The Avionics sub team designs hardware and software to help collect data on our rocket flights. Specifically, they use a variety of sensors, like GPS, barometers, and accelerometers, to try and understand where the rocket is, and where it is going. They develop code that will help predict the apogee of the rocket given current altitude, velocity, temperature, and more data points. Some of our rockets have airbrakes on them, and avionics’ software can detect when our predicted apogee will be above our desired apogee and open the airbrakes to slow down the rocket to our desired apogee.
Avionics develops PCB designs to interface microcontrollers with sensors, and this year they will be flying multiple microcontrollers on the flight computer, and have those microcontrollers communicate data to each other. The sensor board will be designated for reading sensor data and delivering it to the controller board. The controller board will interpret that data and decide how much it should open the airbrakes based on that data. Overall, they build an embedded system from the bare metal parts to the software that predicts altitude.
