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by euler_angles 849 days ago
We made our XMLs with, horror of horrors, a Visual Basic script that ran in Excel and digested several input documents to generate a map template that we could then tweak by hand and turn into an XML through another VB script.
1 comments
lchengify 849 days ago
Honestly, makes sense. This is how much of finance runs their models.
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euler_angles 849 days ago
We weren’t allowed to have any other real programming tools, and the telemetry “maps” we were trying to make were/are major/minor frame oriented. This maps nicely to a grid of data: a spreadsheet.

IRIG 106, Chapter 4 PCM telemetry covers what we were doing in this process, along with Chapter 9.

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jki275 849 days ago
I feel your pain. I've written entire applications in Visual Basic in Excel onboard the CVN before. It was the only programming language I could get access to.
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ghc 848 days ago
Wait, what? Why weren't you allowed to have real programming tools? I mean, I see a lot of FTEs using Excel, but I thought it was a matter of familiarity. I've also encountered some who are using Matlab, SAS, Python, R, etc.
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tacticalDonut 848 days ago
US DoD heavily controls what can and can't be installed on their stuff. To make matters worse each branch and organization has their own approach to how they control what gets installed.

Sometimes it's just the path of least resistance to use what you already have.

I remember putting in a request to install Python. It took me 6 months to get a response of no. I had the opportunity to appeal with more information on the use case, but I just did it in VB for Excel at that point.

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ghc 847 days ago
While that's true, FTEs (Flight Test Engineers) tend to have more leeway. As I said above, I've seen Army S6 give approvals for all sorts of programming environments. And the AFTCs seem to be a bit more lenient than that even when it comes to deploying in SCI environments.

Granted, I've also seen a piece of software denied because it has USB in the name (even though it had nothing to do with USB), so YMMV.

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tacticalDonut 848 days ago
Oh boy, were you stuck with NMCI devices? At NSWCCD we at least had an RDT&E network we could use...
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