Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has launched Ball Aerospace COSMOS, the company’s second open source software project.

Ball Aerospace COSMOS brings an exciting set of functionality to Operations and Integration & Test that had previously only been available in proprietary and expensive COTS solutions or not available in any commercial product. A full set of 15 applications provide features including automated test procedures, realtime and offline telemetry display and graphing, post-test analysis and CSV extraction, limits monitoring, command and telemetry handbook creation, and binary file editing.

Automated test procedures written for COSMOS offer the full power of the Ruby programming language allowing operators to send commands, verify telemetry, read and write files, access the network, and even send an email on completion. Additional features include automated test report generation, standardized meta data collection (unit serial number, operator name), and loop testing (executing the same test repeatedly to wring out timing and other issues). Advanced debugging functionality allows for single-stepping through procedures, setting breakpoints, and complete logging of all script and user interaction with the system under test.

Detailed data visualization allows for custom screen creation, line and x-y plotting of realtime data, easy creation of custom 3d visualizations, and the ability to quickly view any data provided by an embedded system. Post-test analysis and data extraction capabilities make narrowing down anomalies easy and allow for data to be quickly imported into outside data analysis systems such as Matlab.

“Ball Aerospace’s COSMOS enables an amazing amount of functionality and can provide a standard interface for interacting with anything that contains embedded software”, said Ryan Melton, COSMOS’s creator and open source evangelist. “By open sourcing this software we hope to change the whole playing field of Operations, Integration, and Test”.