CDR

yesterday we had our pre-CDR review and we did fairly well or at least better than I expected. In the review Dan expressed(for the third time lol) that his changes weren't being include in any of our documents so to adress that we all have individual meetings with dan. In my meeting today i am expecting to have most if not all of my gramatical errors corrected.

team organization issues

one problem that i noticed within our team was that if a lead or even editor makes changes to documents (content) they don't tell any one else which has an effect on various aspects of the document. In our PDR the the lead over editing stated in the science part that taking data once every 30 minutes was our plan (also stated in our science and technical requirements);however in the principle of operation it clearly states that data will be collected once every 10 seconds. As programmer in my data storage diagram i have our stware to record data every 10 seconds, this was not conveid to me so i only was going off of what i was told and what was i the requirements. which brings me back to my original statement, team communication is very important to successful team performance

Project management discrepencies

In the first few days of putting together this pre-PDR i have observed many problems in the structure and operation of the group. The first problem (and in my opinion the most important) that we encountered is that whenever we (the students) present something to our advisor he changes everything. He doesn't meet with us and discuss it as a group, he just makes revisions and leaves it at that. If I'm not mistaken the advisor and project manager meet and discuss changes, but other than that the rest of the group doesn't have much say so on the group decisions. Another problem is that Meetings are called at 8:30 in the morning and we aren't notified until 15 minutes before the meeting is supposed to be held. There doesn't seem to be much structure or order. I was under the impression that the advisor and project manager would assign task to be completed(that's whats in the contract) but this has happened only once in the 3 days of the project. Another problem that i feel is very important to get resolved is that, we as a group made a list of who would do what task(electronics, flight software, etc.), as a group we concurred and it was understood that the list was acceptable. When we met today the list of of task had been changed completely. I personally don't feel like the person over flight software should be over that task. I have observed in the programming activities that we have done that this person encounters difficulty with the simplest of programs. I will express my concerns as a group then to this individual but he has his mind made up that we know nothing and we can't tell him anything he doesn't already know.




p.s. I already have a program to write data to the EEPROM with a time stamp, and I have a separate program to read data from all or specific addresses in the EEPROM.

Weekend activities

Over the weekend i worked on the technical background and the science objectives for the pre-PDR. Today we met as a group and began actually putting the pre-PDR together. In doing this we encountered many problems. One of the problems was that some of our objectives and requirements didn't match up.

Prototype testing

Professor Jim had us test the insulation of our prototype boxes using 2 double A batteries and i resistor as a heat source. We recorded the temp inside the box using our hobo. I wasn't satisfied with the heat produced by the battery and resistor alone so I did a little experimenting of my own.

-Above is a picture of my setup. I have a 9 volt battery being shorted to produce heat(wire going from positive to negative), a 1.5 volt battery connected to an inductor(producing heat as well), and i have the same 2 lithium AA batteries connected to a resistor.

The previous set up of 2 double A batteries and resistor only produced 76 degrees Fahrenheit of heat. The set up in the picture above produced an excess of 95 degrees Fahrenheit. With this informatin we are able to get an idea of what it would take to keep our box nice and toasty :)

Payload box prototyping

Earlier on in the week we built our prototype payload boxes. To get an idea of how the construction and fabrication of our payload box is going to go, we built a prototype box. The box had to be able to fix inside both the vacuum chamber and the ice chest (for condition testing).

-To the right is a picture of our prototype payload box.

while building the box we had to double and triple measure to ensure that we didn't have deminsion complications (pieces don't match).

Project Management lecture

After lunch Professor Greg gave a lecture over Project management. Seeing as how our PDR is due on the 24 of June(next week) it is priority that we get together as a group and make this thing happen. In the lecture he laid out expectations, goals and the basic "life cycle" of a group (as he so eloquently put it). After the lecture we were given an activity to do, we were instructed to develop a mock project management contract. To do this we laid out the team leader, project manager, record keeper, and head researcher. Amongst other thing we also laid out rules, roles, expectation and a system of checks and balances. we will meet later on tonight to finalize our contract and mail it to Professor Greg in the morning.