Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Rocket Scientists Build the Microcontroller of your Dreams”.
Hello, my name is amogo, i’m the ceo and cto at carbon origins. We make rockets flight computers and data loggers and today to maker faire, we bought the latest iteration of our data logger that was born out of a rocket flight computer and we’re opening up the makers and making it our video compatible. And it’s going to be super cool. You should check it out, we’ll be releasing it on kickstarter about a month from now. Well, it has 11 sensors on it yeah it’s two and a half, it’s less than two square inches and has 11 sensors on it.
Uh. It has a temperature sensor, uh humidity, sensor, luminosity sensor, which does ultraviolet infrared and visible light. It has a microphone that has audio to the environmental package for motion. It has accelerometer gyroscope compass and gps 11 sensors.
It also has bluetooth and wi-fi for cons so right out of the box. It is an internet of things. It can uh communicate with other modules. It can network all sorts of crazy things uh.
It also has an sd card slot, so you can plug in an sd card lock data on an sd card. It has a beautiful oled screen and it’s incredibly beautiful high contrast bullet and a trackball. So you can go through here and best part is arduino compatible, which is always cool well making something. This small is incredibly hard. There are 11 sensors, a 32-bit arm, cortex m3 processor, wi-fi bluetooth. I mean think about all of that, going on something that is as big as a flash drive.
It’S incredibly insanely complicated right and uh. We had to. We spent a lot of time engineering, it figuring out the layout ultra turbo thermal problems are a huge deal.
Things get hot, you need to control temperatures around the sensors. I think that was the biggest problem and also the biggest value proposition of the board, because we solve those problems. So the board has six layers signal layers and it has two ground planes which also act as thermal planes.
What that means is the thermal planes go under the components that get really hot, like the wi-fi module the microcontroller and radiates the heat to the edges uh? If you look at the outline of apollo that it’s gold plated – and it’s essentially connected to those two thermal layers on the inside – that’s taking all the heat to the edges, making it incredibly cool near the sensors, we are all carbon origins, follows the same ethos as The maker revolution, as i mentioned earlier, we build rockets and it’s expensive to build rockets, but we’re doing it in a way. That’S a lot more feasible a startup our size to get into and also arduino is a huge influence for carbon origins. It’S all open source make a con and make it fair is the essence of open source hardware and software. So you love it.
The original idea was to have multiple apollos on rockets, to lock data from different parts of the rocket and use the wi-fi and bluetooth comms to duplicate the data. So we have um different. We have multiple locations on the rocket where we have the same data, but we soon realized okay. This has applications way beyond we’re now here: cool um.
So what advice would you give to young makers just getting started? Think outside the box very important? If you have a problem, there’s always a solution, if you think outside the box and if you’re an entrepreneur, don’t take no for an answer, i mean there’s always a way to get things solved. You can always figure it out. .