NOVA21 had a special guest on board the flight: Wee Rex from Dinosaur Comics! He’s an adorable fluffy squishy stuffed T-Rex. We mounted him on a couple of sticks of balsa wood to the payload containing JOEY-M and the cameras: Then we sent him up, getting a ton of good photos: He got to approximately …
The Joey-M flight computer was soldered up this week, all going fairly well apart from some minor rework required on some of the finer pitched components. Joey-M uses the uBlox NEO-6Q GPS with a Sarantel SL1202 passive antenna, along with a small I2C EEPROM such that configuration can be retained when Joey is powered off. …
We’ve put together a concept design for the launch rail for the Martlet 1 rocket. The rail concept has a 6m truss tower, standing on a base made from standard scaffolding tubes. The tower stands on a hinged plate, that is raise and lowered using guy ropes and winches. The base is held into the …
Today we received the Martlet 1 centering rings from our machining sponsor, Cambridge Precision. The rings are turned from Nylon 6/6. The first sets of rings are to centre the rocket motors in the motor sections. The rings also have 3 radial holes to locate the fins into, and one axial hole for a wiring …
Today we headed to Cambridge Precision, our local machining sponsors. They are making all of the coupling rings for the 3-stage Martlet 1 rocket. We visited their R&D department today, to see the first version of the parts. After the anodisation process, some of the parts were no longer a sliding fit, so sadly we …
The carbon fibre airframe arrived today for the airframe. It is 118ID 122OD, made from 50% axial 50% circumferential uni directional per-preg, with a working temperature of 180 degrees C. The manufacturing process uses spiral wound heat shrink trape, so the surface has been ground smooth to get rid of the spiral ridges. They’re still …
When the fins are bonded into the carbon fibre airframe, some extra carbon fibre will be laid up tip-to-tip to strengthen the fins. We wanted to practice doing this lay-up and make sure that the C-F fabric that we cut is the right shape, so we made a mockup of the fin can. A quick …
Last weekend saw the 20th launch in the CUSF Nova balloon project, carrying two payloads – the experimental Wombat flight computer, and the Squirrel Android flight computer. We also used for the first time the excellent F-203AV mass flow controller (kindly on loan from Bronkhorst who support CU Spaceflight) for regulating the helium filling of …
We got the PCBs for the Joey-M flight computer! These are experimental flight computers using the Micrel crystal pulling radio (see an earlier blog post), along with an Atmel AVR and a uBlox NEO-6Q GPS. Thanks very much to Cambridge Circuit Company for manufacturing these PCBs for us!
Martlet 1 has 3 stages, each stage having a motor section and a parachute section. Each parachute section holds two parachutes: a small spring pilot parachute that is deployed first, to allow the rocket to descend quickly so it doesn’t drift far in the wind, and a large parachute which is deployed near sea level, …
