ocularium is a tiny sensor platform designed to be flown on kites to monitor atmospheric conditions. This project is a collaboration with Chucho Ocampo on this project, who I met on SEI's trip to Lanzarote.
Rev 1 has been fabricated and brought up, and I am working through a board respin to address some design errors before it will be ready to be flown.
design
The board is 30x30mm with a 25x25mm M2 hole pattern. It's powered by a lithium cell via a battery controller, and uses an SD card for data storage. The sensors onboard are a six-axis accelerometer/gyro, a BME680 gas sensor (temperature, humidity, pressure, air quality), a lux sensor, and a MEMS microphone.
Design goals:
- Small and light, to minimize impact on the kite's flight -- Chucho's previous solution was bulky/heavy and would pull the kite
- Useful / interesting sensor payload
- ~4-hour endurance -- long enough to be forgiving about state of charge
- Low-cost
software / firmware
I'm writing the firmware in Rust using the embassy family of embedded libraries.
I am planning on writing a host-side UI in iced, which I've had luck with in the past (I'm using it for an in-progress mission UI for antrelay).