12/9/14 Winter Break Update
12/9/14 Winter Break Update Introduction During the winter break thus far I have made a lot of progress prototyping the first data acquisition system (DAS), codenamed Yorktown. The telemetry system as a whole is divided into two subsystems; the video system and the DAS. I have not been working on the video system portion of the project because it was tested at the end of fall term. Instead, I have focused on the DAS. In this report I will cover the Yorktown’s progress in four steps. First I will review the circuit design for Yorktown followed by the programming for the system. Then I will...
Read More11/17/14 Update
11/17/14 This past week I ordered new parts in order to jumpstart the telemetry system. I determined that using the chipKit Max 32 board with the Eagle Tree air speed sensor was too difficult to continue devoting time to. Instead I have now order the Arduino Mega 2560 board and an altimeter that is known to work with the Mega. I have already found this code online and downloaded it. I verified (compiled) it on my computer using the Arduino IDE and it compiled successfully. I believe that it should be relatively easy to ‘plug and play’ once I get these parts. Then once the Mega communicates...
Read More11/10/14 Update
11/10/14 This past week I calculated the amount of information that could be collected during one flight duration. I found that at 5 readings of air speed, altitude, and GPS per second I collect 10500 bytes during a 5 minute flight (see table at end). I also found that the Max Chip Kit 32 board that I am using is practically an Arduino and should be able to be used as one. “…supports the original Arduino™ line. Compatible with many existing Arduino™ code examples, reference materials and other resources.” This being said, I still have not been able to get the air speed sensor working with my...
Read More11/3/14 Update
11/3/14 This week I learned all about I2C protocol. I2C protocol, or inter-integrated circuit, uses a master/slave combination to talk to multiple sensors from one master. The master being a microcontroller for example. At first I tried to find a way to use sensors without I2C, however, as I looked I found that more and more sensors actually used I2C and that there were a lot of resources online for help. For example the air speed sensor I am using now uses I2C. And the altimeter from Eagle Tree (that is missing) also does. I have not yet gotten the air speed sensor to work using I2C but I...
Read More10/27/14 Update
10/27/14 Last week I fixed my MATLAB code that doesn’t use forces. I found that our ground speed will have a great effect on the lead distance than the altitude. Several figures are below from the script. Altitude varying slope: 0.492 Ground Speed varying slope: 3.67 Varying ground speed has a larger impact on the lead distance. I started writing the code for the microcontroller and found that I have to use a serial peripheral interface (SPI) technique. Since I am not familiar with SPI, I have been doing some reading and checking examples online. Ervin and I also connected the test bed set...
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