Hello, my name is Micah Hoffman and I am from Cortez, Colorado and for my Pinternship I was sent to Oklahoma State University (OSU) to work in an Aerospace Lab with a fellow Pintern, Logan Files. The Lab that I am working in is called the Excelsior Unmanned Systems Research Laboratory and I am working there with several other interns from other programs. I am staying in an apartment building not too far off of campus called Stillwater Flats with Logan.
I got into Stillwater on the Saturday before my internship would start and went to the apartment building where I would be staying. I checked out the town of Stillwater and the OSU campus on Sunday and picked up Logan from the airport Sunday night. We planned to take the bus to get to our internship since it was a 1.7 miles from our apartment to Excelsior but we ended up walking the first day because the bus times we were using were incorrect.
(Excelsior Unmanned Systems Research Laboratory)
The first day of the internship started off with Logan and I working with the other interns to test the heat resistance of certain materials by sticking two different materials together with epoxy resin and waiting for them to dry. The plan was to heat one side of the material with an electric strip and put ice on the other side to see which materials kept the ice from warming up the longest, but before we could finish we were pulled away to begin working on a Solar Cell Project which would be the main focus of our first two weeks. The main goal of the solar cell was to collect data about the sun and other weather data by hoisting a box via a balloon into the high atmosphere to get the data. This project had already been attempted by students in years prior but they could not get it to work in the time they had so the job was passed on to us. The box had to be both light and insulated in order for it to easily rise with the balloon and prevent the electronics inside from freezing. We were working with two college student named Meghana Fathepure and Nicco Wang. Logan and I were tasked with building and designing a new possible design for the box that housed all the electronics and solar panels, while Meghana and Nicco worked on the coding and circuitry that would go in the box. We only had enough time to come up with a basic design that we would start to build the next day.
(Original Solar Cell Box)
On Tuesday, we began by taking a class on the basics of drone and model airplane flight. This class taught us how to use the controllers for the drone, how to find the center of gravity (CG), how to take off and land, and how NOT to take off and land. After the class was finished, we began building our model for the Solar Cell out Styrofoam and hot glue. We cut out the panels using the measurements from our design and glued it all together using hot glue. The design resembled a square pyramid with the top cut off. We deigned it so the solar panels would fit horizontally across the four faces of the shape. We were able to finish the design by the end of the day.
(Box Proto-type)
On Wednesday, we started the day by going out to the OSU flight field to watch the other interns fly the planes they had made in the previous weeks of their internships. The planes flew decently well but some of them had issues that caused flying to be difficult due to having a CG that was improperly positioned. After we got back from the flight field, we went to Oklahoma City (OKC) which is a city about an hour away from Stillwater to see some of the other interns and fly kites with sensors attached to collect weather data such as wind speed, temp, and humidity at different heights. The problem with this was that it was not windy enough for the kites to take off so in an attempt to get some actual data, we got someone to ride on the back of a golf cart with the kite in order to pull the kite along and get it some height. This worked for a bit but the kite ended up losing altitude pretty quickly after it was no longer being pulled by the cart.
(OKC Kite Flying)
On Thursday, we put the design for our box into a program called Solid Works. Solid Works is a computer aided design program (CAD) that is compatible with things like 3-D printers and laser cutters. Putting our box design in Solid Works allows for us to create a more precisely cut and thus sturdier if we decide to build our box for the final design. Learning how to use Solid Works was somewhat difficult but after a little bit of messing around with it we got the hang of it.
(Solid Works Box Design)
On Friday, we went to help out another student at the college who was working on a project called the Pluto Hop, Skip, and Jump mission. This mission hopes to land a rover on Pluto using a balloon similar to the mars landing mission. The thing that we were helping with was testing model of a balloon that they hoped to use to bounce the Pluto rover on the surface. In order to test it, we hung the model balloon from a catwalk in a large OSU basketball stadium called Gallagher-Iba. We then dropped it to collect data about the pressure on the inside of the balloon as well as other things. We did one successful drop but the other times we dropped it, the balloon popped and we had to tape it closed again. This day was probably my favorite because we got to see a lot of the other buildings on campus and dropping the balloon from the top of the stadium was fun. Inside one of the building was a lab that had robotic foosball table that would play against you that had only lost three times.
(Balloon Dropped from Gallagher-Iba, Automatic Foosball Table)
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