Wednesday, May 24, 2006, 10:13 PM
More pieces are being pulled together. The Power Supply will provide power to the various devices. We have different types of pressure sensors some take 16-32 Vdc others take 28Vdc. We have valves that take 12V to actuate.
Here is the power supply.
We canabilized an old PC power supply for the 12v, we used a laptop power converter to supply 20v and we bought a 28Vdc supply from eBay for $10. So we tied all these together into this nice little package.
We're getting closer to finishing our command board. This board will take the 5vdc discrete outs from the National Instruments DAQ devices and switch the 12vdc supply for actuate the valves using some MOSFET to do the switching.
I hear the Civil guys have the foundation to the test stand framed. Waiting on the concrete next.
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Friday, May 19, 2006, 11:01 PM
Five hours zipped by before we knew it. We have a new team member; Marlon. After going through the LabVIEW tutorial Marlon worked with Jason for the rest of the day. Jason spent time configuring the data acquisition server, adding all the need parameters names and configuration. Then went back and started updating our data displays.
Cameron worked on configuring the data acquition subsystem. Defining which sensors are connected to which pinouts on the data acq boards.
Jesus did a bunch of stuff. Soldering pins onto wires, making homebrew connectors using Bondo (the types of connectors these pressure sensors require cost $12... wow, so instead we created our own).
The tanks arrived.. Thanks much to Diversified Plant Services, LC. for donating these tanks and labor to ASA. They did an outstanding job on the tanks along with all the engineering documentation. Very professional job.
Here is a picture of the mockup test stand. We're going to be using this for our cold flow test and make sure all the sensors and wiring are placed and configured properly.
Lastly a picture from one of the rooms at the ASA facility.
Notice the rocket hanging on the wall. That 18' rocket was the one we launched back in 2003 at GCRS. Next year we would like to take this liquid fueled motor and fly it in that rocket.
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Saturday, May 13, 2006, 09:26 PM
A lot of preparation work today. Cameron and Jason were soldering pins on a lot of wires (they did > 40 pins each). This is the wiring we're going to use from the Computer to the sensors.
At the end of the day we tried a temperature sensor and were having problems reading it [5/17 Update: The thermocouple we were using seems to have been bad, tried the others and it worked fine). We then jumped onto a pressure sensor and hooked it up the the brassboard. Woo hoo.. we were able to read the data. This coming Saturday we will be hooking up a few more pressure sensors to the brassboard, commanding some of the valves and start exercising our software.
The Motor team has the mockup of the Test Stand at the ASA facility so we can properly plan things out. Rob tells me he will be picking up the LOX and Fuel tanks this Saturday. Also the Civil team is going to be assembly the real test stand out at the GCRS.
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