Interim Report: GPS-guided Rocket Recovery

Saturn Zero

or,

Nevada Dave and the Rocket-Eating Trees

This is my presentation for NARCON 2010 (was NEMROC 2008 … see below), summarizing my efforts over the last three years since 2006 toward building a model rocket that won’t get lost.

The idea is that it carries a GPS and a steerable parachute, so it steers itself back to the launch pad on the way down.

An introduction to the project is in the PowerPoint presentation below.  Fair warning: It’s 60 Mbytes.

Update January 2010: I’ve posted all the hardware design and source code for the “Rev 3” hardware on this site.   The main index to the series of posts is here.

Update March 2010: I’ve replaced the presentation with a slightly updated version that I presented at NARCON 2010.  It discusses a little about the “Rev 4” hardware, based on the 32-bit PIC32 MCU, toward the end. Download all 3 files (and put them in the same folder) if you want the Google Earth links to work.

2010-03 NARCON Presentation.ppt (PowerPoint file)

1004_f2_pressure.kml (Google Earth .KML file, flight of 2008-10-04)

1101f2_pressure.kml (Google Earth .KML file, flight of 2008-11-01)

If PowerPoint is an issue, here’s a PDF version of the slides (15 MB):

2010-03 NARCON Presentation.pdf (PDF)

3 thoughts on “Interim Report: GPS-guided Rocket Recovery

  1. Thanks. This talk was from early this month (November 2008) so it’s pretty much up to date.

    Things are going a bit slower now as I don’t have as much time to work on it as I used to (pressure of business stuff).

    I’m still hopeful that I’ll get the GPS guidance thing working by the fall of 2009 – the flying season here (Boston) has just ended.

    I _will_ post the CAD files for the PCBs and the firmware on this site, Real Soon Now.

    –Dave

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