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2 <!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN"
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7 <firstname>Bdale</firstname>
8 <surname>Garbee</surname>
11 <firstname>Keith</firstname>
12 <surname>Packard</surname>
16 <holder>Bdale Garbee and Keith Packard</holder>
18 <title>TeleMetrum</title>
19 <subtitle>Owner's Manual for the TeleMetrum System</subtitle>
22 This document is released under the terms of the
23 <ulink url="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">
24 Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0
31 <revnumber>0.1</revnumber>
32 <date>30 March 2010</date>
33 <revremark>Initial content</revremark>
38 <title>Introduction and Overview</title>
44 <title>Specifications</title>
50 <title>Handling Precautions</title>
56 <title>Hardware Overview</title>
62 <title>Operation</title>
68 <title>Using Altus Metrum Products</title>
70 <title>Being Legal</title>
72 First off, in the US, you need an [amateur radio license](../Radio) or
73 other authorization to legally operate the radio transmitters that are part
77 <title>In the Rocket</title>
79 In the rocket itself, you just need a [TeleMetrum](../TeleMetrum) board and
80 a LiPo rechargeable battery. An 860mAh battery weighs less than a 9V
81 alkaline battery, and will run a [TeleMetrum](../TeleMetrum) for hours.
84 By default, we ship TeleMetrum with a simple wire antenna. If your
85 electronics bay or the airframe it resides within is made of carbon fiber,
86 which is opaque to RF signals, you may choose to have an SMA connector
87 installed so that you can run a coaxial cable to an antenna mounted
88 elsewhere in the rocket.
92 <title>On the Ground</title>
94 To receive the data stream from the rocket, you need an antenna and short
95 feedline connected to one of our [TeleDongle](../TeleDongle) units. The
96 TeleDongle in turn plugs directly into the USB port on a notebook
97 computer. Because TeleDongle looks like a simple serial port, your computer
98 does not require special device drivers... just plug it in.
101 Right now, all of our application software is written for Linux. However,
102 because we understand that many people run Windows or MacOS, we are working
103 on a new ground station program written in Java that should work on all
107 After the flight, you can use the RF link to extract the more detailed data
108 logged in the rocket, or you can use a mini USB cable to plug into the
109 TeleMetrum board directly. Pulling out the data without having to open up
110 the rocket is pretty cool! A USB cable is also how you charge the LiPo
111 battery, so you'll want one of those anyway... the same cable used by lots
112 of digital cameras and other modern electronic stuff will work fine.
115 If your rocket lands out of sight, you may enjoy having a hand-held GPS
116 receiver, so that you can put in a waypoint for the last reported rocket
117 position before touch-down. This makes looking for your rocket a lot like
118 Geo-Cacheing... just go to the waypoint and look around starting from there.
121 You may also enjoy having a ham radio "HT" that covers the 70cm band... you
122 can use that with your antenna to direction-find the rocket on the ground
123 the same way you can use a Walston or Beeline tracker. This can be handy
124 if the rocket is hiding in sage brush or a tree, or if the last GPS position
125 doesn't get you close enough because the rocket dropped into a canyon, or
126 the wind is blowing it across a dry lake bed, or something like that... Keith
127 and Bdale both currently own and use the
128 <ulink url="http://yaesu.com/indexVS.cfm?cmd=DisplayProducts&ProdCatID=111&encProdID=4C6F204F6FEBB5BAFA58BCC1C131EAC0&DivisionID=65&isArchived=0">
134 So, to recap, on the ground the hardware you'll need includes:
135 <orderedlist inheritnum='inherit' numeration='arabic'>
137 an antenna and feedline
146 optionally, a handheld GPS receiver
149 optionally, an HT or receiver covering 435 Mhz
154 The best hand-held commercial directional antennas we've found for radio
155 direction finding rockets are from
156 <ulink url="http://www.arrowantennas.com/" >
159 The 440-3 and 440-5 are both good choices for finding a
160 TeleMetrum-equipped rocket when used with a suitable 70cm HT.
164 <title>Data Analysis</title>
166 Our software makes it easy to log the data from each flight, both the
167 telemetry received over the RF link during the flight itself, and the more
168 complete data log recorded in the DataFlash memory on the TeleMetrum
169 board. Once this data is on your computer, our postflight tools make it
170 easy to quickly get to the numbers everyone wants, like apogee altitude,
171 max acceleration, and max velocity. You can also generate and view a
172 standard set of plots showing the altitude, acceleration, and
173 velocity of the rocket during flight. And you can even export a data file
174 useable with Google Maps and Google Earth for visualizing the flight path
175 in two or three dimensions!
178 Our ultimate goal is to emit a set of files for each flight that can be
179 published as a web page per flight, or just viewed on your local disk with
184 <title>Future Plans</title>
186 In the future, we intend to offer "companion boards" for the rocket that will
187 plug in to TeleMetrum to collect additional data, provide more pyro channels,
188 and so forth. A reference design for a companion board will be documented
189 soon, and will be compatible with open source Arduino programming tools.
192 We are also working on the design of a hand-held ground terminal that will
193 allow monitoring the rocket's status, collecting data during flight, and
194 logging data after flight without the need for a notebook computer on the
195 flight line. Particularly since it is so difficult to read most notebook
196 screens in direct sunlight, we think this will be a great thing to have.
199 Because all of our work is open, both the hardware designs and the software,
200 if you have some great idea for an addition to the current Altus Metrum family,
201 feel free to dive in and help! Or let us know what you'd like to see that
202 we aren't already working on, and maybe we'll get excited about it too...
projects / fw / altos / blob