1st Launch Competition
Mars held its first launch competiton today it went great! Nine teams competed to see who could launch the best rocket! Congrats to S.R.A.G who won the competition! Watch the video!
Info
Avionics Session Success
The avionics sessions was a success!! Eight teams got their avionics to successfully transmit telemetry from their flight computer to their ground station! Here's some photos!
Avionics Session on April 25th
Historical April 2024 event announcement. Credential-sharing instructions were corrected on October 8, 2026; current SSH setup guidance is in the archived ground-station guide.
We're going to have our major avionics tutorial on April 25th from 2-6pm at the DME. We'll have free pizza for everyone who is on a team and who clicked interested on the Discord event!
What you need for the session:
- Laptop
- Your avionics kit
What you should do before the session:
- Solder your avionics
- Sign up for a GitHub account (optional)
We will be going over:
Part 1
- Setting up flight computers
- Set voltage level
- Install Teensy software
- Programming boards
- Blink test
- Download code from GitHub and load it onto the Arduino
- Record data from the SD card and check it on computers
- Set antenna channels
- Setting up ground stations
- Download Raspberry Pi Imager
- Select RASPBERRY PI OS LITE (64-BIT)
- Set a unique hostname and username in Imager's customization settings. Enable SSH with each authorized member's public key. Keep private keys and passwords private; do not share them in Discord. Follow Raspberry Pi's SSH documentation and verify the host fingerprint before connecting.
- Plug in SD card, select it, click write.
- Plug in Pis to network
- ** Linux :**
ssh username@hostname.localls,ls -al,cd,mkdir,rm,rm -r,sudo, permissions, users, groups- install git
sudo apt install git - clone repo
git clone https://github.com/marstmu/groundstation.git - install python library
sudo apt install python3-serial sudo raspi-config- Run gs.py with python
python gs.py
Part 2
- Soldering GPS battery
- Committing to your team's documentation repo
- clone
- change, commit
- PR
Notes for the leads
- Each team will
ci.ymlneeds to include updating to the latest commit for submodules- Pizza for people
- Opportunity for teams to solder beforehand
- Solder surface mounted battery holders
- Need multimeters, screwdrivers
- Pis all need hostnames and a label on them
- Need UDR and both switches
- Dry run
- Adapter
- soldering irons and fume hoods
Giving Out Avionics Kits At Rocketry Conference
We will be giving out the avionics kits this Saturday, March 16th, at the TMU Rocketry Conference! Please sign up if you haven't already. The first step in assembling your avionics kit is soldering. Each team will need to find time to go to the DME to solder their components. The soldering must be completed within three weeks, as that is when the programming session will take place. We'll post a link to the soldering documentation here on Friday. Each team will sign a contract with information on returning/purchasing the kits.
PCB Update
Hey guys! PCB avionics finished. It's been ordered and is on the way. You guys get to solder it in a bit when we confirm the stuff works. Have a goodnight I kinda spent a long time on this
Nathan Liu
Team update
There will now be a message posted to discord whenever the blog is updated! This will be the first post that does this.
The fuselages, and motor tubes, and a few other things have arrived! We have already given out fuselages to a ICARUS and Lunar Wolves. We will be in contact shortly with each team to give out the fuses.
Here's a photo of me picking up the packages. Photo cred to Nikolai.
Updates for Jan 23rd
We have officially placed orders for everything in the BOM. We spent about $7000. We had an issue with ordering the starlink so Alessia will be ordering it soon. The absolute latest things will come by is March 5th.