The last two weeks have been incredibly hectic in regard to our project. We launch this coming Saturday and we have all been double checking our payload to make sure it is launch ready. We were having a problem with one of our voltage regulators. It was reaching very dangerous temperatures. after replacing a regulator and a resistor, we were still having the same problem. Low and behold we were drawing too much power from the battery at once. We disconnected the camera from our main power source and wired it to its own battery. The problem instantly went away, like we anticipated.
The way sensors work is by recording a voltage in relation to what it is sensing. A big part of the job is actually being able to convert the recorded data into usable data. This past Monday, I tested the data of that was recorded from the majority of our sensors to make sure the data recorded was actually good. The calculations were good, and our sensors are recording actual data. This is going to be extremely helpful for the conference we are speaking at in a few weeks.
All of this hard work and this is what it translates to!!! HAHA
This week our team constructed the payload's enclosure. Creating a solid design was less challenging than expected.We wanted out payload to have angled edges so that the cameras will naturally be pointing in a downward position during the balloon's flight. We began with a few rough sketches on a white board and then went to Solid Works to build our design. Solid works enabled us to pre-build the payload and make sure our lengths and angles were correct before botching the real product. After we drew the enclosure we printed our design to full scale at a Staples. With our template being at the proper scale we were able to trace the design with an razor knife and fold the box up and finish the enclosure very quickly. Tomorrow we will fit all of our circuits in the payload enclosure and get ready for launch next weekend!
Below is an image of the 2D Solid Works payload we built. Next week will be full of super cool photos, so get ready!!!
This has been a very challenging week in regard to our balloon project. Last week we finished soldering out circuit board...The we wired an LED to it to tell us that everything is working if the light is on. When we went to download software onto the circuit board it kept giving us a communication error. And thus began the hours and hours of debugging. Our mentor professor couldn't figure out the problem, we couldn't figure out the problem, we didn't know what to do.
Finally on Monday after re-soldering potential bad connections and removing solder from where it shouldn't be, I had the idea to plug in and test other circuit boards to the computer. Every board failed. This finally told us that the problem wasn't out circuit board, but the connection to the computer. We brought out a laptop that wasn't connected to the school's network and VOILA! everything works!!!! Our diagnosis is that because of the schools network security the driver for the cable we were using was not being installed on the computer, making every effort to download software onto our circuit board a failure.
I wish we would have tested that sooner, but after this experience it was nice to know that we did everything right the first time. This week was not a very visually stimulating week, but here is a video all about the only comfort our group knew of for the past week..the LED
