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....