This is the promised Video about the vieHAB-1 Hardware. It has lots of problems, mainly everything was made into one system. In the end we had no SD logging because the atmega328 didn’t have enough memory. Our friends from STS-project already solved this with using a secondary processor with an SD card.

I will make a new system with seperated functions and better power supply. This time I will take every time it needs ti make it (this time we had a fixed date and wanted to get this going :))

It was finally done! The whole setup reached a total height of 36000 m (118000 ft).
We set off at 00:15 from Vienna and reached Povozany (SK) at 02:15. After a bit of socializing with our slovakian friends from STS Project I set off to make the radio work and do some other bits in software.
Launch was at 06:45 Local.
Have fun with the flightvideo:

I’ll have some more next week on the hardware itself,
until then,
your AE

First off, sorry for my not keeping you up to date, finishing the payload just took precedence over posting.
We set off to Slovakia on sat 30.8.2013 at 00:00 to meet the awesome guys from stsproject.net 2 hours later. We arrived at 02:30 and I had to finish the payload since our radio burned some days earlier (our replacement did unfortunately not arrive in time, no hard feelings tho:). Dano resoldered their RFB22B on our break-out board nad I started to set it up to transmit at 300 bd at 438.020 MHz int RTTY. locally it worked well but I made a huge mistake…

Fist some pre flight pics:

My first received telemetry:

The reset circuit is in place:

First assemled:

Put it together on-site:

the STS project was nice enough to lend us a backup tracker – their v2 version:

to calculate lift and filling it is important to weight the complete setup:

the guys filled the balloons:

while I was playing waiting:

after launch I got no seat in a SAR-car so I had to track them and the balloons at our launch-pad:

Because I am an ass, you will have to wait for pics of the launch and rescue. I’ll have the video complete asap but I had a 36 hour day doing this and my flat looks like fallout after the building. All I say is that I made a terrible mistake (STUPID BITS!!!!!!!) and without the help of STS project we would have failed 100% so its only ~66%..

thanks for tuning in!

So first we got the bare board, etched with NaPS and toner transfer:

The whole thing is kinda like a mainboard, processor socket and expansion cards:

Boards in place from left to right: Arduino, SPI-level shifter, RFM22B on breakout board and a SD-card holder:

On the top added: a voltage divider for battery voltage, UBLOX GPS receiver, LM317 for 3,3V (RFM,SD):

This I really love: from bradboard to etched without a hitch:

There will be another chip flying with us: a tiny85 to reset the arduino every 5 minutes or so. It will reinit GPS and rfm and so on. Also it will turn off the photo and video cams to save power after landing.

so long….

I have rebuilt Anthony Stirks Interrupt Driven RTTY TX Demo to do it without interrupts 😀
Right now I’m just happy that I made RTTY work, there is still some work to do, like setting transmission power according to flight state (pre-launch, launch and landed). Landed will be especially funky, because it will lower its output power in three stages, then a beeper beeps and leds will light up.

Still to do is a reset circuit, SD-Card saving and the v2 Motherboard.
Thank you OE1HWS for lending me your FT-817!

PS.: The xp on the netbook is there to play Rollercoaster Tycoon, still my second favourite game!

PPS.: The first being Transport Tycoon ;D

I basically spent the whole day figuring out the librarys little quirks. The DHT22 lib had a case issue (dht.h != DHT.h). Just got my first responses from the spi controlled RFM22B, I will hook up the sd card tomorrow and set up a filesystem on it.