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Why?
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act as a combo brain & sensor mod
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The first era. Deployment Mod
Originally, we were under the impression that Brain Board was non functional. We know now that it was untested.
Design Goals
Use known working MCUs and sensors from the Grim Reefer to increase the chances of everything working first try. Basically, a Grim with charge deploying capabilities and ethernet connectivity.
Grim had a super set of the features of an RRC3. Had enough inputs to do phase detection but that was not developed as we did not need it.
Be backplane compatible with the ability to act as the charge deployer for a backplane rocket. Have a backplane compatible interface.
Be able to take battery power as a secondary source. This would allow testing on L1s and L2s that could not support an entire backplane. We saw testing as a vitally important aspect because if we are trusting this thing to deploy charges we want it to be proven many times
TLDR; a more flexible RRC3 that could also act as a backplane module.
The second era. Brainsor Mod
At the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, the project was brought up to the powers that be.
The main points of the first meeting with the wider Avi community brought about the following thoughts:
Brain Board exists, why are we redoing this?
Standalone Test Flights (L1 grim flight) are really important
Since last year, talks of moving Brain Board away from VoCore to one of the bigger STM32s. The idea was that originally, VoCore was chosen because it would be more powerful and flexible compared to launch_core on an stm32f4 like all the other modules. However, the larger stm32h7 series has chips that are quite powerful (some of them exceeding the clock rate of the VoCore even) and Zephyr solves a lot of the complexity that using a linux based board would solve.
A brain board is pretty useless without a sensor module. While modularity is great, we are taking away a slot that could be used for something more interesting (live video board, things like that that)
From there, we decided to sort of combine the ideas of Deployment mod and Brain Board v2 into Brainsor Mod
Design Goals
Use tested sensors - As of Irec 2024, all of sensor mod sensors were working from Aarons assesment and theres a good overlap there with grim sensors we were already planning on using
use an stm32h series chip. Allows us to use new launch libraries w/ zephyr but with greater power and dual cores.
Keep the ability to deploy charges
Drop the dual power sources from the board itself. They provided a lot of complication and with more sensors (sensor mod has more than grim) and the components for deployment, space was at a premium on the board.
In order to still have the ability to do test flights in L1s and L2s, "little plane" was to be developed. It has not yet been decided what form that would take
Biplane: Aaron brought this up as something he'd been working on but it was not discussed much. I don't know what form this takes
Payplane. Still a thought experiment at this point but it also has the ability to fit into a smaller rocket as it will have to fit into a payload
Power Module Passthrough: A double sided board that has brainsor mod on one side and power mod on the other. W/ or w/out a switch. We know powermod works and if we don't require a switch (for a test flight of brainsor mod, we don't necessarily need to record power telemetry), could be incredibly simple - just headers and a little but of routing
Powered Plane: Put electronics to supply the power required by the backplane standard onto the board onto which brainsor mod mounts. Would basically be what the original design of Deployment Mod but on two boards to simplify brainsor mod. Wouldn't need a switch since theres no one to talk to.
We hope to give a PDR at the Avionics meeting by end of September or first week of October