On the Roads to CANSAT : PART 2

It was mid April, Our Flight operations were scheduled to be held on June 13th and June 14th in Amarillo Texas. We had loads of work to do, I was pretty lazy expecially to go and work in the Lab. It was rishabh who used to do the dirty work of waking me up and getting me to work. His absence was felt soon and i realized that i had to do something to get things going at least at the same pace ...if not faster...

I shifted my bedding into our Robotics lab , this was one way i could keep my focus on work and stay in the lab for as much time possible... I remember there were weeks i stayed in the lab all alone @ 16 degrees of Room Temperature... courtesy our wonderful Air Condition. This did help, I soon finalised the Fabrication Schematic for our Chip Design with a better and more reliable microcontroller , we used a 128 KB flash chip with 2 USARTs which completely made our work easy in terms of removing the necessity of a multiplexor to get both the transiever and the GPS running at the same time. Once i finalised the design i wanted it to be rechecked by someone as you often dont realize your mistakes. I did get it rechecked by some of my seniors and gave the final schematic for Fabrication.

In the mean time we worked on the firmware , there were some personal distractions that i started to face during this period but i managed to move on within 2-3 weeks... Our fabricated Design arrived by May 2nd week. We began programming our firmware as soon as we got the chip fixed but things dint seem so easy as we thought it would be. We weren't able to program our Chip, something had gone wrong and we couldn't figure out what it was. We spent the whole night frustrated and went straight back to the fabricators the next morning to figure out the problem. Then we realised that we had used the wrong MOSI and MISO pins for the programming interface, luckily i had kept the pins PI and PO open and had provision for a change.

Once we got our chip running , it dint take much time to get the firmware running on our system. Our fabricated chip looked something like this :



Our firmware was fast and running , it was time for some real testing to be done. We started moving around the campus... climbing on the newly constructed building... checking GPS data .. configuring packet informations and looking at accuracy of our External Antenna which we procured at the last moment as we realized that a micro-chip antenna would not be good enough. When the range testing was being done we were getting a range of around 500 m with our new antenna. Our manual predicted its range to be around 6 miles but we weren't able to get it. Interference in the Mobile range was a factor we had not neglected so we came up with a conclusion that it might work to higher ranges at US and we should go for it with the present antenna itself. Once all the Electronics were tested along with the Software Interface we started working on the structure and got all the components fixed on the structure of CANSAT. Ankush did a pretty great job in getting everything fixed in a very systematic manner. The system worked very well when we did a dummy parachute test of the Landing.

...It was June 8th and we had almost finished with all the testing and working on the CANSAT. We started packing and were ready for it. It was our first time and we also dint know the pre-factors involved. All i wanted was to avoid failure and get all my systems working on the D - day. I dint want all our 6 months effort to go futile with our sensors or systems failing at the last moment. I had taken spare chips for each and every part of the CANSAT. There was a spare parachute as well... ;)

The other members who were going were together but i had a different flight path as i had to go for my Internship in France right after the Competition. I dint get much time to prepare for the journey , i even forgot to take a digital camera with me... ;) all i wanted was to succeed in the competition. It would be a great achievement if an Indian team could break into the top 5 in its first attempt itself.

We reached Dallas on June 12th evening, i had come from Delhi via Chicago to dallas. It was a pretty long trip but i enjoyed it... ( i got wonderful company )

We reached Amarillo in the morning and once we reached our Hotel we took a small nap and reported at Holiday Inn. We were asked to meet them at the Competition Briefing at 3 PM. We went back to our hotels and worked on fixing our CANSAT back to shape. We managed to get everything working before 3 , we reached there on time to get our Central Ground Station tested. It worked in the first try itself... we had a superb reception , we were happy that our firmware worked. This was the only part we dint get a chance to test so we had our fingers crossed... Once things worked correctly in our trial we were pretty happy. Our briefing went well and we retired for our dinner at a Chinese restaurant nearby. The day before the competition was pretty calm for me, I knew that i had done what i could do and there is nothing much we could do by thinking about tommorow. I had a good nights sleep and we started of for the D day in the morning at 8 AM from our Hotel to the Launch Center. Once we reached there , we had breakfast and got our Tents fixed. We set our Ground Station and made last minutes arrangements on our table. Everything seemed to work perfectly.

