2/20/15 Update
2/20/15 This past week I have made progress with the GPS, a new Time of Flight sensor, EEPROM memory, and system robustness. I was able to use serial communication to access the GPS NMEA information with my computer. Below is an example of the NMEA sentences recovered from the GPS using the program puTTY. Figure 1: NMEA sentences recovered from College Park Hall. Figure 2: Fix Information (GGA) sentence information made clear using MATLAB. I wrote a MATLAB script to decode the sentence information and make it more understandable to the user. The GPS latitude and longitude information was...
Read More2/11/15 Update
2/11/15 This week I continued GPS testing, got the RF communication working, and received the I2C memory chips in the mail (finally). I am still unable to read anything from the GPS by serial or I2C communication. I have tried several different serial communication programs such as Command Prompt, MiniGPS, PuTTY, and the Arduino IDE. For every test I get nothing. Not even garbage results, I just don’t get anything in terms of results. I am considering finding another GPS now, but first I would like to sit down with Professor Hedrick and/or Professor Spinelli to see if they can help me...
Read More1/30/15 Update
1/30/15 This week I worked primarily on the user interface for the telemetry system. I added a button and two LEDs (one red and the other yellow) to a protoboard. This UI can be bolted onto the outside of the plane for ease-of-use. Below is an up-to-date block diagram for the telemetry system on board the aircraft. I was unable to work with the GPS this week, however, I spoke with Professor Hedrick about GPS and I2C and he has also had bad experiences with the devices. He and I are going to meet next week with a logic analyzer to look at what is actually being sent/received on the data bus...
Read More1/23/15 Update
1/23/15 Over this past weekend I continued testing the GPS sensor for a location fix. The results I got from the GPS indicate that either I do not actually have a fix, or I am reading the information incorrectly. I believe that I do have at least a 2D fix because the LED indicator lights are solid (I read that solid indicates a fix and blinking is searching). I think the problem is in how I am reading the GPS data. I’m not sure why it is a problem since I am using the given sample code. I have tried to find more documentation on what the actual returned bytes mean from the...
Read More1/14/15 Update
1/14/15 Over the winter break I designed and built the first telemetry system prototype named Yorktown. This system used the Arduino Mega 2560, the MPL3115A2 altimeter, and the EagleTree Airspeed Sensor V2. Using the on board EEPROM I was able to store 4096 bytes of information from the sensors. This system was tested successfully several times without the aircraft. Time, altitude, temperature, and air speed were all recorded. When Yorktown was integrated into the aircraft and tested during the first test runs of the aircraft the serial clock line wire broke off of the Arduino. The meant...
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