UCAS Rocket Avionics

UCAS - Reaching New Heights!

 The University of Calgary Aerospace Club (UCAS) is a joint research, design and competition team spanning 4 main divisions: Rocketry, Automated Drones, Balloons, and Planes. Each division has their own competitions that they compete in.

The Rockets Division, is the University of Calgary’s foremost, undergraduate student run, rocketry club. We are developing a rocket for entrance into the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) to be held at Spaceport America, New Mexico in June 2018. We will launch our student researched and designed hybrid rocket engine. The rocket systems are manufactured with the help of our Sponsors! 

Project Details

This will be the group’s third year competing in the IREC and we have an ambitious electrical design for the avionics control system. 

We've designed a development board that includes all the sensors we intend to put on the rocket to deploy recovery systems, control the engine, perform remote communication and onboard data logging. The entire system is controlled by an STM32 MCU.

The PCB is a 4 layer design measuring 50x70mm and will become an important piece of reference hardware used by students making a purpose built PCB for competition. 

Having a reference design like this allows software team members to write and test code and make modifications early in the year. The development board does not have to contain every component we intend to send up during competiton which saves costs. 

### Words to PCBWay

UCAS is familiar with PCBWay and have ordered from your company for past projects. We are interested in ordering the above PCB as well as a stencil. In the following months we will be designing several more PCBs for other sub-modules within the rocket.