Our Launch was scheduled at 12 PM so we enjoyed the other launches and followed up with their results. Team Maryland and Alabama had finished their task successfully. Soon it was our turn and we were ready on time for our launch , we got a good rocket and had all the pre-flight preparations on time. At the Launch Window all i could do was pray for a successful flight. The Count-down began and i knew ... this was it ! zoom .... went the rocket and within a sec it disappeared into the cloudy skies.

I went straight to avi to find out about the reception of telemeter data and he showed me that he had stopped receiving data once the rocket had gone up. We waited for 15 minutes and then looked for our Landed satellite. We found it pretty fast with the GPS data. At the Landing site we looked at the CANSAT and found that everything was fine and working. ALL the data was supposed to be stored in the Memory so we still had hope to win inspite of communication failure. This was how our day ended and in the evening when i downloaded the data from the memory , i found out that the problem was in the range of the antenna as it had recieved commands from the relay satellite once the repeater was brought close. We prepared a good post-flight review with lots of analysis based on our GCS interface.

My post flight review presentation next morning went well and we got a good response from the crowd. I was infact expecting to win atleast the 4th or the 5th position as we had complete data analysis inspite of our communication failure. The results were announced soon after the presentations ended and i was disappointed as we lost a position just by 2 points. We ended up 8th in the final rankings.

Well if we look at it in a way , it wasnt bad... its just that the pain lingers... One small mistake and you fall a step behind complete success... There is always a limit to what a person can expect but i knew that we had it in us to be a complete winner..all that we had missed was we dint get a higher decibel antenna to work on. Whatever happened the pleasure of such a wonderful experience is what counts the most, the pleasure to have competed with the worlds best universities and show them that we are equally competent, the prestige of showing that students from IIIT-Hyd are as good as the top 20 colleges in the world is an experience worth living. We were the trend setters and no one could deny it, we did what we could and we know that thou we missed out on a few dollars of prize money we had earned lots of respect !!

That is what Counts....................

For Pics u can chek out...Link

On the Roads to CANSAT : PART1

"IIIT,Hyd beats MIT in CANSAT 2009"

This was how our very own IIITians were celebrating the decent performance shown by the IIIT Hyd Team in CANSAT 2009. Incidently this was the first Indian Team to have qualified in this prestigious competition organized by the American Astronautical (AAS) Society and the American Institute for Astronautics and Aeronautics (AIAA) and Sponsored by NASA(i guess i dont need to expand this one... ;-) )

CANSAT as it is named is a combination of Can and Satellite. Our Task was to make a Pico Satellite in the shape of a can which would be able to Telemeter Remote Sensing data on descent after being launched to a height of nearly 2kms and then land safely and collect science data from the position it had landed.

The CANSAT would be tracked based on the Landing Position sent to the Team's own Ground Station and the Central Ground. This was briefly what we were asked to do..

Here i go about narrating my journey from my little cosy Lab to the Launch Centre at Amarillo Texas......


It all began with a mail sent by our Team Leader Sudhir Gupta. He was looking for potential team-mates for this endeavor. The first time i read his mail i was very skeptical about what he had written in his mail. I dint figure out how India would be able to participate in this event as it was clearly mentioned in the Competition Website that only Teams from US,Canada,Mexico and UK were allowed to take part.

My doubts were cleared once we had our First CANSAT Meeting with all the members who had RVSP'd to his mail. Some of the faces were familiar and some weren't. Our First Meeting began with the Introduction of Members and then Sudhir and Vinay Pandit explaining us the details about the Problem Statement and how the whole competition was structured into Different Levels. When we went about discussing , i figured out that the whole challenge involved a lot of Electronics. The complete concept behind this event was to bring out the students from the fields of Computer Science , Mechanical and Electronics to work together and make a fail proof System.

This was when i could feel the excitement within me, the very idea to work on your own Satellite and compete with the Best Colleges in the world was a good enough reason to go for it... This was a new challenge altogether , it was an opportunity for me to actually apply all those boring and meandering concepts of Embedded Systems and Communications. I could feel it that this was something big , but at the same time i could feel the pressure that came along... I could see that the number of ECE students in our team wasn't enough. I then put forth my point to the members that we would need another senior ECE member as i was the only one from 3rd year ECE and the other two members Rupen and Amey were 2nd year and 1st year ECE students who dint have much experience at that point of time.



