An ATMega32 board has finally arrived in one piece and it seems to work. Well at least the LED lights come on when the power is attached. I’m going to have to go through a big learning curve to get this processor to do my bidding for me. On initial investigation it looks very possible to have the board monitor three temperature sensors, one in the flight box, one external and one with the camera as well as driving the servo controller. To conserve power in the camera the ATMega32 will also control the power to the camera using a relay. This will have the added benefit of resetting the camera each time.
Had a breakthrough on the issues with the RS232 cable. I complied up the code for the Gumstix Verdex and installed the package and discovered that the servo control code worked perfectly with the supplied serial connection that came with the Verdex. This leads me to believe that either the serial cable from Maplins is faulty or there is a problem with the RS232 port on my Linux box. Taking the voltage drop between the outer casing on the cable and the Pololu servo contoller gives a 63V AC current which strikes me as wrong. It is about 3V with the butchered serial cable and I haven’t yet measured the difference on the Verdex serial cable. The next step is to get the canon capture software compiled and to construct a cradle for the camera out of aluminium.
