First parts from Airball East

This morning, I just got the new boards from Jeremy, along with a cute little free gift related to the robotics team that he mentors. The professionalism and quality of the boards, as well as the packaging and shipping, blew me away. Check out the exciting unboxing photos below. :)

I can't wait to get these into a probe and get our first data from a reliable custom built circuit. Having this capability in the bag is going to unlock, not only flight testing and the acquisition of real-world data from actual pilots, but also a whole new ability to simplify and streamline the probe form factor around a now-reliable core.

Oopsie – but it's alive!

Last time, in High-altitude help to prepare for low-altitude testing I wrote about receiving a batch of custom Airball circuit boards (v2) to prepare for Ihab's flight testing. I bet you – dear reader – are waiting with bated breath to learn how that went. The answer is... well, but not well. It turns out that as part of my cleanup work on Ihab's EAGLE board files, I managed to swap Ihab's carefully-backwards-designed placement of the SparkFun Fio v3 board to the forwards orientation. Which is fine, unless you, uh, actually need to mount the Fio backwards.

They work perfectly, you just can't mount a Fio on them in the way that we need to; so I got to do the re-order walk of shame. At the same time, I made some adjustments to v3 mainly to the silkscreen text on the boards based on seeing some of them in person, and I rounded the corners a bit more, as the previous radius was too small. However, I was careful to leave all the SMDs in the exact same places so that the stencil I ordered would still work just fine.

These are the new boards (on top) and the v2 boards (on bottom), top side:

And bottom side (notice how the Fio pins are swapped on v2, bottom):

A stainless steel solder paste stencil is used to apply exactly the right amount of solder on all the SMD pads, which makes placing parts and soldering them much simpler, and produces way nicer results:

And then the parts can be manually placed with tweezers and a steady hand:

I used a hot air rework station to reflow the solder, and the tricky part of the boards is done, all of the SMD parts are on:

With the addition of all the sockets, the board is complete, and it works! This is the pressure sensor side (missing an absolute barometric pressure sensor for the moment):

And the Fio side:

It's alive and well, and reporting data. It's still on the (high altitude) ground though, so next step is to get some of these over to Ihab for some "low altitude" in-air testing!

High-altitude help to prepare for low-altitude* testing

Hi there, Airball fans. Jeremy, here.

This is my "F1RST!!1!one" post on the Airball blog. I recently reached out to Ihab to offer him my help with the Airball project, and he enthusiastically accepted. I am an ex-Googler, currently on the tail-end of a year long sabbatical, mainly teaching kids robotics and working on personal projects. I am an instrument-rated private pilot and I own a DA40. Being an ex-Googler, I learned of Ihab's crazy and awesome project through internal channels, and I have been following it here since. Being an electronics hobbyist, some aspects of it caught my eye, and I've provided bits of advice (and consolation) to Ihab here and there for the past year or so.

I offered to help in whatever ways my skills and experience (or even my dogged determination to blunder my way through things) could be put to use. My first projects are all related to getting a flight-test capable Airball sensor probe up and running; reliably providing (non-glitchy) data for Ihab to continue proving the idea, evaluating designs, and building the Airball display unit. So, enough about me, onwards!

Working through some gremlins...

My first order of business was to understand the hardware Ihab had built so far, the code he had written, and help him work through some gremlins he had been experiencing with the custom circuit boards he had designed and assembled. In our discussions back and forth, I made repeated requests to Ihab for more and more specific zoomed-in steady-hands pictures of his work (and even a flatbed-scanned picture of his boards). It became clear to me that something was "just not right" with the solder mask on the boards he had been having trouble with.

I sent Ihab back this annotated picture of his board where I've called out some problems (manufactured by OSHPark – open for the larger version to make it easier to see):

The problem here is that the solder mask apertures are mis-aligned to the copper layer below it, which is exposing wispy (or substantial) little edges of the copper ground plane next to many (well, nearly all) of the SMD pads and plated through holes. This combined with Ihab's less than steady 😅 hand-soldering mean that it was exceedingly easy to bridge pretty much any connection to ground accidentally. And, so it happened. A few times. This fully explained why a previously-working board could suddenly stop working by the simple addition of an unpopulated socket – the act of soldering it in had bridged some pins to ground.

There were some other issues with the board's design that I had identified (and others that Ihab had run into earlier) so I knew I'd need to re-spin a custom board for the probe. In the meantime, though Ihab built a drive-test capable probe-on-a-stick which I wanted to make sure he could get good data back from.

