Tuesday May 14 2002 Avionics Team Meeting
Participants: Andrew, Bart, Jamey, Dennis, James, Larry, Paul, Nathan New Folks: Nalini, David
Great meeting tonight - thanks to all who came. We started with an introduction to the project for David and Nalini, and then in typical style argued about everything and redifined the entire ground station setup. How cool is that? Here are some highlights and details:
CAN Node Status:
- Dennis did a great job of soldering up the IMU CAN board, including the annoyingly small TQFP 18F458. He agreed to do the GPS node board as well, which will enable us to have an IMU and GPS for the June launch.
- It looks like we'll rely on modifying the PIC16F877 + SJA1000 PCB's that we made in order to use the PIC18F458. We'll eventually replace them with 18F458 boards, but for now we just don't have time to redo all the boards: so the umbilical, IMU and GPS CAN nodes will all be modified old boards.
- The only new board we still aim on having on the June launch is the 2m uplink system, which Tim and Andrew are currently working on.
Ground Station Changes:
The whole group reviewed the ground station setup, and eventually we hammered out the following:
- Uplink Computer: The uplink computer sends DTMF tones using a 2m (146.43MHz) radio to the rocket. These DTMF tones are decoded on the rocket as commands and include functions such as arm, disarm, blow chutes, etc. In essence, it's a manual backup system in case the 802.11b link and flight computer fail. We decided to replace a PIC board, DTMF generator chip, and Linux program to communicate with it with a shell script which calls dtmfdial! Basically, the