Home/General Overview

The TRT Avionics Subteam

Mission:

To provide a platform for students to learn about and develop avionics systems for high-powered rockets. This includes the development of hardware, software, and documentation.

Team Goal:

To develop a reliable, modular, and well-documented avionics platform that can be used by the other subteams in the development of their rockets and the TRT competition rocket.

The Terrapin Rocket Team (TRT)

TRT is a student-run organization at the University of Maryland, College Park. We are a multidisciplinary team of students from various engineering disciplines, as well as Computer Science and Physics. We design, build, and launch high-powered rockets for the annual Spaceport America Cup competition, flying in the SRAD 10,000 ft category. TRT is divided into several subteams. Subteams may work on different parts of the competition rocket, or may be researching and developing new technologies for future rockets.

If you are interested in joining a specific subteam, please join that subteam's Slack channel and attend their meetings.

The Avionics Subteam

Our team researches and develops the main telemetry system for the competition rocket. This includes a flight computer (FC), sensors, and radio system. We also develop the ground station software and hardware.

Our custom-designed flight computer, the Unified Board.

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Current Features

• GPS tracking
• Radio telemetry
• State estimation
• Data logging
• Stage Detection
• Custom PCB design (Unified Board)

In-Progress Features

• Live video streaming
• Advanced state estimation (Kalman filtering)
• Non-Arduino flight computer (STM32)

Future Features

• Charge Deployment for recovery
• Automated ground station tracking

Development

We use a variety of tools and languages to develop our systems:

• Flight Computer Coding:
  • C++ (with some C)
  • VSCode
  • PlatformIO
  • Arduino (for Teensy)
• Ground Station Coding:
  • JavaScript
  • (Other things)
• PCB Design:
  • KiCad
• CAD:
  • SolidWorks (Entire TRT uses SolidWorks for all CAD work)
• Project Management:
  • GitHub for Version Control
  • Slack for Communication

See Slack for information about meetings and other team events.

See the Getting Started page for information about how to get started working with us. Useful for both new and experienced members.