Rockoon Flight, CAA preliminary approval.

Me and Hanna went up to Wellington last week to try and convince CAA to let us fly the microprize rocket from a balloon without a transponder.   Looks like they are going to let us do it :)   There are some provisions we have to meet, but I anticipate no big problem with them.

We were planning to fly in the Canterbury plains but due to all the controlled airspace there we are going to have to move the flight to Southland.  At the moment I'm roughing out flight predictions centered around a small town called Tinkertown, which seems appropriate :)    We will also have to start the flight at night to avoid as much air traffic as possible and there are a lot of flight zones we must keep out of at all times (such as around Queenstown).  This should all be doable and with the rocket launching at or just before dawn should make for some spectacular photos from the top.  

Battle Blimp Boards, PCBs

The PCBs for the battle blimps boards have finally arrived.  We got them on the Dorkbot PCB group order and they have taken ages to arrive.  I think they got lost in the postal system as the PCBs from dorkbot have always arrived much faster than this.

The battle blimp boards are based on the Leaflabs Maple.  The PCBs on the left are the microboards with the ARM cortex chip, the ones ont he right are the motor/radio shield.  In all we got 18 PCB's of each made up.

We will have one spare which we can use to test the current handling of the motor driver chips and the high power Fets.   As the traces are only 1ounce per square inch they won't handle that much current before exploding so we will investigate roughly what that point is.  We have a work around for people who want to sink heaps of current with the fets.

I'll order the parts from Digikey this evening and then we will run the SMT assembly workshops once they arrive :)