BroadBit project events and news

Article published in the Astrophysics and Space Sciences Transactions journal:

We describe a solution for generating spacecraft on-board electricity in the 5kW – 500 kW power range. The introduced thermo-photovoltaic electricity generation works without magnets or external cooling; it combines operational simplicity with a good power per mass ratio.

Once in orbit, the system shall be capable of powering numerous missions within the inner solar system or a single long range mission.

Space exploration today is limited by the length of time and amount of fuel required for reaching desired destinations. An ideal propulsion design simultaneously features high Isp, high thrust power, and limited engine weight. Recent advances in nano-scale fabrication open up new possibilities for thermo-photovoltaic electricity generator design, and allow a the use of high-trust electric propulsion technologies. High-powered on-board electricity generation is key to reducing travel times to nearby planets and to the the expansion of space exploration horizons. The following sections describe each component of the proposed on-board electricity generator. …

Download: AndrasKovacs and Dr Pekka Janhunen: Thermo-photovoltaic spacecraft electricity

Resource Sharing Principles for Vehicular Communications
This paper proposes a suitable scalability principle for each major vehicular communication scenario: periodic safety broadcasts, event-driven safety broadcasts, and unicast message forwarding. Each scenario section investigates an appropriate design of individual congestion control tools for the implementation of related scalability principle.

Estimation of Channel Utilization at the Beaconing Edge
Estimating channel utilization at beaconing edge is important, so that power control feedback can be based on comparing this utilization rate to a target level. The beaconing edge channel utilization estimate presented in the ‘Resource Sharing Principles for Vehicular Communications’ paper is revised with the following aspects;
– taking an estimate of link asymmetry into account,
– interpolating on link attenuation metric instead of distance metric.

GeoMapped Timing of Beacons and Unicast Messages
This paper proposes a timing algorithm for assignment of beacon transmissions. The proposed geographically derived beacon timer solves the problem of ‘hidden-terminal’ packet collisions for periodic broadcasts and certain unicast messages, regardless of particular road network topology details.

BroadBit offers the power and efficiency of TTCN testing for the IT and Telecom industry! Release 1 of BroadBit Test Tool (BTT) is published as a free software; enabling all software test engineers to add it into their toolbox.

Training support is available through training@broadbit.com, and support for custom interfaces and software package can be requested through btt@broadbit.com.

Features:

• Support of basic TTCN-3 syntax
• Support of both binary and ASN.1 based definitions
• Easy mapping between port definitions and port handlers
• Port handlers included for generic sockets, such as Ethernet, UDP, or Unix sockets.
• Platform independent

BTT is a comprehensive TTCN tool for conformance and protocol testing supports both Binary and ASN.1 layers! (Requires also Objective Systems’ asn1c tool for ASN.1 testing)

See more: BTT – BroadBit Test Tool product page
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BroadBit releases and offers new, industry level automotive black-box (OBU: On Board Unit) for recording driving statistics and event details!

The Automotive Black Box has following hardware features:

• GPS sensor, sampling position at every second. Logged GPS data includes time information, vehicle position, vehicle speed, and GPS signal quality data (HDOP and number of satellites)
• 3-axis accelerometer, sampling acceleration 50 times per second
• Ignition input, which synchronizes unit power to ignition status so that start-up is automated and battery is not drained during days/weeks of standstill
• Rugged metallic casing and automotive input connectors
• Bluetooth radio for communicating logged data
• Internal flash memory, data processing, and statistics generation

Log reporting process may be started manually or automatically in the proximity of a reporting terminal. Provided Java based reporting applications can run on PCs, laptops, smart-phones, or PDAs. In the context of electronic tolling, this allows to set up auto-reporting terminals at:

• Freight forwarder home bases
• Petrol stations
• Border crossings

Complementing server application visualizes reported log data:

• Intuitive user interface allows querying events of interest or road utilization statistics
• Enforcement data can be visualized on a map segment
• Longitudinal and Lateral acceleration are graphically charted

Demo interface: broadbit.com