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Project Based Engineering Instrumentation with CircuitPython
Carlos Montalvo
This textbook has been designed with the student and faculty member in mind. First, this textbook goes hand in hand with Engineering Instrumentation taught at the undergraduate level at many universities. The course begins with simple plotting and moves into data analysis, calibration and more complex instrumentation techniques such as active filtering and aliasing. This course is designed to get students away from their pen and paper and build something that blinks and moves as well as learn to process real data that they themselves acquire. There is no theory in these projects. It is all applied using the project based learning method. Students will be tasked with downloading code, building circuitry, taking data all from the ground up. By the end of this course students will be well versed in the desktop version of Python while also the variant CircuitPython designed specifically for microelectronics from Adafruit. After this course students will be able to understand Instrumentation at the fundamental level as well as generate code that can be used in future projects and research to take and analyze data. Python is such a broad and useful language that it will be very beneficial for any undergraduate student to learn this language. To the professors using this textbook, 1 credit hour labs are often hard to work into a curriculum and “live” demonstrations in the classroom cost time and money that take away from other faculty duties. I’ve created this kit and textbook to be completely stand-alone. Students simply need to purchase the required materials and follow along with the lessons. These lessons can be picked apart and taught sequentially or individually on a schedule suited to the learning speed of the course. I hope whomever reads and learns from this textbook will walk away with an excitement to tinker, code and build future projects using microelectronics and programming.
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Aerospace Mechanics and Controls
Carlos Montalvo
This report represents aerospace mechanics and controls for CubeSats, quadcopters and aircraft. A CubeSAT is a small satellite on the order of 10 centimeters along each axis. A 1U satellite is a small cube with 10 cm sides. These satellites are used for a variety of missions and created by a variety of different organizations. When deployed from a rocket, a CubeSAT may obtain a large angular velocity which must be reduced before most science missions or communications can take place. Maximizing solar energy charging also involves better pointing accuracy. To control the attitude of these small satellites, reaction wheels, magnetorquers and even the gravity gradient are used in low earth orbit (LEO) while reaction control thrusters are typically used in deep space. On a standard LEO CubeSAT, 3 reaction wheels are used as well as 3 magnetorquers. In the initial phase of the CubeSAT mission, the magnetorquers are used to reduce the angular velocity of the satellite down to a manageable level. Once the norm of the angular velocity is low enough, the reaction wheels can spin up reducing the angular velocity to zero. At this point a Sun finding algorithm is employed to find the Sun and fully charge the batteries. In LEO two independent vectors are obtained, the Sun vector and the magnetic field vector, to determine the current attitude of the vehicle which is typically called attitude determination. Other sensors such as horizon sensors, star trackers and even lunar sensors can be used to obtain the quaternion of the vehicle. This paper investigates the necessary mathematics to understand the intricacies of guidance, navigation and control specifically discussing the attitude determination and controls subsystem (ADACS).
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