Below is an excerpt from the Telemetry System ECE-499 Report, Performance Estimates and Results section. The full report can be located in the downloads section of this website.

7.0 Performance Estimates and Results

7.1 System Results

The Hornet system is the current design of the telemetry system for this project and can be seen in Figure 11 from section 6.1. This system was completed with the exception of the GPS component. The Navigatron V2, which uses the GTPA010 GPS, was selected for its ability to communicate with a microcontroller using the I2C protocol. However, this device was never successful in communicating over the I2C bus. The component was tested serially to determine if it was functioning correctly and when using a serial communication method it is able to return the NMEA sentences with accurate location and time information. A parser sketch was developed to read the information serially from the GPS; however, it is still under development and has not been integrated into the overall Hornet design yet. The GPS component is the only incomplete component from the Figure 11 diagram.

The remainder of the system works as expected in the lab and results have been produced by lifting the system up and down and imitating a flight. Figure 18 below shows a fake flight test using all of the components with the exception of the GPS.

Figure 18: Fake flight testing in the lab.

This test shows the system working as expected. The airspeed plot shows several spikes as someone blew into the airspeed sensor to simulate airflow. The VL6180 range finder returns approximately 40 mm when the ‘aircraft’ is close to the ground and 255 mm when it is ‘airborne.’ The MPL3115A2 shows altitude as the system was raised up and down in the lab by fishing wire. The zero point for altitude in this test was 10 feet. This was done so that negative numbers were not recorded when the altitude data drifted by a few feet. Temperature data is shown in the fourth plot but it is insignificant.