High altitude ballooning

Wombat Flight Computer

Work has been progressing recently on the Wombat flight computer. While the original designs had been started well back in October, a few weeks ago we restarted the schematics with a view to a much more capable payload. The schematics started coming together on the 18th Feb, and within a week were all finished and …

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UKHAS Conference

Several CU Spaceflight members attended the first annual UKHAS conference in Islington, London this weekend. Jon and Adam gave a talk introducing the society and the new Wombat radios and flight computers which are currently in development. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qSL16h0W0I[/youtube] This was followed by Ed’s talk on the Squirrel smartphone flight computer project. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3Mh4j2Cw9M[/youtube]  

Nova 19 Recovered

After four months in a tree in Exning, the Nova 19 payloads (Squirrel and Weasel) have been recovered thanks to the help of some local tree surgeons. The Weasel payload with its Canon A560 camera took some stunning photographs. See all of the Nova 19 images on Flickr. The Squirrel Nexus One smartphone was also …

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Micrel Prototype Radio

One of the current projects is to build a radio module to be a replacement for the excellent, but large and expensive, Radiometrix NTX2. A first prototype uses the Micrel MICRF112 10mW FSK transmitter with a varactor controlled crystal pulling arrangement. An onboard variable capacitor also allows tuning of the centre frequency to anywhere in …

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Nova 18 Launch

Today saw the launch of Nova 18, carrying the Squirrel smartphone and the Ferret Arduino tracker. Ferret has had some bugfixes since its last flight and seemed to perform much better this time. The Squirrel smartphone was running a custom app called SquirrelPhoto enabling it to take pictures at set intervals. Unfortunately the software crashed …

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