The PDM didn’t work as desired so I’ve been troubleshooting that and contending with life, as usual. My power supply seems to have stopped producing power as well. This is the second one I bought. The first was DOA and now this one (a cheap one from Amazon)… I’m just going to get a good one now.

On the plus side, Pop Chart Lab’s Chart of Cosmic Exploration arrived. I’m going to use it to help me check every probe/satellite for ion density sensors and then try to get the data from those sensors. That data can then be built into a model that I can use to estimate how fast the ships can accelerate, and what speeds they can attain, prior to leaving the solar system.

Progress was slow through the start of 2015 due to a wait for the sled’s “plumbing”. That is now done so work has begun on designing the net’s electronics. You can see a preview here:

Hard at work.

That is an Arduino Due, some AD5206 variable resistors, and a small piece of the net, which is actually silver mesh. Once I figure out how to talk to the 5206s I’ll hopefully be able to scale things up for the sled. More about that in a future update.

Yesterday a major advance forward happened. My vacuum chamber’s vent valve finally arrived last week, so I was able to test the chamber out safely. About three hours in, the vacuum had already arrived at 5 mtorr. It worked great!

It’s probably time for a little introduction. Here’s the chamber:

Cryogenic Associates built it a while back. It’s about four feet tall and just under 14 inches in diameter. I got a laugh because there is a “Property of NASA” sticker on it. Anyway, the lid you see above turned out to be a little funky, so John from JW Machine built me a new one. Highly recommended.

Regardless, this is the setup I presently have in my basement:

The pump is hiding behind that console with the gauge on it, and is a Pfeiffer Duo 2.5M. Just after shutting the pump off, again after three hours, this was the reading:

What this means is that I finally have a good environment to test my idea in, so I can finally begin worrying about the testbed more than the test environment!

We finally have a working vacuum chamber, which quickly revealed a need for a way to release the vacuum without a sonic boom. The ‘vent valve‘ is of course back ordered, so development efforts are focusing on building the testbed and learning more about the Arduino Uno. The Arduino will be used to sense the turbulence within the chamber and adjust the voltage going to the net to counteract it.