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March 2011:
E-Kermit is now available as Open Source software.
Hurricane Frances, 1 September 2004.
Photo: NOAA, Click image to enlarge
NEW YORK, 20 SEPTEMBER 2004
CHARLEY, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne... As the hurricane season of 2004 continues to inflict death and destruction throughout the Caribbean, scientists are focussing on the role of ocean currents, temperature, and salinity as they work to improve understanding of hurricane behavior and develop better prediction models to save lives on land and at sea.
To collect time-series ocean metrics, scientists and engineers at the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) deployed sensor-laden floats in the Atlantic Ocean in the path of the eye of Hurricane Frances 31 August 2004. The floats, programmed to descend and rise repeatedly to measure conditions as the hurricane approached and passed by, were dropped from aircraft the day before the storm.The devices, manufactured by Webb Research Corporation and called Electromagnetic-Autonomous Profiling Explorers (EM-APEXs) with instrumentation designed and built at APL, measure the ocean's velocity electromagnetically while monitoring water temperature and salinity, with excursions to depths of 500 meters every 16 hours. Each made more than 100 up-and-down profiles, mostly while under water, and then transferred the data they had collected, along with GPS location, over the Iridium satellite cell phone system to an onshore base station, using The Kermit Project's Embedded Kermit (E-Kermit) software, which had been integrated into the float's control processor by APL Senior Electrical Engineer John Dunlap (pictured on the right, below, with float), a longtime Kermit Project contributor, who describes Kermit's role in the project:
John leaves Thursday (September 23rd) on a cruise to collect the floats.
Embedded Kermit is ideally suited for applications like this. E-Kermit is the product of more than 20 years' experience with design and real-world implementation of file-transfer protocols that are resilient under harsh conditions, yet can go fast when sailing is smooth. E-Kermit is especially designed for embedding in microcontrollers, where reliable unattended operation in the smallest possible memory footprint is a must. In this application, E-Kermit occupied just 9710 bytes; customer-supplied i/o routines another 4266 bytes, and the customer-supplied control loop 15102 bytes, a total of 29KB.
The Kermit Project / kermit@kermitproject.org / 20 Sep 2004 - 27 Sep 2011 - 19 March 2013 |