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Saturday we had a pretty big crowd all building, gluing, soldering and coding. Here’s what was happening:

The new reel has been assembled had two sets of carbon brackets mold on the sides. These will hold the braking system. This new reel has duel brakes and a longer drag ladder than the original. We also make the new hub.

The next to last seam reinforcement went on to the Ascender test rib. Eighteen inches to go and it will be ready for a pressure test.

The team finished a second pair of mini rocket launch boxes. The first pair are for testing. They only last for one launch. The new pair will be for flight.

We’ll be flying two HD video cameras on the next flight. We began working on camera alignment. One camera will be focused on the launch boxes, the other on the flight path.

We’re controlling several move events on Away 38 than on a standard mission. We went back and forth on whither to use a seperate event controller and connect it to the the main controller through a serial port (this is how it’s done on the Tandem Airship), or just extend the main controller with a daughter board. The daughter board won. We cot it build last week and Saturday the systems team wrote the code for it and tested and debugged it. This took a little longer than usual, someone who shall remain nameless (yours truly), put in all three transistors backwards…….

Getting new carpet is just like moving. Your world goes into boxes and chaos ensues. It didn’t help that the old carpet came out over a week before the new went in. Workman have been in the shop all week, fixing the roll up doors in the bays, putting in a hot water heater and repairing a whole list of things. Are you sitting down? They’re even coming in next week to fix the air conditioning.
I agreed to sign the new building lease only when all the promised maintenance and upgrades had been done. I think the building owner really needed us to stay. Sometimes a recession has its upside.

We’re been experimenting with different antenna configurations for the small test quad engine.  It’s been waaay too much fun making gas glow. We were patterning our initial experiments after some recent big university experiments. It wasn’t working out to well so we started tweaking and adjusting. We now getting the same results at 35 watts that they were getting at 300.

The bad news is that the rent on the building is going up. The good news is we’re getting a new rug and hot water. About half of yesterday was taken up with ATO stuff and the other half taken up with moving desks, bookcases and filing cabinets so the old carpet could be pulled out.

The new reel was removed from mold. It came out great. The two halves were split and trimmed. It’s now ready to have the holes for the drag bars drilled.

Mark expanded and wrapped up the code for the rocket motor heaters. The main controller was tested looks pretty good. We still need to do some more heat cycle testing to determining the best on/off timing.

Yet another two yards of reinforcement strips went on to Ascender airbeam rib. Only 5 yards to go!

The Sacramento State University crew installed the bearing plates in the drum brakes and made the drum to shaft access port. It’s really starting to look like it will fly.

Anthony did a great job crafting this antenna for the quad engine.

Last night Mark and Karl laid carbon fiber and balsa wood into the reel frame mold. This is the first step in building a new balloon reel. This is a complex part to make. Two balsa cores (one inch apart) are sandwiched between single layers of carbon above and below. The whole thing gets vacuumed to get a good lamination. The result will be a very light and very strong part. We won’t know how it came out till Saturday. We’re leaving it to cure in it’s vacuum bag til then.

Here’s a sketch of the upcoming Away 38 mission.

We had a late start and an early finish, but we got a lot accomplished. Here the list.

We began applying reinforcement strips to the outer seam of the Ascender rib. Two yards worth got glued in place.

The first draft of the software for the rocket motor heater controller was completed, loaded and is running.

Second heater pair install in the second mini launch box.

The Away 28 “Reimaged” project is really coming together. This mission is being worked on by the Sacramento State University engineering student crew. They completed the drum brake disks and made the new drum bearings.

Old deck plates for a high rack platform were patched. The foam and carbon decks are normally good for two flight. This will be the forth for this set.

Helium inventory in never a fun task. Each tank gets a valve with a gauge mounted to check for pressure then the 120 pound tanks get sorted. The gang jumped in and found enough gas for the next mission.

A set of end caps for the ascender rib got another coat of sealant over the foam.

We begun the physical weight assessment for Away 38.

At 5pm the folks from the Sacramento L-5 Society came pouring into the electronics room for there monthly meeting. We hung on in the main shop working on connectors and code for another couple of hours then called it a night.

       
Programing the heater controller, drilling bearing and rib work.

Away 28 and, don’t even ask……

We spend the whole day on Saturday dropping a 20lb iron weight from the 18 foot ceiling. We’re going to start testing the reel system from that height tomorrow. Just in case the system fails, (it will from time to time during testing) the falling weight won’t kill us. The first few drops were pretty exciting. Instead of absorbing the energy our foam target made the weight bounce.  Nothing like a 20 pound piece of iron bouncing like a super ball to get the blood pumping. A dozen drops later and the weight stops dead safely in the target.

Now that we’ve learned how to make the test airbeam withstand 3.5 psi it’s time to apply what we learned to the Ascender rib airbeam. We finished adding reinforcements to the inner seam Wednesday. Tomorrow we start on the outer seam.

The Hardware for the new heater controller is done. Now the software needs to be written. The first two heaters were installed in the mini rocket launch box. The second pair get installed in the second box in the morning.

Saturday Bob taught a Basic Stamp class. From the raves I’ve gotten from the team it went very well.

While the class at the shop was going on, I was manning a table at the California Aerospace Museum. It was teacher and educators day. It looks like with vehicles will be filled to the brim with PongSats again this year.

The Discovery Channel was at the shop Monday. They filmed for over five hours. It was fun, but I’m still seeing spots from all the lights. This will be for an episode that will air sometime in the fall.

Wednesday the crew started assembling a controller for the rocket motor heaters. This project fell to some of the folks who took Bob’s class and are new to stamps and embedded computers. It’s a good first flight system project.