General & Avionics Meeting for September 04, 2001
Black Rock:
- We're going to Black Rock!
- We did some logistics in terms of getting people to carpool, talked about renting trucks, etc.
- We'll use the OSG funds to pay for the entrance cost and the gas to get down to Black Rock.
- Hope to do two launches: Saturday morning w/a commercial "M" motor and Sunday morning w/our own "N" motor.
New Minimum System requirements
The airframe team doesn't want to launch ANYTHING on the first flight on Saturday 9/29. However, we're going to try and weasel our way in anyway while staying COMPLETELY out of their way (that's important). Basically, if it doesn't get in their way, we can do it.
The airframe team is doing one thing: they're trying to build us another avionics module. If they're successful and the new module fits in the fiberglass skin, then we'll have a module to intregrate before the launch and essentially swap with the module they're currently using.
They also gave us a weight limit due to the 1/8th scale "M" motor we're using on the Saturday launch: less than 3lbs. Given all of these requirements, and based on the fact that we have only three weeks of development left, the new minimum system is:
- MOPS520 Flight Computer w/FLASH disk
- PCMCIA carrier w/Lucent 802.11b card using the onboard patch antenna
- PC104 Power Supply
- Rockwell GPS w/CAN controller, two patch antennas, and a antenna combiner
- LV1b IMU w/CAN controller
Things we'd love to add would be:
- Slot antennas for the 802.11b card
- Possibly a power amp for the 802.11b card (using CH 1, sticking to the 2.4 - 2.45GHz Ham band)
- The 1.3GHz ATV system, including antenna
- Better GPS antennas
- Other CAN boards, including a power supply controller and a misc controller for ?RocketReady
We're Doomed
We have three weeks until Launch - that's essentially zero time. Our schedule boils down to:
- Develop like heck until the 9/15.
- Try and put everything together the weekend of the 15th.
- Fix everything until 9/22.
- Dry run, including ground systems, during the weekend of the 22nd.
- Last minute fixes until the launch on 9/29.
Again, just to reiterate, because it's an airframe test, we don't HAVE to be ready with anything. But of course, that would be a giant waste from our point of view. So we'll cobble together what we can, and go from there.
See you next Wednesday!
-- AndrewGreenberg - 05 Sep 2001