It was then when Rishabh Ranjan my batchmate joined our Team. Dr Rajan our Team Advisor and Professor of LSI (Lab for Spatial Informatics) was really helpful and encouraged us a lot from the first day itself. I was appointed the Alternate Team Leader and the Electronics Team Lead. The whole team was divided into 3 major Parts, the other two being Structural Design headed by Sudhir Gupta and Software Design headed by Avi. Our initial target was to create a concrete plan on how to go about building such a system. The whole process involved us creating a complete blueprint of the whole satellite on paper with different stages of planning and Implementation. Lot of hours were spent just discussing and planning out how the whole system would be developed. A complete schedule of 6 months of concrete work was prepared. All the Heads were allocated work in parallel keeping in mind the major deliverables of Preliminary Design Review and Critical Design Review before the final D day arrived 6 Months Later.

For the next month around January, we just went about making a small Development Kit on a Vector Board as we dint have any Components till then. Our development Kit was made using an ATMEGA 16 microcontroller and a two way Zigbee communication Interface with the Laptop. I knew that we wouldnt get all the components till the Late end of February so we would need to make our own kit on a PCB. Thus our first advent began with making a small communication interface with the laptop which could use a dumb terminal emulation program to communicate in a duplex manner. By the Preliminary design Review we worked a lot on the planning and search for Hardware requirements. Most of the components were not available in India and had to be imported from US. Specifically the GPS sensor and AC 4790 transiever were a big problem as none of us had worked with it before.

Our PDR deliverable went smooth and the Organizers were indeed happy with the level of Design given by an Indian Team. I guess they weren't expecting much from us :P... Soon we started working further and developed the Temperature and Pressure Sensor modules on our PCB development Kit. Both the modules worked pretty fine individually as well as together. We had interfaced an LCD in the Remote Satellite End so that debugging would be easier. We soon started generating packets of Temperature and Pressure data and sent them across to our Laptops. Our Main Hardware was on the way from different parts of the world... We were a little behind our Planned Schedule because of the delay in Hardware Components.

Half of the Time between the PDR and HWR(Hardware Design Review) was spent waiting for the Components to arrive. There was another fucking problem.... We weren't legally allowed to work on the Frequencies of 900 to 928 MHz as they were in the regions of our GSM mobile phones used in India. That contributed to a delay in shipping those transievers to India, but finally we managed to get it from our Professor Dr. Rajan's Relatives. By then the GPS sensor had arrived. We had never worked on GPS sensors before but the great thing was it was the most reliable sensor in our System. The sensor worked overnight without much hassles. We quickly shifted our focus back to the AC 4790 and waited patiently for its arrival.

Our HWR went smooth and the big Critical Design Review was on the way. We were working on the AC4790 Module. The whole thing was pretty different from zigbee as we had to use the API protocol in th Addressing mode against the option of transparent communication in Zigbee. AC4790 also involved further complications of programming the EEPROM of the device and configuring the correct settings. With all these difficulties and sleepless nights we still weren't able to communicate with the transiever. It had been a week of study and we dint get results. I had been busy with the R & D showcase and couldn't work with Rishabh and Rupen. They were the guys who worked in Labs all night tryin to fix the creepy problem , and yeh they finally did it... We got our Communication system working and were able to generate complete packets both from the Temperature cum pressure module and the GPS module.

It was time for us to keep a secondary storage in our System. Our Critical Design Review went really well. We had a couple of hiccups communicating with the american organizers but on the whole it was flawless. The strange thing was our mentors dint give us reviews , we were all on our own and dint have anyone to lookup to incase of technical problems. The software group was also working on Time along with us , Structural group was facing some problem due to the unavailability of Rip-stop Nylon. Working as a team does help as the stress and problems can be divided amongst each other...

Our memory Chips arrived and we interfaced that pretty well to our AT-Mega 16 board. We then had finished interfacing all independent modules on our development board. This meant that we were ready for the final Implementation and Fabrication of our Module. Endsems had approached and that meant that we would soon be loosing our valuable team-mate Rishabh as he would be going to Singapore for his Internship. Rishabh had done his part and all we could complain was to stop him from going and stay with us to see the finished model of the System.After he had left it was just me and rupen with all the baggage on our shoulders....

That was when i realized that all we had done yet was to familiarize with the interfacing of components. We had to rebuild the whole system with a completely different micro-chip and writing of the whole firmware was left... Fear grew so did our motivation... I just knew one thing... we had to do it... One way or the other.. We had to complete it...

Read about how things actually happened and the experiences on the Final Day in my Next Post....