REXUS-BESPIN

So we passed the integration progress review which means the next time we will be seeing Stefan Krämer (REXUS/BEXUS program manager) is at the end of November for our experiment acceptance review. At this time the experiment should be flight ready with all of the software done….So better get to work then.

At this moment almost all the different modulus are completed and we aim to have all the modules done by the end of the month. After that we will start working on the timeline of the experiment and make the code more reliable.   

So what am I working on? Right now I am working on our accelerometer that will measure the g load during the experiment. Up to 20g during launch, 0g during the microgravity portion of the flight and the part which is of most interest for us, the shock of the parachute deployment.

I have also been working on the watchdog which is in fact, not a dog (it would be a bad idea to send a puppy to the edge of space). It is instead a timer that resets the entire microcontroller if the software gets stuck. So it is basically the computer saying “have you tried turning it off then on again?” to itself.

The watchdog goes hand in hand with the other part of the software I have been working on, mode switching. Our software will behave differently depending on which mode it is in. If the watchdog timer triggers a reset we want to be able to boot in to the same mode as before the reset. It would be bad if the experiment thinks it is on the launchpad while falling at mach 3 towards the ground. Of course we hope to never have a watchdog reset and because we all in the software team write perfect code without bugs that should not happened, but you never know…

 

 

 

 

All in all there is still a lot of work left to be done but we are starting to see the big picture come together. There are exciting times ahead with lots of interesting tests for all the divisions of the project and in the end hopefully a fully functioning experiment.

Stay tuned

//Daniel