Hello everyone, My name is Matteo, and I am a lead on Carleton University's rocketry engineering design team (called CU InSpace). We're based out of Ottawa, Canada and we design and build high powered sounding rockets every year. We typically fly two rockets each year, one at the Spaceport America Cup competition in New Mexico, and the other at Launch Canada in Timmins, Ontario.
The team I lead specifically is our avionics team. This team is concerned with all flight critical electronics, which includes a telemetry flight computer, deployment of our recovery systems, altimeters, GPS tracking, etc. Also new for us this year is the design of a control system for our student designed hybrid rocket engine, which has stringent control requirements set by our competitions. We had previously used the QNX RTOS for our telemetry system last year, but this year we have made the decision to switch to NuttX because it is open source and much better suited to the embedded systems we design. NuttX will be running on our flight computer this year, and possibly as part of our hybrid rocket engine control system. All students on the team this year so far will be using NuttX for the first time ever, outside of myself who only has very limited experience with NuttX from making some minor contributions. We have students from every stage of their undergrad and in multiple programs, not just engineering. It is likely that we will encounter some hurdles while developing our systems on NuttX for this year. I have instructed members to re-contribute all of our meaningful work back to the upstream repository to help continue building the NuttX infrastructure. I expect that you will see several PRs to add more sensor drivers and radio module drivers to the kernel as we develop our systems throughout the year. Some members have already been interested in contributing to the documentation to help others getting started from scratch have a smoother process (yesterday we had roughly 35 students all installing NuttX for the first time). We may also be reaching out through the GitHub issues or through this mailing forum to get help on development hurdles. Our design is very early in the year and we're picking exactly which MCU(s) and which peripherals we'll be using, so we may reach out to ask questions about the supported MCUs if we can't find what we're looking for in the docs. Of course, we'll be happy to formally write out any information we receive in the docs when we receive it! This email is intended to serve as a heads up, as I'm aware from other discussions on this forum that there has already been a large influx of PRs recently. I have asked members to specifically mention in their PRs that they are from InSpace in case anyone is curious about what we're contributing or how NuttX is being used for amateur rocketry. In addition, I also wanted to provide a heads up in case NuttX would like any promotional materials from InSpace. We're happy to provide some photos, video, etc., of students using NuttX for development and to show off our systems. We know that NuttX is a growing community and we're happy to spread the word about it as well. Every year at Spaceport America Cup there are more than 150 international educational institutions who come and compete. As far as I know, last year no one had been using NuttX for their rocket. We're hoping to start a trend! If there is anything I've overlooked or that you might suggest as we start writing code for NuttX, please let me know! If you can think of any outreach initiatives InSpace could help with, let me know as well and we'll see about making it happen. You can learn more about us here: https://www.cuinspace.ca/ You can learn about Spaceport here too: https://spaceportamericacup.com/ Thanks for the incredible RTOS, we're looking forward to using it! Matteo
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