I am fascinated by the details in the data. Red is acceleration, Green is velocity, Blue is altitude. Plotted over time; x-axis is seconds. I cropped the long tail of the fall back to Earth.
My Dizzy Bee rocket accelerated from 0 to Mach 1 in 2 seconds flat.
It took 37 seconds to coast to apogee, and then 5 minutes to tumble back to earth, with parachute deployment at 1000 ft. That was a nail-biter as it passed overhead at an average downward clip of 65 MPH and landed near our camp in the desert.
The HCX computer in the prototype avionics bay recorded 500 samples/second from the accelerometer and barometric pressure sensor. I’ll mark some interesting details in note overlays on the graph.
Independent of that flight computer was a GPS system in the same payload bay, which broadcast down at 1.5 second intervals. It is probably the most accurate, and it recorded the max altitude as 33,701 ft. MSL.
Big thanks to Rob Briody for lending me this developmental avionics package. I am totally hooked, and can’t wait to buy one. Gone is the wiring nest routing wires through bulkheads and to various computer connections, and unreliable screw switches, and the need to replace and secure the Duracells when they drop below 9.2V, and wondering about the jumper settings, and wondering if the GPS locked, and standing on a ladder next to a fueled rocket, futzing with screwdrivers (breaking screw switches, which I have done twice) and putting an ear on the rocket to listen for the beep sequence, and wondering where the rocket went, and what wind effects it saw while airborne. The rocket arming and feedback and telemetry feed all comes over the same radio with a 40 mile range. Now if it could also arm and control a videocamera and send sample frames down between GPS reads, I would be on cloud F9. =)
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