIA EN15000 mini-itx. Nano-itx boards are only slightly
larger than a PC/104 board (120 x 120 mm) and have lower power consumption than a
mini-itx board because of its architecture and the limited number of peripherals.
However, this board, which was equipped with a VIA C7 processor running at 800 MHz
in fanless mode and a slim 2,5” 40 GByte hard drive, was not able to run all necessary
applications at the same time: the guidance tunnel interface, the camera control software
and the java-based FASTER display. So it was necessary to replace the board with the
one currently used, which proved to be sufficiently powerful to maintain a constant image
download data rate from the camera (3 Mbyte/s) while running the two graphical
applications (the more demanding in terms of computational resources). In order to avoid
system slowdowns the tunnel in the sky refresh rate was set to 10 Hz without major
effects on the 3D animation fluidity.
The Advantech PC/104+ board was tested with the acquired device attached one at a
time so single software blocks could be debugged. Then parallel port connections were
tested to check the camera arm switch functioning. Some precautions had been taken in
case of power loss or board reset. In the first software release, the data log file, containing
ancillary information, after a re-start was overwritten causing the loss of all previous data.