I took a Saturday off from launching test balloons to sit down and really go over the Tracksoar. After a couple of hours of testing I was able to reproduce our big issue from the last flight; losing GPS updates at 66k feet. I spoke with the friendly folks at the #highaltitude IRC and confirmed that if it were a problem initializing flight mode on the U-Blox MAX-M8Q receiver we would have stopped receiving updates at 20k feet. That knowledge in hand I set out to re-create the problem we ran into, and was able to reproduce it by disconnecting the TX jumper on the Tracksoar. It continued to send the last good GPS info it had in the buffer until the jumper was reconnected. That indicates that some fairly large force managed to knock the jumper off the pins just enough to kill the serial connection. This is great news as the fix is as easy as tightening up the jumper, or taping it in place to prevent it on our next flight. I have our next flight scheduled for next Saturday 8/30 and barring any new problems we are ready to launch our Kickstarter. To that end I spent some time today fixing some of the minor issues on the Tracksoar. I’ve cleaned up the silkscreen significantly so it looks pretty and professional now.
*UPDATE*
After some further testing we will also be changing battery holders for a locking holder. We ran some stress tests on our existing battery holder and under normal flight conditions the batteries can pop out of place causing the issue we saw on the first test flight.
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