Congratulations to The Villanova CubeSat Club on their recent first ever high-altitude balloon (HAB) launch! The project featured an AmbaSat-1 Satellite with a BME-680 pressure, temperature, and humidity sensor onboard.
Faculty advisor Dr. Alan Johnston says:
“AmbaSat has been a great project for the students so far. The Villanova CubeSat Club backed the project on Kickstarter with a rocket launch, and since then they have built three AmbaSat kits with two different sensors, learning how to do surface mount assembly.
While waiting for the launch, the students decided to fly one on balloon. The light weight and flexibility of the hardware made it ideal for a small balloon launch. We started with the excellent flight software by Michael Kamprath, adding maximum and minimum packets and also storing select sensor data on the EEPROM. We installed the 915 MHz version of the RFM95 board and connected it to The Things Network (TTN), and built a TagoIO dashboard using Fredric Raab’s instructions. We have greatly benefitted from the AmbaSat Forum and the community there.
The students were very happy with their first HAB flight, just over 90 minutes from the university campus in Pennsylvania to New Jersey where we recovered the payload from a tall tree. We successfully received packets over TTN and also the TinyGS network. We are still analyzing the sensor and tracking data from the flight.
The students are already thinking about more launches in the fall.”
Watch the recording of the live stream on IGTV:
https://www.instagram.com/villanova_cubesatclub/
Telemetry Data can be viewed on the Villanova University CubeSat Club Tagio Dashboard:
https://admin.tago.io/public/dashboard/6078d14942fe2e001824e473/7eadc276-910d-4b45-9d46-b69755667a16
