A Teacher's Perspective 

Little did I expect when I embarked on my teaching career that I would be taking a group of students to have their satellite fired upwards 1 km into the sky at a location in Norway within the Arctic Circle. Yet that is what now awaits us.

There are enormous technical challenges for the students and teachers. However it cannot be denied that Cansat is THE most exciting project at Second Level schools in Ireland. Even at Regional level, there was a great sense of achievement when the quadcopter carried our cansat 50m above the astroturf at CIT and data streamed into the laptop. The venue for the National Final was perfect,  set against the backdrop of the giant telescope at Birr Castle. While racing after the students to find the cansat after being ejected from the rocket, as a teacher I had a real sense of satisfaction as this was actual science in action.

The work has intensified. Final decisions must be made about the secondary  mission. The outreach has stepped up a gear.  All  systems go!!

Anne O'Dea  

ALL - IRELAND CHAMPIONS! 

On Friday, Candroid travelled to Birr, Co. Offaly for the ESERO-CEIA CanSat 2014 National Final. We arrived at the County Arms Hotel at 18:30 and began some final testing of our sensors in our rooms. 

At 20:00, all 6 teams met for dinner and speeches. The speeches were extremely interesting and reminded all the teams of how their cans are the baby steps to a bigger picture. 

And so, the team retired - well, tried to. We decided to do some more testing of the can but errors kept being displayed. We stayed up until the early hours of Saturday morning but finally fixed all of the small issues. 

At 9:00 on Saturday morning, we arrived at Birr Castle. We were the sixth and final team to be dropped from the quad copter. Fortunately, all went to plan and our sensors received data. 

At 11:30/12:00, the rocket was unveiled. Each can was placed into a compartment inside the cylinder which would fire each can out at the same time through individual doors. The rocket was launched to a height of 300m and Tayyaba's parachute worked brilliantly. We were the first team to find our can as it did not drift into Birr Town and none of the sensors were broken. 

We spent the next hour finalising our presentation and analysing the data. We made four graphs - Temperature -v- Time, Temperature -v- Altitude, Pressure -v- Time and Humidity -v- Altitude. 

At 14:30, the presentations began. We were the last to present and we were delighted with how it went. The judges' questions were searching but the team managed them well. 

The judges then retired to deliberate and we mixed with the other teams. The other National Finalists included Coláiste Éanna, Dublin, St Paul's CBS, Dublin, Gairmscoil Mhuire, Athenry, Mercy Convent, Galway and Douglas Community School, Cork. They all had fantastic CanSats. Nobody reached the National Final without putting in long hours and a lot of hard work. Congratulations to all of these teams and their teachers as they represented their schools/ provinces really well and should be very proud of their CanSat! 

The competition was extremely tough and at 17:30 one of the judges, Stephanie O'Neill of ESERO Ireland, announced that Crescent College Comprehensive are the NATIONAL WINNERS! We will be representing Ireland in Norway in June in the European Final. 

The team is absolutely thrilled! We would like to thank Eamon Connolly & Brenda Cooper of CEIA, ESERO Ireland, ESA, the judges, our teachers Anne O'Dea & Frank Murphy, ON Semiconductor Ltd and everyone in Crescent! 

We will be on the Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk tomorrow morning (11:15-12:00) so be sure to tune in! 

Onwards and upwards from here! 

By Hugh 

Calibrating the Humidity Sensor 

Yesterday, I travelled out to Shannon Airport to calibrate our humidity sensor as it was the only place with known humidity readings for comparison. 

We had already travelled to the airport to calibrate the pressure readings.

It was a successful expedition and we are now receiving correct readings. 

By Chris

1st Year Workshop 

One of the main components of our Outreach programme is to promote physics at Leaving Cert level. Today, Tayyaba and I gave a workshop to a group of keen 1st Year students. 

The class was treated to a short presentation on CanSat, Space Explorations, Rocket Science and Newton's Third Law. 

The students were then divided into groups and carried out an activity to demonstrate Newton's Third Law (every action has an equal and opposite reaction). Each team built a Rocket Cart out of paper, straws, balloons and Polo Mints. 

It was a hugely successful workshop and we hope to give more as the competition progresses. 

 

By Hugh

Testing of the can 

This evening, the team, with the help of Ms O'Dea and a fellow 5th Year pupil., tested our can and parachute. We travelled to Cussens Crane Hire, Dock Road, Limerick. 

The crane brought the can up to a height of 25m and the can was dropped. We collected data and tested the parachute. It was a great success! 

A big thanks to the team at Cussens Crane Hire for helping us out!! 

By Hugh 

Here's a video of our first attempt - bit comical!! 

Humidity Sensor 

We decided we wanted to use a humidity sensor in our can as CanSat is supposed to simulate a space mission. Humidity sensors are frequently used in space missions to test for water. 

After much research we found that the HH10D humidity sensor, was the right one for us. We decided to go with this sensor as it is relatively accurate (+-3%) and the code would be straight forward. 

I started straight into the code and quickly realised that the tutorial I was hoping to use was based on previous Arduino software and was completely useless. After a bit more research and consultation with our mentor Cathal and our physics teacher Frank, we established a new, more accurate code for the sensor. 

This weekend I'm travelling out to Shannon Airport again to calibrate the sensor. 

By Chris