Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Summer Update

With flight week drawing near, we have been working hard to get XSAS up and running for flight! The flight crew and ground crew are here this summer working on finishing up the loose ends from the school year.

There has been a lot of progress from finals week until now. We have water-jet the first flight structure, started building and testing the chassis to test XSAS with, and have had a lot of changes to our C&DH system. The most notable is our switch to dataloggers. The original project was to develop from scratch a system that could write data to an SD Card. However, we were unaware of the challenges that faced us with trying to develop a system like this. Thus we have changed the architecture to dataloggers after a long, drawn out battle with trying to make our own datalogging system.

We currently have 23 days until we leave for Houston and a lot more testing and building ahead of us! Wish us luck and enjoy the photos of the progress we are making!

~Rachel

Assembling the first flight structure of XSAS 
Nathan working on XSAS 
Rachel soldering the LED lighting system together
Chassis Assembly 
Another View of the Chassis
Back up button pad