Building my own breadboard rig for software development

In order to get Ihab up and running with reliable data, I planned to re-write the Arduino code powering his current hardware (and his new probe-on-a-stick), so I first ordered a few parts and built out a compatible hardware rig on a breadboard:

Once I got that up and running I could run Ihab's existing code, and started in re-writing it from scratch, based on a properly modularized codebase for the pressure sensors and the bus multiplexer. To that end, I wrote Open Source-licensed Arduino libraries (now available right in the Arduino IDE!) for the AllSensors DLHR-series pressure sensors and the Texas Instruments TCA9548A I²C multiplexer.

I was then able to make the actual Airball code much smaller, simpler, and easier to follow. I also made the measurement interrupt-driven by a timer so that the data coming from it could be sent at a much more reliable frequency (currently 20 Hz, or sending data every 50 ms). Ihab was able to get this new code up and running on his probe-on-a-stick immediately!

A new custom circuit board for the Airball probe

Once I completed the new code I got started on a redesign of the custom circuit board that goes inside the Airball probe – and hopefully hangs out on a wing soon, sipping some delicious in-flight air.

The previous board had a number of problems which we were looking to address (aside from the manufacturing problems), so the following changes were made:

• Several mistaken connections (e.g. bridging the unused SCL and SDA pins on the multiplexer) were removed.
• Some layout improvements were needed to help in assembly; all SMD components were moved to the top side, so that a solder paste stencil could be used, and the parts could be easily hot-air reflowed.
• Many inconsistencies and errors were fixed in the custom-designed library parts so that the schematics and board designs are easier to work with, and look better.
• Many more labels were added to the board and the layout was made more consistent overall.
• The USB micro-B connector was replaced with one for which we have an actual part available, instead of the random footprint that was used previously.
• The SDA and SCL for the I²C bus lines were re-routed so as to not be parallel to avoid crosstalk (which was actually visible on some oscilloscope captures during debugging).
• The vias were tented (covered with with solder mask) so that they aren't exposed, the silkscreened text isn't broken, and so that the board looks nicer.
• The corners were rounded, because all "pro" circuit boards have rounded corners. 😏

The new board however is drop-in compatible with the current design in order to allow Ihab to more quickly move on with physical integration in a flight-ready probe. Future designs will likely adjust the design more (such as integrating the ATmega32u4 microcontroller and other relevant components from the Sparkfun Fio v3 rather than placing it in a socket).

The new design still looks pretty familiar in EAGLE...

Top:

Bottom:

I got the boards in yesterday (manufactured by PCBWay) – Ihab made me choose a color scheme, so I went with white solder mask and black silkscreen text, and they look great:

I'll get a few boards assembled and tested soon – more to come on that!

—

* I live at 5,825 feet elevation, in the Virginia Range mountains southeast of Reno, Nevada. I suspect that most of the Airball flight testing will be done at 2000-3000 feet over the Central Valley, so I'll claim it's "low altitude testing". 😎

More miscellaneous meanderings

Various progress notes as things go ahead --

Jeremy has reproduced my setup, gotten a far better Arduino program than mine working, and is re-designing the PCB! Impressive progress!

I have been busy with my day job but have been noodling around with a 3D printed version of the Citabria mount. This is the form that's out to the printers right now:

Stay tuned for more progress. I got some test prints in ABS (white) and PLA (black) that are teaching me the limits of what to expect for tolerances in commodity 3D printing:

Furthermore, I've been slowly acquiring some new antennas for more testing down the line. I expect I will be able to handle low-wing airplanes by building a "spike" that puts the antenna ahead of the leading edge so it can be seen from the cockpit. This is for later but I have these antennas and U.FL extension cables to try out:

And finally, I continue to have trouble getting my Dynamixel servos to talk to my computer, after having gotten a dud USB2AX and having to get another one sent to me. Still trying....

Mounting options

I'm re-examining my probe mounting options.

I tried putting the probe where it would be under the wing of a low-wing metal aircraft, just to see how the wireless stuff works. But with the 60 mW XBee, and the small Taoglas self-adhesive antennas I'm using, I do not have reliable enough connectivity.

So it's back to high-wing airplanes. And I was not happy with the way my Cessna strut mounting worked out so I'm considering going to a Citabria. I tried the wireless with a Citabria and it was just fine.

The great thing about Citabrias is that they have 2 struts, giving me the option of a 2-point support rather than just having to clamp really hard on just one strut. So I'm messing around with a design for a "twin vee block" mount for these.

I'm also trying out OnShape, and finding it mostly ok but different enough from SolidWorks that it's a fair learning curve. But with OnShape, I can easily share designs online! So here is a link to my design, and this is what it looks like:

I just figured out how to use the OnShape "Mass Properties" tool and the above weighs 0.5 pounds, assuming the vee blocks are made from hard maple.

Stay tuned!