We can almost see the end of the new launch bag project. A couple more weeks and the sewing will be done, for now….
The team made two new controller boxes for the next three high rack missions. The old ones got a bit thrashed on the landings of the Toshiba commercial flights.
We’ve begun upgrading our flight computers. For the past six years we’ve been using Parallax’s Basic Stamp series. Over the next year we’ll be moving systems over to Parallax’s Propeller computer. It’s an eight way parallel processor on a chip. It will give us a great deal more speed and flexibility in our flight controllers. We waited on the processor upgrade until we got the major telemetry system upgrade complete. The next Away mission will have a least one Propeller processor on board.
The “desktop” quad engine is slowly coming together. This weekend we built the 300 watt plasma antenna. We spent about two hours trying to tune it. After much frustration we discover that the antenna was fine and one of our meters was uncalibrated. We only tested it a 70 watts. Our big amplifier is still at the repair shop (it was smoking right out of the box). Today we struggled with the connector nightmare on the oxidizer side of the engine. The regulators, flashback arrestors, servo valves and other plumbing not only all have different thread sizes but different unit standards and even different thread direction. Everything is actually design not to fit together. This is for safety. You don’t want to hook a fuel line to an oxygen tank for example. However, since there are no hybrid/plasma engines plumbing parts out there you end up cobbling bits together from other disciplines. The result is that everything needs an adapter. One the second generation engine we’ll make custom fittings, however now it’s hair pulling time.
