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flight/main.py is the what runs when the board boots up. We modified this to collect data and then transmit the data on loop.  Most of the sensors were connected over an I2C line that was soldered where the solar panel connections on the ARGUS board were. The component that weren't on the I2C line were the IMU, GPS, and LoRa. Some important notes for next time:

  • Calibrate the IMU ahead of time, so that we can get accurate accelerometer readings
  • GPS can take 5-10 minutes to achieve a lock once it's in proper conditions. The GPS must be outside and in direct sight line of the sky. When testing I was not able to get the GPS to position lock through a window, although it was able to detect time information through the window.

Sensor data was supposed to be saved to an SD card. We were not able to get the SD card reader on board to work, so we hooked up an I2C SD card mount. It broke on landing and we were unable to recover the data on it. I think it's a wise policy to require that we stream absolutely everything over radio, and only have backup storage on the HAB as a last resort.

The packet structure emitted by the LoRa radio was designed such that every field encoded a valid boolean so that if a sensor failed, we could tell in our data.

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