R/C-Plane altitude recorder


Posted on Feb 6, 2014

This is a circuit to record the altitude of a R/C-plane. The data is saved on a SD-Card. It uses an ATmega8 microcontroller and a SCP1000 chip to measure temperature and (more important) atmospheric pressure. If you decide to build and use this circuit, you do so at your own risk. This is just a hobby project, so I don`t take liability for any dam


R/C-Plane altitude recorder
Click here to download the full size of the above Circuit.

age or harm it might cause. The circuit is powered by battery or the R/C receiver (5V). The LM317 regulates the voltage to 3. 3V, which is the operational voltage of SD-Cards and just high enough for the ATmega8. The atmospheric pressure is measured by the SCP1000-D01 from VTI, which has an SPI interface. The single chip is available only in a SMD version, which cannot be handled manually. Luckily, it can also be bought premounted on a PCB carrier. The SD-Card shares the SPI bus with the SCP1000. The bus lines are held up by pull-up resistors. In addition to the ICs there are two status LEDs and a button to start and stop the recording of data. At first I wanted to build the circuit on a stripboard, but because of the many connecting lines the board would have been far too large to fit into my R/C-glider. So a PCB was necessary, which I desinged with KiCad and then ordered from a manufacturer. Because the SCP1000 in the PCB version is quite expensive, it is not soldered to the PCB, but plugged in two rows of multipoint connectors. The the main tasks of the microcontroller software is to request and receive the temperature and pressure data from the SCP1000 and store the data on the SD-Card. I was a little lazy here and did not implement a file system. After the initialization of the sensor and the SD-Card, the microcontroller searches for a certain byte-mark on the card. It writes recorded data in raw bytes onto the card...




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