NAR RSA Telemetry

Overview

Please see the NAR Rocket Science Achievement page for complete details on the RSA program.

My submission for the telemetry award is based upon the vNARCON 2022 altimeter make it take it project with the addition of a GPS receiver to the airborne segment and the creation of a ground station.

The heart of the ground system is the Adafruit ESP32 Feather V2 w.FL Antenna microcontroller. This particular model has a connector for an external antenna and a WiFi Antenna with w.FL / MHF3 / IPEX3 Connector was used for this application. The display is a Monochrome 0.96" 128x64 OLED Graphic Display - STEMMA QT and is used for a quick display of ground station status and telemetry reception.

The flight took place at the NOVAAR launch of 2022-11-12. A FlightSketch Mini altimeter (data available here) was flown as a cross check.

Required Data

Please find a list of the required data below:

RequirementSubmitted dataNotes
FAA Class 1 or Class 2 rocket design Estes Green Eggs Right click to save the Rocksim design file to your local machine.
Award application Adobe Acrobat format
This award is for candidates that have constructed and successfully flown their Hobby Rocket with in-flight telemetry that records and displays in real time data reflecting the insight to the dynamics of the rocket flight. These may include altitude, acceleration, and speed; but must contain at least one or more other significant data points. Roll rates, attitude, 3-axis accelerations, 6DOF, or 9DOF etc… Gamma rays, radiation, and other science data is welcome. Temperature and humidity are being telemetered. Acceptable per email of 2022-01-25 with J E Thompson.
The successful award candidate will submit the ground recorded data from the flight Data recorded in ground station Simply a capture of received text using the CoolTerm program. This data starts shortly before launch and end shortly after landing.
along with a video clip of at least a portion of the real time display being used at the candidate’s mission control observation point. Screen capture during the flight Started shortly before flight and ends moments after landing.

The Payload

Recovery photo

The Software

Here is the Arduino source code in a tar archive.

Look in the overview above for a description of the GPS module to be added to the flight unit and for the modules needed for the ground station.

Note that you'll need to modify the DOMITI.h file to include the ID numbers for your two processor boards.

Credits

Thanks to Adafruit for offering such great products and tutorials. Thanks to Bruce Canino for co-hosting the vNARCON presentation with me. Thanks to NOVAAR for being such a great club. Thanks to Steve Morris for agreeing to witness the flight.