D.C. Blizzard of 2010

    I'm finally back to work after 4 days of online training from home. I don't particularly enjoy giving up my time to work for someone else, but today I'm actually happy to get away from my apartment and do something other than stare at a computer screen. The blizzard of 2010 was very unspectacular to me, but there were 40 MPH winds and about 1.5 feet of snow. The biggest problem I see is that the roads and parking lots here weren't designed with snow in mind. For that matter they weren't even really designed with cars in mind...they are really meant for horses... Since the snowplows have nowhere to push the snow to most people just have to wait for it to melt before they can drive anywhere.
    Now on to the important stuff! I did not make any progress with being able to program the microcontrollers on my board. I actually have no idea what the problem is. I checked proper voltages, the programming connections, clock sources, part numbers, and my sanity several times. Nothing seems to work, but there is another way. The plan is to work with my STK600 to develop the code as best I can and use it to program the chips through a ZIF socket. Then I can solder the programmed chips onto the board and see if the program runs as expected. I was smart enough to bring UART connections to some headers for debugging purposes so it will be easy to verify that my programs and circuits work. This is definitely not an ideal situation, but it will save me from spending more money on redesigning the balloon board.
    I have also enlisted the help of my friend Arhan to create a tracking application for the balloon's flight. The idea so far is to send periodic SMS messages from the balloon to a second cellular module connected to a laptop. The laptop will take in the SMS messages over USB and plot GPS coordinates, altitude, speed, etc. I have not tested any of my antenna ideas yet, so I don't know if we will achieve constant communication, but any time the balloon is below 30,000 feet we will be able to track it. I'm really only concerned about knowing where it lands. All the data collected during the flight will be stored on SD cards on the payload so we can always reconstruct the flight if we can recover the payload. See you next time space cowboys!