The Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) builds, designs, and launches open source amateur rockets. If you haven't heard about PSAS, watch my five minute Ignite Portland 2 talk and follow along with the sides.

In this PSAS episode, we talk with some potential members, work on simulators, and stare at shiny LEDs.

Slow meeting. I was distracted because I was playing with my new eeepc 900. Some new members showed up, and Andrew attempted to explain some rocket science to them:

Sounds like the guy in the black t-shirt (Eric) is interested in communications and our open source GPS. Not sure what the guy in plaid (George) is interested in.

Jamey, Josh, and Fletcher (a high school student) are working on the software simulator this evening. We don't have the sensor nodes designed yet, but want want to feed old data into our flight computer software to test it. Then we can inject failures and see how the software reacts. It's a good idea because the hardware people *cough* Andrew *cough* haven't started laying out the sensor node schematics. They haven't even put the sensors on a bread board yet, although they did build a turntable to test the accelerometers.

On a completely unrelated note, Frank (our "Resident Artiste") brought his electronics project. He's building an art installation that includes tri-color LEDs.

Shiny!

The Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) builds, designs, and launches open source amateur rockets. If you haven't heard about PSAS, watch my five minute Ignite Portland 2 talk and follow along with the sides.

In this PSAS episode, Tim shows off the airframe shell he's been working on:

Tim's vacuum setup for pulling epoxy into the fiberglass airframe isn't perfect. There was a large piece near the top where epoxy didn't flow.

Tim brought a work light to demonstrate that the fiberglass shell is slightly translucent. Andrew (in his bun-bun shirt) demonstrated said translucence.