BalloonSat is a high-altitude university weather
balloon project intended to lead to a student-designed satellite.
I will be flying some HF CW beacons on upcoming
BalloonSat and Space Hardware Club flights at UAH. These beacons
will use a homebrewed MSP430 controller and a transmitter either homebrewed
or kit-built. Desired output power is 100-500 mW, though I may
experiment with less.
I also participate in the
chase and recovery of BalloonSat flights, including two flights in November
2006.
In the spring of 2006, I participated in
a senior design project at the University of Alabama in Huntsville to
develop a telemetry module for transmitting several channels of data over
packet radio, thus allowing data recovery in the event of payload loss.
Group members were myself, Jonathan Berry (KF4MME), and Jeb Orr
(KI4ROW as of 10/06), all graduates of UAH's Computer Engineering program.
Project Summary (75 KB PDF)
Project Proposal (110 KB PDF)
Project Proposal (476 KB PowerPoint)
Final Design Review (605 KB Word Document)
Final Design Review Presentation (2.24 MB PPT)
Schematic (20 KB GIF)
PCB Layout (63 KB BMP)
PCB Layout with Traces (210 KB BMP)
Parts List
Received Telemetry from ORION-1 Flight, 9 April 2006
Received Telemetry from ORION-2 Flight, 15 April 2006
News Release (26 KB Word Document)
Other Pictures
Telemetry Decoder (604 KB EXE)
Telemetry Decoder Source (8 KB CPP)
Sample Telemetry Decoder INI file
Telemetry Decoder Documentation (25 KB Word Document)