Putting my hardware where my mouth is...

I had been keeping this quiet, but it is the natural culmination of all that I have written on this blog.


At my day job, I work with space projects, but I have only been in the same room as flight hardware once, and that was purely as a tourist, to get my picture taken with it. I have written code that has gone into space, but never touched the hardware that carried it.

In October 2013, that will change. I am building space hardware. In a sense, that has already changed, since I have touched the hardware, but it's not space hardware yet. I have arranged for a version of the Rocketometer to fly on a rocket all the way into space.

The people I work for at my day job run an instrument in space that needs to be calibrated every so often. Every year or so, we fly a sounding rocket with a copy of our instrument, pop it up above the atmosphere for a few minutes, then let it fall back down into the atmosphere and descend on a parachute. It goes into space (well over 100km) but not into orbit.

On the campaign building up the rocket for the last flight this past summer, I was tinkering with my rocketometer (actually the 11DoF) and got to talking to my scientists about it. I told them about my daydream to actually get this thing on the rocket, and they said it was a great idea. Naturally it was far too late to get on board that last rocket, but with this next one I have plenty of time, especially considering that the hardware is finished, and I potentially could fly it now. The baseline mission is just to collect the data as fast as possible, and not bother with any on-board processing. That code was demonstrated with the speed test I did a few weeks ago.

My test plan and to-do list then looks like this:

1. Adapt the old code to the new hardware. A couple of the I/O lines were reassigned to simplify the board design.
2. Write an offline Kalman filter to process the data. IDL will work fine for that. Mostly I just need a set of equations of motion that allow the compass, gyro, and accelerometer to calibrate each other.
3. Calibrate the sensors. I have an old record player with no needle which will be perfect for this. I may be able to use some stuff in the labs at work to help with this.
4. Do a test flight in a model rocket. These generate a similar scale of forces and rotation rates, just for much shorter durations, seconds rather than minutes. The Rocketometer was designed to be carried in any rocket with a payload section 1" or larger in diameter.
5. Get USB Bootloader++ working. This is low priority, as I can program the part over serial as I have been doing for a while.
6. Consider on-board processing of the data.

I will be using the Rocketometer2148 with an MPU6050 6DoF sensor, an ADXL377 analog high-g accelerometer, an AD7991 12 bit ADC to read it, an HMC5883 compass, and a BMP180 pressure/temperature sensor.

With a couple of changes to main.cpp and gpio.cpp to tell it where the sensors and lights are on this board, the thing works! It may also be working at my goal rate of 1000Hz, attributable to a faster SD card, reading the compass only 1 of 10 times that the 6DoF is read, and not reading the HighAcc.