Telemetry / Instrumentation module for ASRI SSRP (Zuni) program

[Luke Weston]

Hi everyone,

http://www.lunarnumbat.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/LunarNumbat/LNTaskGenTelMod

This Wiki page is pretty old and disorganised. I'd really like to update it when I get a chance. Anyway, it does provide a little bit of basic background for the following post.

This is a first draft of a schematic which should be pretty close to fulfilling the requirements for ASRI for this payload package.
It's actually a revamped descendant of MobSenDat, with some additional IMU components, some different power supply stuff etc.

https://github.com/lukeweston/SSRPInstrumentation

The main files in that repository you'll probably be interested in looking at are the readme and the PDF of the schematic (which is framed for a nice neat print on 2 x A4 pages).

At the moment there is no PCB layout, this is just a schematic. But we can talk about it and review it and bounce it off the ASRI guys, and once we're happy with the electronic schematic design then I'm sure we can look at design and layout of the PCB.

If this meets their requirements and we get to a point where the ASRI team is happy with it, I'm sure ASRI can provide funding for prototype development and manufacturing of this system, since this is something which they can sell to the schools and universities that they work with on SSRP activities and something they will recover their costs for.

Feel free to have a look when you get a chance and let me know what you reckon. :)

Cheers,
  Luke

[Luke Weston]

I'm not sure how fast you can write data onto the FAT16/FAT32 filesystem on an SD card from the AVR, and I'm not sure if that might be a bottleneck.

Maybe, if SD card access speed is a limitation, it might be better to add a 2 Mb Atmel DataFlash IC (AT45DB161) to act as a smaller temporary storage buffer? It should be faster to read/write than the SD card, right?

Thoughts?

 Cheers,
  Luke