TeleTerra

TeleTerra is a hand-held ground station for TeleMetrum.

These are photos of our first cut prototype hardware:

Motivation

While using a TeleDongle board as a USB to RF interface to a notebook computer works splendidly, we thought it would be cool to have a nice hand-held ground station we can use in full sunlight on the flight line. If it can help locate the rocket and is easy to carry during recovery operations, so much the better!

Features

User View

• Hand-held unit about the size of a calculator
• 4 line by 20 character text LCD
• "joyswitch" for user input (up, down, left, right, push)
• Antenna connector for the telemetry stream from TeleMetrum
• Integrated GPS receiver and antenna to allow display of current user position, and relative position of GPS-equipped rockets
• Audio amplifier and speaker for voice status updates
• Integrated rechargable battery
• USB interface for configuration, power, and flight log extraction

Developer View

• Single circuit board
  • equivalent of a TeleMetrum less the sensors
  • Atmel ATtiny48 used as an I/O expander
  • 4 line, 20 character transreflective text LCD display
  • multi-directional switch for user inputs
• 2Ah LiPo battery for all-day use
• Software Features (planned)
  • AltOS for the cc1111 and simple C for the AVR
• Tools Used
  • gEDA for schematic capture and PCB layout
• Licenses
  • The hardware is licensed under the TAPR Open Hardware License
  • The software is licensed GPL version 2

Problems

None yet!

Artifacts

Schematics and PCB artwork exist at git.gag.com in the project hw/teleterra.

Future Plans

In 2010, two v0.1 prototypes were assembled, and the hardware was tested. Unfortunately, this design turned out to be too expensive to manufacture and sell. We then worked on a cost-reduced v0.2 design, which worked ok, but just wasn't very satisfying to use compared to a TeleBT and Android device. It's possible, but unlikely, that we'll come back to TeleTerra at some point in the future.