Featherweight Tracker Build 90

The over-the-horizon lost rocket feature is now available in the public build, 90. Updates from a found rocket come in every ~16 seconds when it has good GPS sky coverage. We also streamlined switching between trackers for the case where you have one GS watching 2 trackers.

Time to try to lose some rockets!

I would skip 90 and go to 91. Build 90 had a minor bug that after changing the frequency, the TRK and GS were on the new frequency/channel, but the display for the GS did not update to reflect the change.

Kevin or Adrian,

Can you suggest a process for testing the functionality of the Lost Rocket feature using 2 trackers and 1 GS and the simulation feature?

I haven't had much success with what I was trying.

What I did was turn on GS1 and TRK1 and wait for communication each way and satellite reception. Went to the SIM page and selected 10Gs, 2sec, 270 degrees (only way I could get positive Vvel) and Main of 600. It would flash to the TRACK page, I'd see the velocity and altitude rise until apogee and then everything would zero out. I assumed this is where the SIM ends. I then turned off the GS1 to simulate lost signal. Waited >5 minutes. Fired up GS1 and TRK2. Waited for communication between the two and sat reception. Ran the SIM again with TRK2, same configuration. Kept checking the FOUND page and there wasn't anything there ever. Where did I go wrong?

Thanks y'all.

ok, first I think the degrees for the sim are 'off vertical' so I usually do a sim at maybe 7, 7, 7,800 (7 gs, 7 seconds and 7 degrees, main at 800). I will try this shortly but want to make a couple notes... The tracker will come out of lost mode if it talks to the GS again OR *it gets blue tooth connection again*. So with your scenario, you could wait till trk1 lands and then remove it from the device page (swipe left / delete) because you want your GS to not talk to it anymore. then I would close iFIP entirely and restart it without trk1 in the list. then change to watching trk2 (no need to launch Turk) and wait ~5 minutes (so trk1 goes 'lost') and go to the 'Found' page and see if it shows up there. [I need to add a popup that tells you when a found rocket is encountered I think - but don't want to interfere with someones flight with popups so I need to think about that...]

I'm guessing that when you fired the GS back up, it eventually made BLE contact to TRK1 and so it assumes it is no longer lost (because you are in blue tooth range).

Let me try to replicate it... oh, did you have voice on for your sim? if you stay on the track tab (arrow/bubble) then it should give you altitude readouts along the way - too wordy I think still but I'll work on that....

I think the problem you had was with the 270 degree flight angle on the sim. Zero is straight up. Not sure how the sim would deal with that. Land shark?

For a tracker to go into lost rocket mode, it needs to detect launch, landing, and have no Bluetooth or LoRa comm for 5 minutes after landing. For a tracker to receive lost rocket packets, both it and the lost rocket need to have GPS lock. To test this out with the current build, I recommend the following procedure:

1. Delete all but the "lost" rocket and a ground station from your devices list.
2. Get the lost tracker talking with the ground station and check the GPS tab to make sure it has GPS lock.
3. Start the sim for the lost tracker with reasonable values for Gs, burn time, and angle (10 Gs, 2 seconds, 2 degrees is a nice normal flight)
4. Use the track tab to verify that the simulated flight is running. Use the GPS tab to make sure that the tracker has a GPS lock. When the sim has landed, it goes back to the pure GPS position, but the tracker stays in landed mode.
5. Delete the lost rocket from your devices list. This will cut off Bluetooth comm to it.
6. Turn on another tracker and change it to a different frequency, and set the GS to match. This will cut off LoRa communication to the "lost" tracker. 5 minutes from this point you should see found rocket packets coming in. The lost tracker will appear to turn off for a few seconds and you'll see the red transmit LED turn on much less frequently.

I just tried this with 3 of my units and it all worked nicely, with a new found packet coming in about every 16 seconds. And I got to hear the voice for the first time too, since I hadn't gotten a chance to try that before. I think the voice intervals are actually pretty good, though round numbers on the way up would be nice.

Thanks guys. I’ll go try this.

On the angle, I tried 0 initially and got negative velocity reading and no altitude gain so I just kept messing with it until I received positive velocity and altitude. Not sure how that happened.

That advice worked perfect and I had no problems performing the test. Very cool feature! Nice work y'all.

Kevin, maybe something simple on the TRACK and GPS page would be nice for notifying of a lost rocket, rather than a popup that has to be acknowledged. Like a little indicator light of some sort. Perhaps like this:

Coming back to this - yes, if you're flying, you surely don't want a popup to acknowledge that your tracker found another rocket on the ground... perhaps simply a voice readout that a rocket was found (and try to pronounce the name of the found rocket...) so that you knew to check for the information afterwards. plus the 'call out' of the found rocket would be heard by others in the launch area...

Any update for an Android app? I understand you want to get the iPhone app in good condition for easy transition over. Just curious if there Is a rough timeline. Thanks!

Love the indicator lite idea. longshot: Is there any chance in the sim area for a button that asks the transmitter so enter ‘lost rocket’ state without need to detect launch, etc to turn it into a pure tracker (love to attach to kids quad)

tollyman said:

Any update for an Android app? I understand you want to get the iPhone app in good condition for easy transition over. Just curious if there Is a rough timeline. Thanks!

Click to expand...

This, please this.

warnerr said:

Love the indicator lite idea. longshot: Is there any chance in the sim area for a button that asks the transmitter so enter ‘lost rocket’ state without need to detect launch, etc to turn it into a pure tracker (love to attach to kids quad)

Click to expand...

It's already a pure tracker. Not sure if by quad you mean the driving kind or the flying kind, but either way you would want to just keep in the default mode that it's in during power up. The lost rocket mode is only really beneficial if the unit is on the ground, out of contact for a while, and there are other units flying above it.

thanks Adrian- i use the second tracker on 4 wheel when my daughter takes off. My hope was if i lose contact, she drives far into desert, that as long as i was flying my other unit i should be able to pick up her distant signal again.