It All Comes Down to This...

It's finally here! Launch week is upon us with all of its colorful circuits, sleepless nights, and bipolar radios. Each team has soldered their circuit together with sensors in place. The program is being tweaked and finalized with all of the necessary bells and whistles by Michael and Andrew.  These two have stared at a computer screen for about 17 hours each day! Figuring out what is wrong is rarely easy, fast, or intuitive.  Exhibit A: The SD card reader that saves our data would not work when the GPS was plugged in. Once the pressure sensor part of the program was removed, both worked properly. If you can explain this then you are clearly smarter then 11 college freshmen. If you can't, well you still might be smarter than 11 college freshmen.

The radios seem to have a mind of their own, or maybe they just didn't like Michael and Andrew. Each team has 2 radios. One for in the balloon and one for on the ground. We also bought a 7th in case of emergency.  After much searching we found two hills .8 miles apart with a line of sight. 4 of the 7 sensors worked during that test. A small improvement from the 1/4 mile range before, but certainly a step in the right direction. Each test the radios seem to work better. The next time they reached a range of 3 miles. For the next test Kayla and Bub went on a windmill hunt. Dr. Rowley said that you could see the windmills in Bliss from the hill on Centerville Road. After leaving the circuit with suspicious looking  Yagi antenna  (good thing we live in trustworthy Houghton) along side of the road (clearly marked as radio testing equipment and not a bomb of course), they drove in the direction of the windmills.

Unfortunately Bub did not exactly remember how to get there and so they wandered around back country roads an hour and a half. Finally Bub said "turn down this road and we'll just head back". A minute later there were windmills all around. You always find something when you least expect it I guess. Their good luck shortly ended when there was absolutely no signal. Discouraged, they drove back to where they had left the other circuit. Turns out the antenna had blown over and disconnected the circuit. Maybe just maybe, the radios could still work. The second trip to the windmills was much faster because they knew how to get there. Using a program that Michael wrote they were able to collect data on the signal strength and data corruption rate. A strong signal at 7.5 and 5 miles away brought hope to the situation. You would think $600 radios that are supposed to go 30 miles should work extremely well  up to 15 or 20. Will they be able to transmit data through the entire flight of the balloon? Your guess is as good as mine. 

Things we've learned: 

1) 2 voltage regulators in parallel explode when put under high current draw. 

2) Our 3.7V batteries actually hold 4.2V and easily burn out battery clips. 

3) Powering an Arduino through Vin and the computer cable will fry it. 

4) When Ye Olde Antenna Lab in CO sends you an antenna kit, there will be assembly required. 

5) Going to bed when the birds are chirping is a very late night. 

6) In reference to 5, sleep is for the weak.

Tomorrow we launch! We have had months of planning, and now we are ready (or nearly so) to let our balloons fly into the atmosphere. Come out to Houghton College tomorrow at 11:00 am to watch!

-Kayla