[Hamara-devel] Keith Packard, Altus Metrum, amateur rocketry, Debian (and almost no advertising)

[shirish]

Hi all,
Let me introduce Mr. Keith Packard, although the gentleman needs no 
introduction. He was the one of the main destructive forces behind X.org 
being what is today and he's still not done as he's also spearheading 
wayland and next generation display and compositing servers for FOSS 
desktops for years to come. While X.org and wayland are and huge topics 
by themselves it's just a backgrounder about where he's from.

Wikipedia has also dedicated a page about him, see 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Packard :)

But this e-mail is not about him at all but about Altus Metrum, a 
company which he founded to help him develop his love of amateur rocketry.

Now amateur rocketry is nothing but people flying model rockets till the 
end of troposphere or just beyond it. I haven't asked Keith till what 
height their rockets have gone as that is not what the game is about. 
The real game in here is to understand the difference forces at work on 
that rocket, designing rockets, seeing how the telemetry worked and what 
worked and didn't . This is invaluable if you are a young person who 
wants to know how this all works and wouldn't be possible in the real 
world unless Keith hadn't come with it. He not only opened up the 
software for that, he also opened up the firmware needed for those 
rockets as well as an API for programmers.

See http://altusmetrum.org/ for more. He also went ahead and also opened 
up the schematics for almost of the hardware that they have made.

See http://git.gag.com/?p=hw/telemetrum;a=summary for the hardware 
schematic files.

If you look at the short log you would see that Bdale Garbee (another 
Debian Project Leader, I think 2005-2008) also has contributed to those 
schematics as well.

Now where does debian come in the picture? Simple, they are the ones who 
get the latest code out.

See, for instance :-

[$] aptitude show altos=1.6-1
 

Package: altos
State: not installed
Version: 1.6-1
Priority: optional
Section: electronics
Maintainer: Bdale Garbee <bdale at gag.com>
Architecture: amd64
Uncompressed Size: 29.0 M
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14), libelf1 (>= 0.144), libusb-1.0-0 (>= 2:1.0.8), 
default-jre | java2-runtime, freetts, nickle, libjfreechart-java
Suggests: slim | gdm
Conflicts: altusmetrum-themes, slim-altusmetrum
Replaces: altusmetrum-themes, slim-altusmetrum
Description: Altus Metrum firmware and utilities
  Firmware and utilities needed to support high power model rocketry 
products from Altus Metrum, including TeleMetrum, TeleMini, and TeleDongle.

  See http://altusmetrum.org/ for more information.
Homepage: http://altusmetrum.org/AltOS

Now, while it may not be feasible in India atm simply because flying 
anything in air with permission is hassle, it is a bureaucratic 
nightmare as was seen in the drones space couple of years back when 
businesses wanted to fly drones but eventually if there are enough 
people who want to do that, places will be found and infrastructure as 
in open spaces without buildings nearby would be found.

Even if we are able to help in creation of even 2-3 this kind of amateur 
rocket madness, it will do more for science propagation and education 
then has been done by various State Governments spending lakhs down the 
drain because simply you cannot copy and have to understand the 
different dynamics that come into play when playing with amateur rockets.

And of course, as can be seen there is almost no advertising that you 
would see about it on net anywhere. He hasn't used any google adwords or 
any digital marketing campaign for he does because he's doing for the 
love of it and whatever money they are making is a side-benefit to 
whatever they are doing.

At the end, this is just one package from Debian's 60,000 odd packages 
that it has :)

Note - People who would be working on microcontrollers and embedded 
systems would be delighted when they see the specs and the schematics as 
well.

Till later.

-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org