Optical tracking system for amateur rockets
The TRoll French amateur rocketry association is developping KEOPS an optical tracking system to pursue its and others amateur rockets.
All of our software, hardware, and electronics designs are/will be licensed under the GNU GPLv3 and are available from our subversion server. Access is granted on request by sending me an email at yXanXn_XgoXuy@yahoo.fr (suppress all the X).
Contents
Hardware
The hardware will be simple but robust as the system has to be deployed and manipulated in harsh environment. It is mainly a 2-axis system with a equipment casing at the bottom holding the electronics.
Electronic
As in our rockets, we'll use a microcontroler from ATMEL, we are currently discussing to obtain samples of their brand new XMega but a recovery solution is the ATMega32. Driving 2 motors via H-bridges and coupled to a W5100 for communication, it is in charge of controling the position and/or the speed of the Elphel camera.
Software
The software is composed of 2 parts :
- the embedded part is coded in C using the AVR port of gcc.
- on the PC side, the code is in python using the openCV library.
Principle
The camera films the rocket and the sky beyond it. A picture is retreived and the rocket is extracted. The tracking algorithm ensures to keep the rocket centered in the picture. If not, commands are sent to the microcontroler to adjust the camera position.
