The hardware integration is completed for the Vertical Trajectory System with the new version two hardware.
That is for a 98mm rocket airframe. Ignore the white thing on the bottom, that is just a stand for working with it on the bench. In the final incarnation the brass spacers and allthreads will be replaced by titanium bike spokes and carbon-fiber spacers, as was done on the first version. This saves about 200g of mass!
Took about a week for me to get the stupid Bluetooth link with the groundstation (Mission Planner) working. Firstly one of the cheap HC-06 BT boards stopped working, then the second one lost its programming and by the time I finally got all the ports, baud rates, adapters, telemetry port mappings and everything else right there was a week of my spare time gone
. A problem with the BT stack that they used in MP didn't help either. Very pedantic. I hate it when things go that way with many confounding factors.
Next on the list is to get some smaller fins printed on the SLA resin printer. Those ones shown worked ok but gave me far more control authority than I wanted. I will cut the surface area down to about 70%. The new hardware has provision for a pitot-static tube to measure airspeed, and this is used in the PID control loops to modulate control surface excursions based on actual velocity. I guess making a pitot-static tube is in my future as well.
As it stands all my scripts are working, and they control the modes of the system during flight. A main flight script cycles the servos as a visual check of operation , then senses boost and engages the stabilisation at burnout. Stabilisation ceases when tilt exceeds a preset angle, time exceeds 30s, or the NC separates from the module.
I am also working towards getting all the parameters set in the software. There are around 500 parameters that need to be checked and either disregarded or set to the correct anticipated values to get this to cooperate with my application. Slogging away...