I vividly remember the Tuesday morning
when I first heard about CanSat. Ms. O’Dea told us about it in Physics. I love
anything to do with engineering so I put my name down. Little did I know nine
months later I would end up representing my school and my country in Norway.
It all began the Friday before the October
mid-term break. Mr. Murphy, Chris and I travelled to the LifeTime Lab in Cork
for the first workshop. Here we met Cathal who was our mentor from
ON-Semiconductor. From that day on I have been travelling on one of the
greatest adventures of my life, which culminated in one of the most beautiful
places I have ever been; Andoya, Norway.
Chris and I worked throughout midterm and
all the way up to Christmas getting a grasp of Arduino and the coding. In
January Hugh and Tayyaba joined the team, much to our relief as neither of us
would be able to design and make a parachute or make the quality presentations
that Hugh can create.
The biggest challenge from day one was
fitting everything in the can. After the competition in Birr we realised the
way we were trying to do it wasn’t going to be sufficient for Norway. We
decided to completely redesign our can. Thankfully at this stage Evan had
joined the team.
I ventured into a new unknown, PCB design
and manufacture. This involved schematics, design software such as Eagle and
PADS, Gerber files and eventually a bare PCB that had to be populated. Thanks
to help from Mr. Murphy and Cathal I designed a custom Arduino that suited our
needs. This was a huge learning experience for me, and I know it will stand to
me in future as I plan on working in the electronics industry.
Overall CanSat was an amazing experience
and I am so thankful to have been a part of it. I would like to thank Cathal
O’Lionaird and John Blake from ON-Semiconductor, the school and particularly Ms
O’Dea, Mr Murphy for being there for us throughout the competition.
Niall
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