1. SENSOR SELECTION CALIBRATION OVERVIEWOVERVIEW DESIGN ROADMAP ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The project would not have been possible without the extensive support of the RockSat Program, Colorado SpaceGrant, and the University of Wyoming. The University of Wyoming provided funding through the Physics, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering departments. We also like to thank the staff and faculty of Electrical Engineering Department who's extensive knowledge and experience where invaluable to the design of this project. The project would not have been possible without the extensive support of the RockSat Program, Colorado SpaceGrant, and the University of Wyoming. The University of Wyoming provided funding through the Physics, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering departments. We also like to thank the staff and faculty of Electrical Engineering Department who's extensive knowledge and experience where invaluable to the design of this project. The ‘Space Cowboy’ Multi-Senor project is a suborbital payload to be flown under NASA’s RockSat program. The design is a highly expandable payload control and environmental monitoring system. The system incorporates highly accurate sensors to measure canister environmental parameters that will impact scientific payloads. The system utilizes commonly available and open interface standards to minimize development time and expense. The purpose of the project is to establish a highly expandable standard platform suitable for use in future flights under the RockSat suborbital payload program. The project design decisions are driven by the desire to develop a platform that is extremely robust and implements widely used standards to reduce development time and expense. The ‘Space Cowboy’ Multi-Senor project is a suborbital payload to be flown under NASA’s RockSat program. The design is a highly expandable payload control and environmental monitoring system. The system incorporates highly accurate sensors to measure canister environmental parameters that will impact scientific payloads. The system utilizes commonly available and open interface standards to minimize development time and expense. The purpose of the project is to establish a highly expandable standard platform suitable for use in future flights under the RockSat suborbital payload program. The project design decisions are driven by the desire to develop a platform that is extremely robust and implements widely used standards to reduce development time and expense. Our calibration consists of placing each of our sensors in an environment with specific controlled parameters. We have facilities lined up for testing our temperature, humidity, and pressure sensors. Our accelerometers come pre-calibrated from the factory with calibration tables. Our magnetic field sensor is designed to make relative measurements of changes in the magnetic fields. At this point we do not have facilities to calibrate the magnetic field sensor. The Design of the project is driven by our goal for its continued use in future flights under the RockSat program. The project provides the greatest technical capabilities and value due to the low cost, robust design, and versatile peripheral connection standards we implemented. To maintain low costs, the hardware was developed entirely in-house without the need for expensive development boards. Cost was also taken into considering during component selection where packages that offered the best performance/cost ratios where selected. The robustness of the project was maximized through the use of surface mount components reliving possible physical loading failures. The use of high speed CAN bus and SD storage system allows for over 100 sub-boards be connected with minimal effort making the design incredible versatile. The Design of the project is driven by our goal for its continued use in future flights under the RockSat program. The project provides the greatest technical capabilities and value due to the low cost, robust design, and versatile peripheral connection standards we implemented. To maintain low costs, the hardware was developed entirely in-house without the need for expensive development boards. Cost was also taken into considering during component selection where packages that offered the best performance/cost ratios where selected. The robustness of the project was maximized through the use of surface mount components reliving possible physical loading failures. The use of high speed CAN bus and SD storage system allows for over 100 sub-boards be connected with minimal effort making the design incredible versatile. We measure temperature, humidity, pressure, acceleration, and magnetic field variance. The main board hosts the center-axis accelerometer, pressure sensor, and one of the two temperature and humidity sensors. Peripheral board #1 hosts the off-axis accelerometer and remote temperature and humidity sensor. Peripheral board #2 hosts the magnetic field sensor. Communication and power transfer between the main board and peripheral boards is conducted over the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus. This bus provides CRC verified bi-directional data transfer. We send 5v and 3.3v to the peripheral boards over the CAN bus. The CAN bus transfers the data collected by the peripheral boards to the main board where the data is moved onto our data storage medium. We utilize a Micro Secure Digital (SD) data storage card to store the collected data and log information during the mission. The main board hosts the storage card. The Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) is used to communicate with the Micro SD card. We estimate about 200MB of storage space will be used by the end of the flight. The 2GB Micro SD card we are using provides ample extra space for expanded data acquisition in the future. SPACE OS DATA TRANSPORT DATA STORAGE ROCKSAT RockSat is based out of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium hosted at Colorado University in Bolder, CO. RockSat provides a low-cost solution to allow colleges to launch payloads. 2009 is the first year the program is accepting payloads from education institutions. RockSat is in its second year of operation. Our project runs on a custom operating system devolved primary by James Richey. Space OS is a light weight, cross-platform operating system designed to provide a high level of abstraction from the hardware layer. Space OS comes with a easily modifiable set of default commands for interacting with the local hardware. Space OS also provides process management, which allows processes to be started or killed during program runtime. SURFACE MOUNT TECHNIQUES To help increase resilience to physical loading, minimize physical footprint, and support modern sensor packages, surface mount components are used. These components are soldered using solder reflow techniques. The solder mask stencils are laser cut out-of-house, but all reflow work is completed using a homemade reflow oven. A full write up of this process will be completed this summer at the request of the Electrical Engineering Faculty.