New high power Rocket launch

Seoul_lasers said:

Some pretty big news coming about the applied technology program and rocketry this year.

A major upgrade is coming to the rocketry program in the form of company sponsors. (being careful not to divulge too much information)
CBC has got wind of our program and will likely be sending out a TV crew to do a TV show spot in October, probably followed by other news agencies. The plan could still change, and any lunch will be weather dependant.... naturally. Hoping for decent weather in October.
One of our local universities will also be joining our launch on the day of filming. The local university has invited us out for one of their launches at the white sands testing facility sometime next year.

This Applied technology rocketry program is the only one of it's kind in Canada.

Stay tuned for more news.

Click to expand...

Good news--beautiful rocket work

Very cool Seoul. Make sure to share the program with us if you get the chance. I never get to watch local launches since they always seem to be at the wrong time.

More rocket stuff coming your way here.
Today I had a look at the new presents coming from various suppliers. We have new more powerful engines this year (muhahah), new loc-precision rocket kits, electronics and a new launching system that I am still putting together.
We have a very special camera coming to us from a sponsor company in PRC that does surprisingly detailed 4K @ 60fps. It is perfect for rocketry.
Our launches this year will be epic in magnitude over last years.

A 3 engine cluster fiberglassed rocket.


Chute deploy with altitude setting.


Altitude/ airspeed sensor. Uses a PIC24 and 3 sensors to generate small text files that are loaded on to a small about of flash memory.



Our other big project is to fix this ancient wind tunnel. We are going to add fog machine for showing airflow and a LED strip to light the inside of the test chamber.
The sensors inside also need fixing as well. It sat for nearly 30 years in the back of the shop and was used 4x. This wind tunnel is worth about $ +4.5K.



Here we have some electronics for measuring altitude, chute deployment and the launcher with a 1.5" rail. The tripod is a home depot purchase. It is a Rockwell Jaw Tripod Stand. Rockwell sounds like it really should be Rocketwell. Oh well...

Enjoy the pics...

Launching will commence in mid-October ~15th. We have our Rocktober posters up all over the school. All out footage is going to go to media and our sponsor companies and school website. :angel:

Looking good Seoul, your rocket program is really growing now! You'll have to share the video from your new camera with us. :yh:

Best wishes with you new builds. They are most diffidently fascinating!

Looking at some of the videos of the launches...
it would be nice to get a video of the rocket
launch from an on board camera looking down
towards the launch point.

Jerry

lasersbee said:

Looking at some of the videos of the launches...
it would be nice to get a video of the rocket
launch from an on board camera looking down
towards the launch point.

Jerry

Click to expand...

That's the intention of the new camera system. It will be housed in a fiberglass shell that will be able to allow the camera to not interfere with the rocket's flight characteristics.

Stay tuned. :evil:

Getting our new boom box up and running.

This is the controller to set off the new rockets. The control box is run by an AMTEL ATmega 328. The display is a sparkfun 7 segment serial display set in a Serial UART mode.

The time is set via the sense pin set to A0 pin with a potentiometer across Vcc and Gnd.

The sketch on the processor sends a 5V TTL level pulse out to an SSR, triggering it to allow 12Vdc @ 25-30A to flow into the ignitor clusters.

The ARM and FIRE switch are the same switch, however the switch is time delayed and can only be set off by going through 3 activations. Once the third activation is reached the countdown firing sequence begins. At anytime the sequence can be halted by pushing the ARM/FIRE switch up. Once halted the system automatically rings a fail alarm and resets to 00:00.

Although, the sketch is based off of the code from arduining.com, the code from that website
uses a library that is now long since obsolete. Changes needed to be made to it in order to get it to run properly.
The serial library SoftwareSerial.h works with all modern arduino platforms. To call the serial port up one needs to use the mySerialPort.write function to write to the sparkfun 7 segment display.

A test today of the completed launching system with SSR installed. have a look at the attached movie.

Launch day is tomorrow! :angel:

Seoul_lasers said:

A test today of the completed launching system with SSR installed. have a look at the attached movie.

Launch day is tomorrow! :angel:

Click to expand...

Nice work -- a successful launch next!

Seoul_lasers said:

A test today of the completed launching system with SSR installed. have a look at the attached movie.

Launch day is tomorrow! :angel:

Click to expand...

Very cool! Looking forward to seeing how the launch goes.

Looks like fun, thanks for sharing.

Well, that was an interesting day.

We had 3 different news agencies covering our rocketry program today. So it got a little crazy.

All and All, we had 2 successful launches out of 3, and we had one motor that kato'ed on the pad. The engine simply blew out, but didn't ignite the fuel, just the ejection charge.... this has never happened before. Also we had a short weather window. The weather changed drastically after 12:30pm here... and the cloud deck started to build when we were firing.

The first rocket shot off the pad at ~1200Km/h and scared the living Sh!t out of the press. It made quite the sound!.... the second heavier rocket only went around 500Km/hr or so and up to an underwhelming 400m on a G80-13T. Video footage taken with our new 4K 30p camera was pretty good. I have included the video here for you to see.

Today was kind of a miss day... the press got a pretty good shot, but the other rocket which was a much faster one failed miserably... though no damage done to the rocket.... bruised ego. --though the press got something, it wasn't what we wanted.

:yabbem:

We ran into some major technical difficulties with the ignitors not igniting the rocket motors and 2 dud motors that "detonated" rather than ignited. So, we are contacting the company to get replacements for these.
NOT pleased... the ignitors burned far too fast to light the propellant.
:yabbem:

Have a look at the motor below... that crack goes all the way through the motor body and the top has completely blown out... the fuel is mostly intact.


strange occurrence.

Our group is on the front page of every newspaper this morning in Victoria. :san:

I like the picture here. Though they did mention about the ignitor mishap

the article was overwhelmingly positive.

More about Monday's rocket launch, click below.

eEditions - Victoria News

I tried posting the article, but I get an error saying that a security certificate for file is missing.

I guess posting .pdfs on LPF is broken?