I'm a Rocket!
My ham radio interests revolve mostly around packet modes - specifically APRS (where I go by N3VEM-11) and 70cm LoRa.
In addition to radio, I really like telemetry, ammonium perchlorate, wide open spaces, anything written by Newton, and getting high.
(*disclaimer* I'm not REALLY a rocket - just a person pretending to be one)
To add insult to injury, I’ve left it running on battery power all night, so approaching 10 hours, and haven’t had nary a power blip😤
I’m now suspecting that maybe a wire somewhere was just loose, which has me thinking that maybe it’s time to take the hodgepodge of parts that are wired together in there, and just make a couple custom PCBs, to reduce the rats nest of point to point wiring.
Arg. At our recent launch our fancy ground station kept wanting to shut down, with what behaved like a power issue, so I assumed I was getting too much voltage drop when firing the igniters or something. With the same setup, firing the same types of igniters, and batteries not charged or anything since then, I can’t reproduce the issue on the workbench.
Angry rocket am I.
Even though a ground station power issue kept us from testing our V4 electronics today, we still had a blast launching a few of the kids’ rockets!
We had some successful launches of the kids rockets, but we did not end up launching the radio rocket test, because of some flaky power issue on our ground station that I’ll need to troubleshoot.
Conditions at the moment are looking good for a launch tomorrow, so we’re lining up our stuff at the door to load in the car in the morning. Each of the kids picked out a rocket to launch and we’ll also launch Ponzu with our current “minimally viable” version 4 electronics, to test out the bits that are done so far.
We’ll set up the AREDN stuff too, which should let us send data via the mesh back home, where we can then push out some toots in your general direction.
Can’t say for sure yet, but we’re tentatively planning to try to make up last week’s cancelled launch this coming Sunday. At the moment conditions look OK, but we’ll see over the next couple days what the forecast looks like.
Quadratus is starting to look a little bit like the 3D mock-up😀
And now it’s raining too, so I guess nature was trying to give us a message today😀
Officially scrubbing - wind is still in the wrong direction, and is stronger than initially forecast. In good news though, another one of our boards arrived from JLCPCB so we’ll be able to work on that this week👍
There is a good chance we’ll have to scrub our launch plans for tomorrow - the wind will be borderline, but probably okay. The catch is that the wind will be coming from the opposite direction than our normal prevailing winds, which would blow the rockets towards the school buildings, instead of across neighboring field, if there are any miscalculations. Still TBD, but not looking great at the moment
@RadioRocket
…don’t ever say “push out some toots” again…
🤣🫶💨
We are tentatively planning to launch some rockets this coming Sunday - each kiddo will probably launch one or 2 of theirs, and if I can sort out a couple details, we’ll use Ponzu to do a first flight test on our v4 electronics which aren’t done, but are in what could be considered a “minimally viable” state if I can sort out a couple things this week for the on-board antenna.
We should also be able to push out some toots if things are moving smoothly 😏
Exciting update for Radio Rocket Version 4, Quadratus, aka Bertha, Queen of the Hagfish:
Our new electronics now include an actual working radio😀. We moved from a LoRa module on a breakout board, to a LoRa module on one of our custom boards, so we were able to remove another 10cm of horizontal length of our sled (replaced an 11cm long def with a 1cm length module and stacking headers.
Was feeling mostly better by this afternoon, so while I didn’t get parts for the vacuum chamber I tooted about earlier, I did do this….
Gotta love a good hack.
More parts for v4 - a couple LoRa modules and some little dev boards.
Soldering up a second “main” cpu board for version 4. The first one worked great, but the stacking headers I used were stupid tight to press the boards in the stack together and take them apart (actually had to squeeze/pry them with pliers). Switched to one with a square tail and ‘low insertion force’ and they slide together like butter.
Early peek at the new brains for version 4 of the radio-rocket!
Version 3 played a Rick Roll when booting up, but for Quadratus, the 12yo wanted Mario.
This helps us know that’s turned on - since this is inside the rocket, it’s hard to tell if it’s turned on without an audio indication of sorts
