This blog covers the day to day progress of water rocket development by the Air Command Water Rockets team. It is also a facility for people to provide feedback and ask questions.

Friday, January 21, 2011

3 Projects

Although I haven’t done new updates to the main website for a while, I have been busy with 3 rocket related projects, mostly the reason I haven’t done an update. The main project has been to get the Polaron G2 flight ready. As a part of that I have the deployment mechanism ready for flight testing on a small rocket this Sunday at the local park. If everything goes well, I’ll mount the mechanism on the G2 rocket ready for next week’s launch. Craig lent me one of his latest flight computers to fly along and gather data. It will also serve as a backup altimeter for the flight. I still need to mount it in the payload bay.

The second project has been writing an application to go with Craig’s flight computer that can visualize the recorded data and configure the flight computer. I’ll post more data on this later with the first official release of this application. This has been taking up at least half of my rocket time.

The third project is the next iteration of the flight computer we use in our rockets. I’ve got the prototype working now on a breadboard, and all the new firmware has been written. I’m currently choosing the final SMD components and then I’ll finish off the PCB layout. This version is simpler to use and less than half the size and weight of V1.6. It should also be cheaper. It will still be a while before these are available as I need to write the documentation and do flight testing first. At the moment it’s looking like 3 months or so due to all the other projects.

4 comments:

rstaff said...

Building things is the best reason for not fiddling with a web site! Unfortunately, I have been just the opposite over the last several months :(

George Katz said...

Hi Dick,

I go in spurts too. Sometimes I spend a week or two on the computer without even venturing into the workshop, and at other times it's the other way round.

It's good to have a break once in a while. Though I have been enjoying reading your reviews you've been posting. :)

Orcslayer said...

Will you be selling the flight computers? Or an FC kit.

George Katz said...

@Orcslayer,

We hope to sell them eventually. I currently don't know the final price yet though, as it will depend on what quantity we end up making as we get component discounts on bulk orders.

We will go through a test period first though where we will fly them on different rockets before they will be available for sale.