ELECTRICAL
Current Responsibilities:
Our team is responsible for the design, build, and test of a robust electrical system responsible for determining mission success of the S.O.L.A.R System.
The purpose of the Orbital Avionics Controller (OAC) is to serve as the gateway for all vehicle operations. It must communicate with payload(s), report telemetry, provide necessary power and protection to all systems, and coordinate events for the high altitude balloon mission. Our design consists of integrated sensing circuits, RF/GPS, load control, power regulation and delivery based on predetermined design requirements. The Controller will be put through serious tests for long range communication, precision load control, fault handling, recovery deployment and much more. The design of this also involves the construction of various test plans to validate our requirements.
The RISE (Remote Instrumentation and Sensor Electronics) serves the purpose of providing additional features to our platform. These features should include a method of determining separation from the balloon, confirming successful parachute deployment, additional sensors, and communication compatibility with the OAC.
Awarded "Best Engineering & Computer Science Project" at the Student Project Innovation Expo
Example of one requirement section
Our designs are driven by requirements.
Vehicle Support
Power Distribution
Environmental Condition
Monitoring
Communication & Tracking
Protection
Recovery Support
Design Calculations and Validation
To ensure our design specifications are met, we deeply understand our systems by reading component datasheets and creating calculation sheets. We promote hands-on experience by using Evaluation Boards, which helps our team members learn how to operate test equipment and system components.
Hand Assembly
Electrical members learn how to assemble PCBAs with through-hole, SMD, and other types of components. We design, test, and assemble our own boards by hand.
Hardware Bring-up and Evaluation
Our team creates custom test plans to validate our hardware in expected and unexpected environments. Each test plan consists of functional tests designed to exercise our hardware and iterate further.