µracoli is going to space

Launching Rocket

Since the last year Torsten and his son David are engaged hobby rocket scientists. They work with modell rockets, which have usually a lentgh of 15cm to 2m. These models are made of cardboard or glass-fiber plastics and are powered by solid fuel engins or hybrid engins. Modell rockets usually reach heights from 100m up to 1500m over ground, depending on the size of modell and the engine.

Beside the fun of designing and building the models, they also wanted  to measure data during the flight and send them in realtime to a ground station. As ground station a laptop with an Sensor-Terminal-Board from dresden elektronik was used. This boards have the advantage that they use a parallel to USB converter FT245BM, that allows high data rates between the microcontroller and the PC. The live data was written to logfiles and postprocessed later to get the resulting graphs and diagramms.

ROSE board mouned in rocket tip

Daniel build a circular PCB called ROSE (rocket sensor), consisting of an ATmega, an AT86RF231 transceiver and several sensors to measure physical parameters like air pressure, acceleration and earth magnetic field. This parameters are sent wirlessly to the ground station and logged on the Laptop.

For general information about modell rocket sports , check this page http://www.ag-modellraketen.de/ (in german).