[AR] Re: Flight Computer
- From: Nathan Bergey <nathan.bergey@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2015 20:32:00 -0800
I think the best option is to perform some shock 'testing' by dropping it off
of tables.
Reminds me of something we tried once that was really fun
Portland State just so happens to have a 31 m tall microgravity drop tower[1]
While the microgravity part wasn't that interesting, it does have the
nice property of stopping somewhat suddenly at the bottom (on a large
pair of permanent magnet electrodynamic brakes). The claim was a peak
acceleration of only 15 g, which is just above our nominal takeoff
acceleration of 10 g. Turns out that it's probably closer to 20 g or
25 g.
Anyway we convinced a nice grad student to let us drop our flight
computer stack a couple of times!
We also turned up the speed of our onboard battery and power
monitoring system while we dropped and hit the bottom. This let us
look for any current ripples or anomalies, besides the obvious "it
stopped working" kind of failures. Everything went better than
expected:
https://github.com/psas/Launch-11/blob/gh-pages/droptest/2014-05-16-drop-0/results.ipynb
And I get to say that we dropped our precious flight computer off the
5th floor of the engineering building!
We've had no vibration problems in flight since then. So +1 for shock testing.
[1]
http://www.ddt.pdx.edu/
-Nathan
PSAS
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