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....................

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