TeleTerra

This is a hand-held ground station for TeleMetrum.

Motivation

While it is possible to use a partially (or fully!) loaded TeleMetrum board as a USB to RF interface, we think it would be cool to have a nice hand-held ground station we can use in full sunlight on the flight line. If it can help locate the rocket and is easy to carry during recovery operations, so much the better!

Features

User View

• Hand-held unit about the size of a calculator with 4 line 20 character LCD
• Antenna for the telemetry stream from TeleMetrum
• Integrated GPS receiver core to allow display of current user position, and relative position of GPS-equipped rockets
• Integrated rechargable battery
• USB interface for configuration and power

Developer View

• Partially populated TeleMetrum board
  • Serial connector used to attach user interface board
  • LiPo charge management
  • Beeper for audible indications
  • RF section with SMA for external antenna
  • USB interface
• New user interface board
  • Microchip 16F886 Microcontroller
    • 8k Flash
    • 386 bytes RAM
    • I2C target interface
    • In-circuit programming interface
    • Serial port
  • 4 line, 20 character transreflective text LCD display
  • Switches for scrolling, safe/arm, etc
  • LEDs to indicate current flight mode, etc
• LiPo battery
• GPS receiver core attached to serial port on new user interface board
• Software Features (planned)
  • Written in PIC assembler
  • 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

Problems

None yet!

Artifacts

As of 26 April 2009, an incomplete schematic exists at git.gag.com in the project hw/teleterra.