RBSP Devices

I've realized that I never put up the designs that I initially worked on at the Space Sciences Lab. The first is a testing system for the Spin Plane Boom to be deployed in the RBSP (Radiation Belt Storm Probes) NASA mission. Most of the system was already designed, but I made several enhancements and added a few sensors to the system for proper testing:

Operational position. The SPB is placed on the bottom and controlled by the motor on the side.

Safety sensors near LVDT (Linear variable differential transformer)

The device is operated by the outer motor and a motor on the inside which

winds the wire on SPB. This is all controlled by a program written in LabView. After making necessary design changes, we built a brand new 2nd system to do simultaneous testing.

The following is another testing device that I made a few adjustments to and built a copy of.

Phototransistor circuit

Just for fun...

I haven't done a design for fun lately because I've been focusing so much on school projects and such. Therefore, I thought I'd give it a shot:

This is a flash drive I've had for a while. As you can see, it rotates at the center to keep the USB interface safe. Sadly, I just lost this flash drive yesterday :-(

TQCM Mount

Just a small side project at work that took about a week to finish:





This is a simple mounting system for a TQCM (Thermoelectric Quartz Crystal Microbalance). It is meant to interact with the systems inside of one of our huge chambers, and there was a very tight space into which we could fit it. The main goal was to have variable adjustment in all three coordinate systems. Also, The TQCM is mounted through its heat sink, so we needed to use a material for the mount that had a high thermal conductivity yet strong enough to support the weight (went with 6063 Aluminum).