Balloon Instrument Pack Update!
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been working no this controller for the K2CC balloon launch. I’ve made some more progress this week, with final integration of all the sensors in to the same set of firmware, and the first of the weird bugs cropping up. As it’s pretty late, I’m not going to get in to much detail, but here’s a list of what I’ve accomplished:
- Geiger Counter set up to run off 5V boost converter. This guy has an output pin that pulses whenever the Geiger tube detects a decay particle, I have that feeding an interrupt on my controller and I’m locally maintaining a count, this makes the Geiger Counter’s onboard USB/Serial and AVR stuff a bit excessive, but I didn’t know when we decided on the board it had such an output. Since I’m not splitting the workload with the Counter’s AVR I don’t need another serial interface.
- Barometer initializes and transmits pressure and temperature data properly.
- Humidity and External Temperature Sensor works with the ADC and has been roughly calibrated.
- Diode used as a fixed voltage reference to self calibrate ADC reference voltage.
- GPS reconfigured to send only the NMEA/GGA sentence, every five seconds. This is much easier to cope with, and I have the sentence successfully parsing on my controller.
That’s the big stuff!, I’ve added some more photos to the album I linked to in the other post (see link at top). Now…. sleep. I’ll post more soon. Launch is Saturday morning!