Project

Ground Station

Ground station hardware and software for receiving live telemetry and coordinating launch ops. We call it Greg.

Role

Telemetry integration, tooling, operations

Stack

RF telemetry, dashboards, data pipelines

Repo

av-telemetry

The Problem

During flight, the rocket is streaming sensor data over RF. Without something to catch that data, decode it, and put it on a screen, the launch team is flying blind. You can't make go/no-go calls without knowing what the vehicle is doing.

What I built

Greg — Ground Radio Equipment Gizmo — is the handheld ground station the launch team uses during countdown and flight. Telemetry comes in over RF, gets decoded and timestamped, and shows up live on screen. After motor burnout, it switches to GPS tracking mode for recovery.

This year's updates were mostly about simplifying. I removed the complexity around switching the 5V source between USB and the buck-boost from the battery. I also added a 330mF supercapacitor as a GPS backup — it charges fast and holds enough energy that if you lose power briefly, the GPS doesn't have to do a cold start and wait ages for a fix.

Highlights

  • Simplified power path by removing 5V source switching.
  • 330mF supercap GPS backup for fast recovery after power loss.
  • Live telemetry decode and dashboard for launch operations.
  • GPS tracking mode for post-flight recovery.
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Media

Ground station platform Ground station rig Ground station layout

3D Viewer

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