Special Thanks

Two things, first, We have to thank Timur Balbekov for helping with the programming aspect of this project because the accelerometer stuff was too crazy for us to do alone. Tim's the man.

Second, we also have to thank Schmartboard and Freecale for donating some supplies for the accelerometer. Along with that is this entry from Timur's website (www.orbitality.com, go check it out) had typed up about his experience using these supplies.

"Sourcing Accelerometers: Most accelerometers are designed for use in laptops and cell phones. Because of this, they are designed to be small. Their size makes it extremely difficult to solder for the average hobbyist without a reflow oven (think toaster oven for microchips) or a really hot blow dryer. A company that has sponsored our efforts, Schmartboard, has developed a product that makes soldering easy.

A schmartboard contains solder and small gutters into which the tiny pins of these accelerometers drop into. From there it is a small matter of heating the junction with a regular soldering iron. The board contains drilled holes through which headers can be placed to plug the sensors into a through-hole board. From start to finish, attaching a chip to one of these boards should take no longer than five minutes. The downside of this convenience is size: compared to a standard breakout board (board without the pre-placed solder), the Schmartboard is much larger. Since we are working with size constraints (the device has fit into a rocket), it will be necessary to take a dremel to the boards to cut them down to size.

The accelerometers were sampled from Freescale, who sent us two 50g (upper accleration limit) single-axis accelerometers (MMA2202EG) and a two three-axis 10g accelerometers. Small rockets can reach upwards of 100g, so these sensors are by no means excessive. The 50g accelerometer is in a SOIC (surface outline IC) package, which means its a small DIP chip that has “gull wing” leads that don’t poke through the PC board. The smaller accelerometer is QFN (quad flat no lead) and has no protruding pins. It’s also very small, and it turns out that the chip has non standard lead pitch. Normally, QFN16 (16 leads) chips have a distance (pitch) of .65mm between pins. The chip we received has a pitch of 1mm, making it impossible to use the Schmartboard for that chip. It is possible to solder wires directly to a QFN chip provided the wires are thin enough (magnet wires). A good idea would be to glue the QFN chip to the adapter board but make the connections with magnet wire."

Oh, and here is the Schmartboard logo:

And their site: www.schmartboard.com

And here is the Freescale logo:

Along with their site:www.freescale.com

-Rebel Rockets

Rebel Rockets-Day 22

I guess this is the last journal post. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be what we did or if we are supposed to reflect on the overall experience, so I'll just do both. To start off we made this awesome video montage of our rocket launches and then made a slide show, and then put together a presentation board for the SEE Fair...that took up our whole day. As for the whole project, I had a really good time, and it was way better than going to school. During the project we had to constantly adapt to our different needs because we always had problems. This is something that we probably wouldn't have had to do if we were in school, and that single learning experience is something that makes the senior project worth it. I had a great time, almost want to keep doing it...Almost.

-Mike B.

Today, we completely finished the project. We made the video montage, which took a good deal of time because we had to get all the videos uploaded onto the computer. Also, we lost one of the cameras, and that took a while to find. We also printed out all the graphs and placed them on the poster. We also printed out the program that Tim wrote for us for the accelerometer and placed that on the poster. A powerpoint was also finished for the SEE fair.
This entire experience was really fun. It was a lot better than going to school for the last month. I couldn't imagine how bad senioritis would have been if we were in school instead of doing the Senior Enrichment Experience. I didn't expect to run into all the problems that we did during this experience. There were so many obstacles in this project like waiting for the accelerometer to arrive, figuring out a way to construct homemade model rockets, and all the failed launches. We really had to work together and come up with new ways around all the problems so that our ultimate goals could still be accomplished. Overall, it was a really good experience, however, since it was the first time for our school to be doing this, there will probably be changes made.

-Christian

Today was spent making the video montage for the SEE fair. That took up most of the day. We worked on uploading all of the pictures and put music to the music. We also built a poster to present our project with.
Over the course of this project, i learned many new things. I also learned how to solve problems in a new way. If i had not done this project, i wouldn't have been forced to solve these problems. I believe that i have grown because of this project and I would definately recommend this to continue on over the next years.

-Ben W.

Today was the final day of our SEE project. We did all that was left to do. We worked on making a video montage for our presentation. We then made a poster to present our project. We printed out all of the accelerometer graphs and put them on the poster. We then printed the programming for our poster, crediting Tim. Last we put the A3-4T thrust graph and the displacement prediction graph on the poster. With this we had finished our project. Our project was a learning experience for everyone in the group. We all learned to solve problems in our own way and through teamwork. The roadblocks that we encountered only helped us push ourselves to accomplishing our goals, whether they were during construction or in the math. I personally was able to push myself farther than I have before when doing the calculus. It was good to get back into math, as I did not have a math course to take this year. It was a good experience to prepare for my major in college. I would recommend the SEE project to any senior who would have the opportunity to participate in it.

-Scott