Electronics Friday

Most of BSU's team members are currently at the Sonny Carter Training Facility taking their chamber flight as this post is being written! They've already spent the morning in physiological training class, and will be taking a tour of the Neutral Buoyancy Lab after the chamber flight is complete. I am looking forward to hearing their stories of this exciting day later!

For the rest of the ground team members (Mallory and Tommy, and Matt tele-advising from Boise) and myself, we've spent a somewhat more relaxed and thankfully productive morning working on the Traction Team's electronics.

After yesterday's switching regulator mishap, the board that was monitoring the encoders and accelerometers needed to be reworked. We bought a new power supply, and are using Mallory's microcontroller to fabricate a new board that will allow us to continue with the experiment by Tuesday's flight.

(Above: New 250 Watt micro ATX computer power supply for sensor electronics, Below: The two position sensors and their filmstrip sensor tape)

Also today: while stopping by Ellington Field to bring our experiment back to the hotel before the weekend, the BSU Traction Team earned its Structural Analysis green check mark!

One step closer to flight days!
~Alex