An Update On My Raspberry Pi Powered Model Rocket

When I asked the woman behind the counter in the hobby shop for a pack of Estes E12-6 motors, she responded with:

"Oh you must be one of those serious model rocket guys?!"

Yeah, lady. I am serious.

Ed Harris in Apollo 13

This past weekend, on a long-overdue trip home to PA to visit my family, we planned a short excursion to some wide-open space we have free access to for an afternoon of rocketry. Back in September, she had her maiden flight with one successful launch, and one not-so-successful launch when the parachute failed, and now it was time for more.

With the past few months of COVID-19 essentially locking me at home, making some updates to this project was one of the many, many, many projects I took on. Here's a summary of what's new:

  • Refactored air software that separates each sensor reading out into its own thread. This allows for a slightly better sample rate than my single-threaded approach.

  • Added a GPS module for air and ground that reports readings over serial

  • Ground no longer logs data to the Raspberry Pi, it just buffers readings in-memory and emits them via a websocket.

  • Refactored dashboard software to a React-powered Electron app.

  • Refactored altitude calculation to use the first few readings of the pressure sensor as the "floor."

  • Enabled Ethernet link-local support in the ground Raspberry Pi so just connecting it to a host machine over USB powers it and provides a network interface for communication.

It was a cold but sunny day in PA when we launched. Spring hadn't quite reached the Appalachian Mountains, but it was good enough for flight. So we set up the base station and prepped the rocket for launch. OpenRocket estimated we'd hit at least 500 feet with these E12-6 motors, and luckily in this area there's far less concern around amateur flight than in DC where I live.

If you listen carefully to the audio in the beginning of the clip, you can hear my young nieces shrieking with excitement as they watch the rocket ascend into the sky. Despite having three great flights topping 600 feet, the data capture was not great. On the first flight, the new software logged more data than last time, but there were a few key issues that I will need to work on for future launches:

  • My Toughbook was unable to connect to the ground Raspberry Pi despite what I thought was extensive testing. I could've spent more time debugging before the flight, but it was cold and my family was getting impatient. Therefore I relied on chance that I was getting good data.

  • I was not getting good data. The first flight was successful with proper data getting logged inboard, but on subsequent flights, it appears the data may have been truncated or corrupted. The logs from those launches show "flat" data that doesn't change, indicating it never captured the "launch event."

  • On the first flight, the GPS module never acquired a signal.

  • The GPS antenna broke on the impact on the first flight because the nose it the ground too hard, thus rendering that component useless.

  • The first two videos turned out excellent, but the third video was totally black. It seems the Raspberry Pi did not have time to save the video capture data.

  • The coupler section between the two rocket sections is still getting shoved up into the payload section when it hits the ground too hard.

However, the good news is that the rocket continues to be stable with higher-powered motors. (The first flight used D's rather than E's here.) My plan is to make some additional improvements to the software and structure while still chasing down more powerful motors such as the AeroTech F44W. The improvements will include:

  • Use simpler hardware for the ground station that can just emit data over a USB-serial connection. (ie. Arduino) This will require updating the dashboard software to collect data over serial rather than websockets.

  • Redesign the payload chassis to be even stronger without adding too much weight.

  • Add a small pushbutton to the air hardware that forces the software to stop recording, perform any file saving cleanup, and reboot the software. Right now I just pull the battery cable after flights and I think that is causing the file corruption.

  • Potentially find a GPS module that locks onto a signal faster.