Another feather in my cap ?

Finished another project at TIFR. It feels real nice to have one more thing done and over with.

This is my completed Command Encoder unit for my balloon flight

The insides of the box. Need to get the lights better the next time.

The front of the box.

The commands are decided by the code in the Hex switches (black thinggy to the left with 00000, it can be changed to anything from 00000 to FFFFF, as the data and address of the commands). The small white switches to the right decide the SYNC code according to International Serial transmission norms, and the switch which is on top needs to get a permanent place on the front panel. Need to get it drilled !!

Will be used to send commands to the balloon borne payload at 40km height from the ground station. The earlier version that i designed had some hardware and needed a PC based software to decide and send thecommands. This version does all the work that the PC does using an FPGA.

Replacing the PC was the most important aspect of this excercise, as we all know, a PC is bound to hang / crash / die at the most inoportune moment.

Touch wood .. One sec.. let me save the blog and then continue ...

Cheers to me :)

EDIT : Well i needed to have actually touched wood. It was not the PC that hung/crashed/died at the most inopportune moment, it was my dear power supply circuit. So more work tomorrow :(

EDIT 2: Got it all to work today :) These are the screen shots.



These are screen shots from my oscilloscope. The commands as they are transmitted at in th etrace labelled COMD and the data is in the trace labelled DATA.