See that little guy up there, he can only handle 32 kb’s of information at a time. He is the center, no, the crux, the heart of of this project.

Now that I have your attention, I should start by saying that this project, CanSat, is a brand new team/senior design project for UCI. We pitched our project to Professor Rangel in the summer and have since been designing the groundwork for our team by carefully selecting new members and developing team and communication structures. The CanSat competition is basically this: a rocket (provided by the competition) houses our CanSat structure, and is launched 700 meters into the sky. After, the CanSat explodes out of the rocket and descends back to earth.

Now, back to that arduino uno up there. It acts as the heart of our CanSat. The CanSat competition (which this team was created for) requires that a communication data handling system as well as a sensor subsystem be created to monitor for different parameters while the CanSat (a cylindrical structure that’s 125 [mm] in diameter and 325 [mm] in length) is 700 [m] in the sky. The telemetry/controls team has been hard at work researching a wide variety of sensors that will monitor: pressure, temperature, altitude, speed, and so much more.

We are currently conducting trade studies to finalize our decisions and will begin prototyping and testing shortly after. Some parameters that we’ve used to decide on our final parts are: weight, accuracy, and cost. Weight is the most important parameter to consider as the competition only allows us 500 [grams] of total weight, so it is important that we do not waste any weight on our subsystems as to allow our mechanical team to design the best structure they can. Accuracy comes next, if our systems are inaccurate by just one second, that’s at the worst 30 meters of time that we lose as the CanSat structure is expected to move 30 m/s during one of it’s phases of descent.

This project is a new experience for all of us, but since all the members/leads are so hardworking, it feels like we’ve been around for a while.