Hello my fellow Rocketeers. This is my first Thread, so I hope I'm putting it in the right place, apologies to the mods if I am not.
I have had the pleasure of getting into this hobby only very recently. Where I live you cant get any supplies like you have access to in the states. I have not let that slow me down though, I have had a few successful ballistic launches under my belt hitting just under 300m after many many many failed attempts as I have had to design and test many iterations on the body, fins, cone, and especially the motor itself and its contents. Now that I have reached to this point it has gotten too scary trying to launch without a recovery system, as its in your sights for less than a seconds, followed by 4 seconds of euphoria and happiness, 10 seconds of, oh ohh, where is it...where is it going, to, ok, it should have hit the ground by now..i'm OK!...where did it go! and then spend between 30 to 45 minutes trying to find the remains I do this far out in the desert, so I'm the only one at risk, as well as the vehicle that got me there..I digress..
OK- so, my problem: I have a few Easy Mini's. 1 has already broken to bits after a failed parachute deployment..it never triggered the powderless flakes in the parachute deployment can. ( I cant get BP here..I could make it but figured my other plan might be simpler. I was wrong. I should just make my own BP, but I love to learn , so I'm taking the trickier route and learning!) The issue I found is that the EasyMini only opens the battery power to the Apogee terminal ( to blow the Charge) for 50ms..thats 5% of a second. I have to make my own igniters, and after a lot of Arduino testing, that 50ms is way to short to heat up the nichrome enough to heat up the powderless flakes to ignite, I need at least 200ms, and would prefer 300ms. I emailed Keith and he said that it is possible to modify the code, and would be simple to do just needed to download Debian, GNU GCC, and that students have done far more complex things. Now just to be clear I have no experience with code, software, compiling, to me C was pretty much Chinese. I will not get into Debian, or the reading I had to do to figure out how to download and use it, but that was tricky already.
In the end...I found the file that holds the code to change the 50ms to the 300ms, and saved it. Now for the life of me, and I have been trying I have no idea how to figure out what to do next, what files to compile, how to include all the files, and how to get it all into a .ihx format for me to try to flash into the hardware. Can somebody please please help! I have a rocket that has been sitting infront of me for almost 2 months now, ready to go as soon as I figure this out!
Thank you all for any help you can offer in advance!
Best regards,
UAEFOX
I have had the pleasure of getting into this hobby only very recently. Where I live you cant get any supplies like you have access to in the states. I have not let that slow me down though, I have had a few successful ballistic launches under my belt hitting just under 300m after many many many failed attempts as I have had to design and test many iterations on the body, fins, cone, and especially the motor itself and its contents. Now that I have reached to this point it has gotten too scary trying to launch without a recovery system, as its in your sights for less than a seconds, followed by 4 seconds of euphoria and happiness, 10 seconds of, oh ohh, where is it...where is it going, to, ok, it should have hit the ground by now..i'm OK!...where did it go! and then spend between 30 to 45 minutes trying to find the remains I do this far out in the desert, so I'm the only one at risk, as well as the vehicle that got me there..I digress..
OK- so, my problem: I have a few Easy Mini's. 1 has already broken to bits after a failed parachute deployment..it never triggered the powderless flakes in the parachute deployment can. ( I cant get BP here..I could make it but figured my other plan might be simpler. I was wrong. I should just make my own BP, but I love to learn , so I'm taking the trickier route and learning!) The issue I found is that the EasyMini only opens the battery power to the Apogee terminal ( to blow the Charge) for 50ms..thats 5% of a second. I have to make my own igniters, and after a lot of Arduino testing, that 50ms is way to short to heat up the nichrome enough to heat up the powderless flakes to ignite, I need at least 200ms, and would prefer 300ms. I emailed Keith and he said that it is possible to modify the code, and would be simple to do just needed to download Debian, GNU GCC, and that students have done far more complex things. Now just to be clear I have no experience with code, software, compiling, to me C was pretty much Chinese. I will not get into Debian, or the reading I had to do to figure out how to download and use it, but that was tricky already.
In the end...I found the file that holds the code to change the 50ms to the 300ms, and saved it. Now for the life of me, and I have been trying I have no idea how to figure out what to do next, what files to compile, how to include all the files, and how to get it all into a .ihx format for me to try to flash into the hardware. Can somebody please please help! I have a rocket that has been sitting infront of me for almost 2 months now, ready to go as soon as I figure this out!
Thank you all for any help you can offer in advance!
Best regards,
UAEFOX