Featherweight Sparrow Altimeter

cwbullet said:

Anybody know if the sparrow is still in the works?

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Might not have the time to develop anymore? The EggTimer Qwark is pretty small but doesn't store any data. Something smaller than a Raven would be interesting. I have a Parrot but I don't like that I have to have a hole to turn the onboard battery on
and another switch to turn on the pyro battery. Plus could have a bad ematch with the Parrot and the continuity is the same. The continuity beep is the same even if one out of the three used channels is good.
I had a failure when I missed one leg of the ematch for the apogee charge. Nice to have audible indication of continuity of each channel. Rocket went in when main shockcord broke. Some devices I like one switch to turn everything on and be done with it. Kurt

I have to agree that the quark is a good alternative. I just think it would be great to have a smaller alternative that stores.

ksaves2 said:

Only issues with the Raven 3 is with very high altitude flights. Since I don't do that, not a problem for me. There is a bug in the Raven 2 if anyone is going to be flying above 60k they should be aware of. Not going to 60k? Don't worry.

Kurt

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The bug referred to here was fixed in 2011. The Raven2 and the Raven3 do great up to about 100,000 feet with default settings (baro-based apogee detection). The Raven 2 can be pushed up to about 120 kft with a special firmware load that has more filtering on the baro sensor.

cwbullet said:

Anybody know if the sparrow is still in the works?

Click to expand...

I couldn't quite make enough time for it to get over the hump to production in 2013. In my regular job now (at Deep Space Systems, no longer at Moon Express) I'm working on electronics or system-level testing for 4 different spacecraft, so I don't really have more time, but for some reason recently I've been more motivated to do altimeter development anyway. But the Sparrow that got to the prototype stage in this thread is not going to happen, because a lot of its parts are already outdated. Perhaps that's why I'm more motivated now; there's a whole new generation of commercial parts to take advantage of that could lead to some really kick-butt products. I feel bad for talking up a product in this thread that I didn't follow through on, so don't expect much more info until I know I can make it happen.

If you could make a new Raven with "tilt" detection for 2 stage flights, that would be a welcomed addition to the birds.