Going Up

Lee stole books from the UTSI library today. We needed an algorthm for our trajectory program (we used bisection because it's freakin' easy), so Lee went to the library to get some numerical programming books. We took a numerical methods class at CBU, but both of our books were at the apartment. I think he got every book that UTSI had that included anything even loosely related to programming or MATLAB. We found what we needed, though, and now have a way for the program to tell itself to stop. I was going to title the post "Good Catch, Amy" because she caught a big error in the logic that kept giving the program bad results, but then I realized that if I gave people post titles for finding errors in my work, that might lead to people looking for errors and could ruin my image of "quite brilliant," and that would be unacceptable.

I now have three working versions of my trajectory code. One works with the GUI, but hasn't been updated in several revisions of the others, and I don't think it even includes the basic thrust model. The second version includes all the updates, but not the self-timer (the bisection thing we got working today). It requires manual changes to the flight time in order to make the program converge to the appropriate solution. It's been what I use for most of my calculations. The final version has the bisection solver method which finds the flight time on its own. The last one includes most of the final modifications, so it's the best version, I guess. I need to get the bisection version merged into the one I use for calculations, then convert for use as a stand-alone or with my GUI. That sounds like a summer project, but I doubt the instructor will let me take that long.

That'll do, pig, that'll do. More tomorrow.