Project Overview

Our goal was to design a system that would allow the Notre Dame Rocketry Team to measure the altitude, acceleration, orientation, and position of their rocket in real time during flights. It consisted of three main components: the Vehicle Module, the Relay Station Module, and the Ground Station Module. Together, they work to send a live stream of sensor data from the nose cone of the vehicle to a gound station that displays a real-time feed of the readings, in addition to saving the measurements locally on the rocket for later analysis. This system has been dubbed the Pressure, Orientation, and Tracking, Automated Telemetry Operation, or POTATO for short.

Project Documents

Project Proposal

Brief description of our initial project idea and initial draft of our project goals and requirements

High-Level Design

Detailed overview of our design. This document describes the detailed requirements for subsystems as well as the system as a whole

Final Project Materials

This contains the finalized project materials including a detailed overview of everything we worked on, code, board files, and other resources that could be useful if this project were to continue.

Our Team

Dr. Jonathan Chisum

The GOAT

Dr. Chisum has acted as our advisor throughout the course of our project. His expertise in RF systems was indispensable in helping us design our project.

Alex Filmer

RF Circuits Champion

Alex worked on designing the Transceiver Board as well as writing the code to interface with the ADF chip.

Contact: afilmer@nd.edu

Meghan Finnan

Embedded Systems Expert

Meghan worked on designing the Vehicle and Ground/Relay Station boards, in addition to writing the code for the IMU and accelerometer.

Contact: mfinnan@nd.edu

Mike Frye

Comm Systems Guru

Mike worked on designing the Transceiver Board, and wrote the code to interface with the ADF chip, GPS, and altimeter.

Contact: mfrye@nd.edu

Zach Kowalczyk

The Code Guy

Zach integrated the various sensor code modules into the Vehicle Module code, and also helped design the Vehicle and Ground/Relay station boards.

Contact: zkowalcz@nd.edu

Tristen Lewandowski

Antennas Wizard

Tristen single-handedly designed the antennas used in this project.

Contact: tlewand1@nd.edu