From May 31 to June 4, the SpaceDucks team at Cal Poly is conducting its fourth round of launches, where the team launches five to seven payloads on a weather balloon, testing its electronics. Each launch is an attempt to improve its devices and get closer to preparing for a full orbital device in space, according to OWL Integrations CEO and Co-founder Bryan Knouse.
During the launch days, the team will be on a 400-acre ranch house near Cal Poly that is the headquarters for the launch. During this, SpaceDucks members are hacking together satellites.
The SpaceDucks team at Cal Poly is partnered with OWL Integrations to launch devices at high altitudes. OWL Integrations was originally formed to provide disaster relief aid after Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Irma in 2017.
OWL Integrations came up with a device called “the duckling” to bring communications back online to communities that lost it during the hurricane. They formed cluster duck networks and rapidly deployed them to these regions to give them a basic level of communication, according to Knouse.
Knouse said having devices on the ground presents problems like them getting lost in a natural disaster, or stolen.
Bryan Knouse/Space Ducks | Courtesy
“Even when we were first going to India, they were telling us about, you know, we really got to make sure your devices are sealed up tight so that they’re monkey-proof,” Knouse said. “And I thought she meant, like, monkeying around is sort of like a metaphor like, people screwing with them. They said, ‘No literal monkeys break into everything in this region, and you need to make sure they can handle that.’”
Sarah Storelli, a Cal Poly alumnus, told OWL Integrations to check out Cal Poly at the same time aerospace engineering sophomore Evan Agarwal launched a styrofoam box on an atmospheric weather balloon to create a capsule for an animal to survive in. Agarwal put a live mouse in during the experiment to be launched 100,000 ft, for the goal of designing a space capsule for human flight.
Bryan Knouse/Space Ducks | Courtesy
“I saw this article and I was fascinated about the idea,” Knouse said.
He said they reached out to Agarwal because OWL had been considering putting their technology – which they call “ducks” – into space to sit and operate above natural disasters.
That year, Agarwal, Knouse and Agarwal’s aerospace friends conducted the first SpaceDucks round.
Knouse said their partnership grew into the entire startup company at OWL with 25 undergraduate students, masters students and three professors collaborating. They conduct joint U.S. Air Force-sponsored research and have secured $1 million to support SpaceDucks initiatives and research at Cal Poly.
Knouse said this couldn’t have been a better partnership that came by chance.
“I love the relationship with Cal Poly. It’s one of the most cherished personal and professional relationships in my life,” Knouse said. “[The] students are top tier. The professors are so knowledgeable and highly engaged. This is a relationship we think is going to last for a very long time to come.”
Last year, the teams lost three of the six payloads they launched. This year, their goal is to recover every single device by implementing new tracking technologies.
They want to improve the electronics, manufacture fully made American electronics and test new types of radio communication techniques, Knouse said.
Electrical engineering senior Joseph Nuccio is working on automated test code with his partner to test the capability, connection, strength of connection, range and knowing if radios are broken or malfunctioning with their code.
Nuccio said this experience has prepared him well for entering the electrical test engineering industry.
“Working the entire past year on test code directly from hardware and also implementing it directly in SpaceDucks is a really good thing to put on my resume to say that I have written test code that is going to go to near space,” Nuccio said.
Electrical engineering graduate student Kevin Nottberg is the lead of electronics design and development for the project. Nottberg is leading the development of the QUAD, which stands for “Quacker Advanced Development.”
The name comes from the “Quaker board” he worked on for his senior capstone project in 2020. OWL had sponsored this senior capstone
Nottberg said launching these devices on a weather balloon is cheaper than launching them within a CubeSat, the standard for launching items into space developed by Cal Poly in 1999. The balloons are launched 100 thousand to 110 thousand feet to expose these devices to a cold temperature and vibrational environment.
“That is the goal of SpaceDucks,” Nottberg said. “We kind of just hack together some cool electronics, make sure that they work at the extremes, and then the other goal is to go for range.”
Electrical engineering senior Nicolas Alvarez is working with electrical engineering senior Douglas Liu for their senior project to develop a revision of the QUAD board, called QUAD RC-2, that they hope will be ready in time to be launched on the weather balloon.
“It is kind of a privilege to have your hardware way up in the sky and being able to test your communication way up is pretty cool,” Alvarez said.
Liu is also involved in designing a camera system for one of the payloads to take a picture of the balloon popping and the environment near space.
Liu said OWL has been helpful in the resources and information they share with them and said it is a great learning opportunity to get their “hands dirty” with real-world experience.
“It is a really eye-opening experience to be a part of the senior project,” Liu said.
Nottberg said the great thing about OWL is that as a small company, the stuff they build at Cal Poly is “intimately important” for OWL.
“The stakes or the importance of this work is really exciting,” Nottberg said. “The other thing is through projects like SpaceDucks, we actually build and deploy the electronics in real-time and we’ve learned in real time whether the thing works.”