Space Team Aachen | Hopper Project

 About Hopper

Space Team Aachen is a student association that offers highly motivated students of RWTH and FH Aachen the opportunity to pursue their passion for space technology. 

We are currently 190 active members divided into six different projects ranging from rovers to competition rockets. 

One of our newest projects is Hopper, which consists of 25 students with the ambitious goal of building a reusable rocket hopper powered by a bi-liquid rocket engine and capable of hovering for 60 seconds. The rocket is 5m high, which would make it Europe's largest rocket hopper.

Why we need PCBway 

To accomplish this, we need an extensive number of circuit boards to control valves, read sensor data, flight computers, inverters to drive our linear actuators, and communication boards. We design all of these boards ourselves. The most essential boards, especially for our upcoming hotfire test, are the valve board and the data acquisition board. They are needed to drive valves to control our fluid systems and to get data from our pressure and temperature sensors.

The Valve Board is capable of driving up to 24 solenoid valves and also has the innovative ability to make precise current measurements to detect valve failures.

The data acquisition board is capable of reading 24 thermocouples and 24 sensors with 0-10V or 4-20mA input at 16bit. Each PCB on the hopper is equipped with an STM32 and a fully isolated CAN bus transciever. 

We would greatly appreciate the support of PCBWay to get these boards manufactured. As a student team we have to work with a limited budget and an extremely ambitious timeline.  Therefore, we think that PCBWay's expertise in PCB manufacturing fits perfectly with our need for rapid iteration and high quality PCBs.

What We Offer in Return

Depending on the level of sponsorship, we offer benefits such as:

• Logo placement on our Rocket
• Logo placement on our website (https://www.spaceteamaachen.de/projects/hopper-project) 
• Mentions across our social media channels (with 10,000 followers on Instagram)
• Visibility at Events from the Hopper Project