The meeting kicked off with a video of our brand new ATV system flying on Dave's friend's RC helicopter! Very cool proof of concept, pretty solid video though they didn't try flying too far away.
Airframe
Tim brought his latest attempt at the composite aeroshell. It was a full 50" with only a few holes at the edges. It was quite a tight fit on the cylinder so he developed a wand to help bang the aeroshell off of the form without damaging it (but part of the wand broke.)
No other nosecone or fin progress this week.
Avionics
Andrew, Maria, and Sarah blocked out the avionics that will fly on the next launch. They broke it down into three phases:
- Power system and ATV only
- Add an off-the-shelf GPS and video overlay board
- Add an ARM node to intercept the GPS data stream and maybe do some data reduction, possibly to the flight computer.
We can certainly get phase 1 done by September, and possibly also phase two.
Andrew then explained the principles behind the cylindrical patch antennas (CPA) used for ATV and GPS. He brought out the spreadsheet that was used for generating Eagle specs for fabricating the LV2 antennas, tweaked it for the new ATV frequency (2.39 GHz) and new diameter (5.5"), and generated new ATV and GPS antennas that showed up fine in Eagle!
Other tasks to do:
- build the CPAs, after a little more homework
- breadboards for the Phase 1 components [details later]
- ATV range test
- decide whether to do Phase 2 for the first launch
- design the power supply
- build for the rocket
Software
Jamey and Josh moved the ikiwiki to a new empty server, a nice sandbox just for PSAS. Edits that used to take 30 seconds to commit now take three seconds. This paves the way for upgrading the ikiwiki from version 2.1 to 2.51 (ATTACHMENTS!!!1!!) To do: move over the mailing lists and archives, svn, and git repositories.