Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Final preparation before integration week



 After a long and well deserved Christmas break the team is once again in place and working on the experiment. The experiment is fully functional and is mostly verified. So one might expect that we could lean back and enjoy our wonderful work now, but there's a lot more to be done before we can ship our experiment to Bremen in the end of January.
 
Some of our main points are:
 
  • Create the box for shipping the experiment
  • Do vibration test with new PCB's
  • Prepare the rocket module with covers over the venting holes
  • Produce multiple sets of soldering setups for integration week
  • Do multiple end to end test with complete system
  • Make PCB's flight ready
  • Implement temperature monitoring of battery packs during charging
  • Implement the sd-backup system
So understandably the team will have to work at full speed for the following two weeks. We are however confident that all the major points will be sorted once it is time to ship everything.

Once the experiment has been sent to Bremen we will send down two team members both named Björn. They are experts on the electrical and software system in SOLAR and could hopefully resolve and issues we could have during integration.
The integration week is pretty much what it sounds like, our experiment will be integrated with the other experiments and the rocket service module to make sure all the interface between different parts of the rocket works as expected.

If we have no major faults in our design the experiment will remain in Bremen before being sent to Oberpfaffenhofen outside Munich. There it will undergo a series of test to verify the flight readiness of our experiment.

So that's what we're working towards right now.
We'll try to get another update out sometime during this week, if not on the blog at least on our facebook page.

Have a nice day :)