Cool Engineering

Info on some cool engineering projects

Thursday, March 30, 2006

More Video, altitude measurements, GPS header plug?

In terms of project work this week I have been mainly working with using a small AVR based 'Bilby' board. This is an Australian version of the popular Rabbit board. At the moment I have been doing some fairly routine stuff, flashing LEDs on and off writing out to the serial port, reading in from the serial port - so not too exciting. Hopefully in a day or two I will be able to configure the wireless serial transmitter I have purchased with the GPS. This way we could stick the GPS in the plane and record GPS data on the ground. This will answer (to some degree of accuracy) an important question that I have been asking myself - how high does my plane actually go?
I'm guessing about 70m above ground level, but with no point of reference in the sky this may well just be speculation. In the vertical axis the GPS receiver we are using is only accurate to about 15m (due to vertical dilution - but this should give us some idea of the actual height. Maybe you could post your guesses as comments with the grand prize being the satisfaction of winning the guessing competition.
One other problem I have identified is the connector on the GPS. It is a tiny 2 x 6 way IDC connector with 1.5mm pitch. These seem almost impossible to find as I have already tried DSE, Jaycar, Mouser, Digikey, Altronics and Farnell. I might just need to make a PCB to fit over the header and convert it to a more standard size like 0.1" or 1.27mm. If anyone has any ideas on this I'd love to hear them.
Oh one other thing I have posted a new video at my website (homepage.cs.latrobe.edu.au/rj3ross) feel free to check it out and make comments.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hang on a second, just the other day you were convinced you could fly up beyond 1500 feet, no worries. For the metric to Imperial impaired, that's over 450 metres, not 70.

It certainly will be interesting once the camera gets working... then we really will be able to fly up way beyond visual limits.

'course, we'll need a camera pointing straight down, since once we're up high enough the only "landmarks" we'll have will be clouds. And they're probably not precise enough to land by. :)

3:58 PM  

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