Chaos. I think that perfectly describes going back to school. Today I had a plan. The plan was:
- Wake up in time for school
- Get to school before 8am
- Get home at 3pm
- Finish building the parachute
- Make the housing for the camera
- Test the parachute
- Hack the Canon cameras
- Test the battery life
- Finish building the Tracker 2.0 UI
- Test it with the tracker and tracking station I have
- Install all software needed on to the laptop that will sit at Intermet
- Finish everything in time to watch an episode of TV before getting to bed by 10pm.
That was the plan. Today did not go according to plan. At all. Okay, that was probably partly (mostly) my fault for having expectations too high, but by setting a high standard it would force me to do more. Or so I thought.
The first three items went according to plan, however just as I was about to start building the last bit of the parachute, my mom suggested that I hack the cameras first, as I can then test the battery life as I build the parachute and at the same time get photos of me building it. This sounded like a better option, so I started with that.
The first problem I encountered was a nasty shock: The Canon PowerShot SX620HS that I planned on using, and my first choice, was not actually supported by CHDK, which I thought it had been. This meant that out of the three Canons I bought, only one of them was supported by CHDK and would be able to make the journey to space. So naturally I needed to find another camera to replace one of them. However this meant that I would have to sell the cameras that couldn’t be hacked so that I could buy one that could. I decided I would put an ad up on Gumtree after I had hacked the PowerShot SX500IS.
Hacking the camera proved harder than I initially thought. It took me just under an hour to find and download the correct firmware for the camera, and then another half an hour to get a script downloaded. During this time I learned how to load the hack quickly, and the basic interface of the software. It was very complicated and had lots of things that were confusing, and I didn’t understand, however there was a lot of documentation of it online, it was just a case of finding it.
Once I understood how to load a script, which is basically a custom hack on top of the initial hack (so making it do even more stuff), I installed the RAW Meter Intervalometer, which allowed me to take RAW photos at a regular once I had pressed the button, making it perfect for what I needed to do. Once installed, it was just a case of playing around with the different settings until I found one that worked for me. However, due to the fact that it had gotten dark outside, the settings I chose worked for low light conditions, which is the opposite of what the actual launch conditions will be. In order to test the camera’s full capacity, the battery needed to be fully charged. As I had been playing with it for over three hours, the battery was dead, so I needed to charge it before I could run the test.
In the meantime, I took photos of the PowerShot SX430IS and posted it on Gumtree. In order to sell faster, I needed to make sure the pictures were of good quality, so I spent a bit of extra time touching them, just to ensure that someone would want to buy it. This took another hour or so, but once the ad was up it looked really good and professional. I set the price at R2000, which was R100 less than what I bought it for, which wasn’t a bad deal I thought.
After supper I set up Canon camera to run the test. The battery was 75% charged, which was enough for the test I wanted to do. I set the intervalometer to take a photo every ten second, so six per minute. I made sure that it was shooting in RAW and that the LCD panel was overridden to be off. I set it up pointing at the table where I was going to be working on the parachute, so that I could get some photos of the parachute building as part of the test. After everything was set up, I pressed the shutter and let it do its thing.
Once the test was running it was time to start on the parachute. I set up my GoPro to video the process for record’s sake. I only started at around 9pm, which was not my plan at all, but I knew it would be easy to finish before 10pm. Or so I thought.
I asked my dad if he could help me with the start of it, just so that we could establish a process. This entailed threading a piece of cord through the loop on the edge of the parachute and then trying to splice it back into itself. This proved much harder than originally anticipated and it took nearly an hour just to get the first three done. Since it was taking so long, we both worked on it together, with my dad doing the looping and splicing, while I sewed the splice together, for extra strength. Two hours later we had completed half the parachute. Now it was time to do the opposite sides. This was harder than the first side and there was no room for error, because the pieces of cord were not individual strands, but where the opposite ends of the sides we had just done. After measuring the lines to all be the exact length, we marked where the ends needed to be cut off and where to splice the cord back on itself.
Aside from one hiccup with one of the cords, everything went smoothly and all the cords had been secured to the parachute. Next it was time to shrink wrap the loop made in the middle of all the cords so that we would have something to fasten the housing to. This took about 20 minutes, after which we had completed the parachute. A quick run around yielded some good results, but I will do some proper testing tomorrow.
As far as plan went, I failed miserably but tomorrow I will start building the housing for the cameras and hopefully test the parachute and the Tracker 2.0. I will ask my dad if he can set aside some time to work on the UI of the website, just so that it is usable for the launch on Thursday.
