Welcome to the Viking Space Agency

This site is more for archive purposes. Members should join and communicate via the Google Group.
Date Location Activity
9/29 @ 9AM DVC ATC Hallway Mandatory Planning Meeting
10/6 @ 10AM 1420 Concord Ave Design Meeting
10/13 @ 10AM Park N Shop Starbucks
 Construction Meeting (main payload)
10/20 @ 10AM Frys Cafe
 Construction Meeting (projects)
10/27 @ 10AM Frys Cafe
 Construction Meeting (projects)
11/4 @ 10AM tbd Tethered Launch CANCELLED
11/10 @ 8AM tbd Tethered Launch (alternate) CANCELLED
12/1 @ 10AM tbd Near Space Launch (weather permitting)
12/8 @ 10AM tbd Near Space Launch (alternate)
Furthermore participants were assigned small groups (2-3 people) to come up with light weight independent experiments.

10/6/12 - Moved meeting to Starbucks due to no access to warehouse space. Second meeting was terrible as only 2 people showed up. Assigned soldering of data logger shield and Public Relations duties. Introduced new main payload container (due to weight constraints) donated by ImmunoScience. If you missed todays meeting and still wish to participate you need to send me plans and material lists for your experiments. If you have more send it to me ASAP. I am assuming anyone I don't hear back from by Wed is no longer interested and will be dropped.

10/10/12 - Student returned soldered data logger.  Looks good, but student brought a Seeed data logger just in case.
10/13/12 - Moved meeting to Frys Cafe.  Light intensity experiment completed, but Patrick wanted to rework using Arduino instead of Basic Stamp (loaned Uno and Data Logger shield to see what he could do). We discussed the need for an internal (or external) frame for the cooler to reinforce the cross member.  Assigned building the wing to Vanessa who will visit hobby shops this week (thinking balsa and plastic). Ordered Spot Personal Locator, 300 gram balloon (for tethered launch), radar reflector and parachute.
10/18/12 - SPOT TrackerReceived and activated the Spot GPS Messenger.  Now we can track our balloon progress at http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=09ChGGdI7OVa6mMVU1n2eQStXqTxPnBWs.
10/20/12 Proposed Wing- Accomplished a lot today.  At the meeting Vanessa showed us the proposed wing.  After review we asked her to harden it. After meeting, I was able to install SPOT in top of main payload and built and installed the first internal sensor pack (includes Adafruit data logger with RTC, Grove tilt sensor, Grove temperature (both int and ext), Grove light intensity (rough) and SainSmart BMP085 barometer).  During assembly I ran into a few problems including not being able to get the 3 axis accelerometer to work properly, failed proto board (so I added headers to the data logger to hold barometer) and the usual coding problems.  Speaking of which, you can download the code used here.


10/22/12 - Received radar reflector and some cameras.
11/06/12 - Received Geiger counter experiment.
11/16/12 - Began assembling Geiger counter.
to be continued...