DorMouse

DorMouse (pictured below), is a flight computer, designed to go in the nose cone of a model rocket. We built DorMouse for the Sunday 2nd Rocket launch at EARS, though plan to continue to use it for low to medium level model rocket launches. It has a large suite of sensors, including 2 accelerometers (16g, 200g), a barometer, and a uBlox GPS, all of which are logged to an SD card, with a polling rate for most of the sensors of at least 500Hz. There’s also an XBEE on board for coarse live data at the highest rate the signal strength allows. DorMouse is controlled by a 72MHz (STMF103RFT6) ARM CPU.

Actual size: 4×7 cm
Headers shown are for an XBEE

We are particularly grateful to the Cambridge Circuit Company for delivering the first revision of the DorMouse PCBs, one of which was partially assembled for the first launch. It was unfortunately afflicted by a software (DMA related) bug which prevented it from flying … though in a rocket whose front section was subsequently lost – a near miss!

We’ll have an update once the full board is assembled, and we plan to do an even smaller revision 2. Other fun future ideas include adding a precise timestamp to all the logged data, using the GPS unit for timing.