- Joined
- Mar 16, 2016
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Lately I have been playing around with building my own Arduino-based rocketry electronics. I realize there are many commercial products already available, but, I like to tinker with electronics and software so I'm working on designing something for myself so that I can play around and customize it to suit my needs. I will be happy to share anything I learn through this process so others may develop their own stuff.
Today I launched my first home-grown altimeter that is based on a SparkFun Pro Micro (which runs the [FONT="] ATmega32U4 chip)[/FONT], a BMP180 baro sensor, and an SD card breakout to log the data I receive. It uses a small LiPo battery for power. The setup worked quite well and logged the entire flight in my Binder Design Excel. I launched it on an I285 and it made it to about 2K feet. Since I'm new to the electronics stuff, I'm still using a Missle Works RRC2+ to control the dual deploy events.
Now that I've proven I can successfully record altitude, I'm looking at having it track the rocket using GPS. What I'm wondering is what's the best GPS chipset out there for an Arduino and what sort of RF link should I use to receive the location information while out at the launch site. I have a few other Arduino boards, so, I'm planning to use one of them as the receiver and then feed the location information into an Android based tablet or phone. The local launch waivers top out at around 15K, so, I'm not too worried about really high altitude. So far I've been looking at RF link stuff in either the 900 Mhz or 433 Mhz band because they seem to provide reasonable range and are license-free in the U.S. Any advice in this area is greatly appreciated.
Today I launched my first home-grown altimeter that is based on a SparkFun Pro Micro (which runs the [FONT="] ATmega32U4 chip)[/FONT], a BMP180 baro sensor, and an SD card breakout to log the data I receive. It uses a small LiPo battery for power. The setup worked quite well and logged the entire flight in my Binder Design Excel. I launched it on an I285 and it made it to about 2K feet. Since I'm new to the electronics stuff, I'm still using a Missle Works RRC2+ to control the dual deploy events.
Now that I've proven I can successfully record altitude, I'm looking at having it track the rocket using GPS. What I'm wondering is what's the best GPS chipset out there for an Arduino and what sort of RF link should I use to receive the location information while out at the launch site. I have a few other Arduino boards, so, I'm planning to use one of them as the receiver and then feed the location information into an Android based tablet or phone. The local launch waivers top out at around 15K, so, I'm not too worried about really high altitude. So far I've been looking at RF link stuff in either the 900 Mhz or 433 Mhz band because they seem to provide reasonable range and are license-free in the U.S. Any advice in this area is greatly appreciated.