TeleScience

This is an expansion board for TeleMetrum intended to support science projects. It provides 12 analog inputs with selectable thermistor support, and 5 general purpose I/O pins. This board can also be used standalone as a USB I/O device.

Motivation

Bdale's son Robert is interested in mapping the temperatures experienced by nose cones and fins in flights beyond Mach 1, and we're working with our good friend Jeff Lane from Shockwave Rocketry to instrument one or more of his nose cones in pursuit of that goal. And it's easy for us to imagine other experiments that would be facilitated by having generic analog data inputs and a few control lines.

Features

User View

Small circuit board mounted near TeleMetrum
Requires TeleMetrum v0.2 or later, as v0.1 does not have the required companion board interface
12 analog input channels, each of which can independently be configured for an NTC thermistor or generic 0-3.3 volt analog input.
5 general purpose I/O lines
On-board flash memory for data logging.
USB interface for programming and development

Developer View

Hardware Features
- Atmel ATmega32U4 Microcontroller
  - 32k Flash
  - 2.5k + 832 bytes SRAM
  - 1k EEPROM
  - 12-channel 10-bit ADC
  - SPI target interface
  - USB interface which can be used for programming
  - In-system programming interface
- Winbond W25Q16 serial flash memory
  - 2M x 8
  - SPI interface
Software Features (planned)
- programmed in C using gcc-avr
- Runs from on-chip flash, uses on-chip RAM
Tools Used
- gEDA for schematic capture and PCB layout
Licenses
- The hardware is licensed under the TAPR Open Hardware License
- The software is licensed GPL version 2

Artifacts

A schematic and PC board design exist on git.gag.com in the project hw/telescience, but no prototypes have been built yet.

Future Plans

3 prototypes have been built, of which 2 are installed in 2YikStik which we hope to fly at LDRS 30 in early September 2011.

The thermistor conditioning circuits in the current design are very tightly coupled to the particular model of EPCOS thermistor that we chose for 2YikStik. Before we could sell TeleScience, that needs to be addressed somehow.