https://youtu.be/R3vGVNKkoVk
Kevin is still on his way back from Black Rock without good internet connection, so I'm posting this for him.
This is a screen recording from the iPhone I used to track Kevin's minimum diameter M rocket he flew at BALLS on Sunday. I only got Kevin a full working set of hardware a week before BALLS, so all the focus has been on the functionality rather than the aesthetic. Still, it's a functional app with a cool feature of letting your phone point toward your rocket. The arrow at the top shows the azimuth (left-right) direction, and the bubble level on the left shows you how much to tilt the phone in order to make it line up with where the rocket is in the sky. It's fun and intuitive to use on a real flight in person, but in this screen capture video it looks pretty random because you can't see the phone motions that the arrow and bubble are responding to.
There are some data dropouts and data transmission errors that came from having the ground station in my pocket and sometimes having my body between the ground station and the rocket. The first few points during the liftoff are weird in the recording because of the GPS trying to figure out how it just got from sitting still to a vertical Mach 1.3. But by the time I took my eyes off the rocket liftoff and started looking at the phone, the GPS had it figured out.
After reviewing the data for this flight that was logged in the tracker in the rocket, I realized that a couple of the odd data points are coming from a new feature I was trying to add to the firmware that morning just before the flight. More on that later. Anyway, consider this a work in progress.
Kevin is still on his way back from Black Rock without good internet connection, so I'm posting this for him.
This is a screen recording from the iPhone I used to track Kevin's minimum diameter M rocket he flew at BALLS on Sunday. I only got Kevin a full working set of hardware a week before BALLS, so all the focus has been on the functionality rather than the aesthetic. Still, it's a functional app with a cool feature of letting your phone point toward your rocket. The arrow at the top shows the azimuth (left-right) direction, and the bubble level on the left shows you how much to tilt the phone in order to make it line up with where the rocket is in the sky. It's fun and intuitive to use on a real flight in person, but in this screen capture video it looks pretty random because you can't see the phone motions that the arrow and bubble are responding to.
There are some data dropouts and data transmission errors that came from having the ground station in my pocket and sometimes having my body between the ground station and the rocket. The first few points during the liftoff are weird in the recording because of the GPS trying to figure out how it just got from sitting still to a vertical Mach 1.3. But by the time I took my eyes off the rocket liftoff and started looking at the phone, the GPS had it figured out.
After reviewing the data for this flight that was logged in the tracker in the rocket, I realized that a couple of the odd data points are coming from a new feature I was trying to add to the firmware that morning just before the flight. More on that later. Anyway, consider this a work in progress.