The first flight computer in the Tao Flight Computer family, which will test many of the sensors and other features that will guide us to space. The computing is done with a Teensy 4.0, and the system can collect data and run a closed loop control system at over 200 Hz.
The Tao family of flight computers was started with the new #pathtospace and the creation of pursuit. The Tao family will include ASTRo’s, Pursuit’s, and the spaceshot rocket’s flight computers. The name Tao was chosen for a few reasons: Tao translates to path and comes from the philosophy of Taoism. Taoism is also often represented by the yin yang symbol, which is also fitting because eventually the flight computers will feature two main microcontrollers, one for data acquisition and one for control.
Before any flight computers were made, the board depicted below (left-half is CAD, right-half is real) was created to test most of the components we were considering using repeatedly in the Tao family. This included multiple altimeters, IMUs (Inertial Measurement Units), communication-bus switches, and other sensors
Tao Test Board. Left side is CAD, right side is real
Tao ASTRo is the first full flight computer in the Tao family and will fly on the ASTRo rocket. Here are some of it’s features:
Teensy 4.0
The main microcontroller on the board is a Teensy 4.0 dev board which has an an NXP iMXRT1062 chip on board (based on a 600 MHz ARM Cortex-M7)
Sensors
Tao ASTRo includes a high speed LSM9DS1 IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) to detect acceleration and rotation, an MPL3115 altimeter, a power monitoring chip, and some peripherals to support these. The board can also connect to a GPS over UART for extremely accurate positioning
Active control
The sensors and PWM-chip on-board allow the computer to control up to 4 servos to keep the heading of the rocket straight up
Micro SD
The microSD card slot means that data storage is no problem, especially since the Teensy can suport more than an 8GB microSD. This will also allow us to check the data immediately upon retrieval of the rocket
LoRa Radio Module (telemetry)
The telemetry board (seen on the right) allows Tao ASTRo to send data to the ground station during flight, so the team will know the results of the flight long before the rocket lands
