Water Rockets Summer II --- MATTEO V.I --- (part ii)

(If you have not seen yet the previous chapter ...)

Wondering about Matteo V.I?

I will show you ...

And this is its flight ...

It is a pretty nice flight but ... it ends in the sea ... not too good for Arduino ...

Light tech specs:

• 2.250L coca-cola bottle filled with about 1/3 flat water.
• About 4 psi @ the moment of launching
• 3 secs time out for parachute deployment

And now the crash story:

Well, if you have seen the video you will have noticed that Matteo V lands in the sea ...

Lets say that electronics and salt may not be as friends as they would like to,

Post-mortem

I need to analyse the video to really see what happened. When I went to rescue the rocket into the see the parachute was deployed. My guess is that it opened just in the sea but I'm not sure, I've to video edit and video analyse. This will require a whole new blog entry.

It took me about 1 full day of work to assemble everything (sparsed in 1week of holidays). The first thing is that is nice to prototype in paperboard but set the whole structure there and manipulate it once and again is is not a good idea, re-use policarbonate.

• Bad idea to put the servo in one corner (I expected to let more space to the parachute)
• Bad idea the duct-tape re-enforcements
• Bad idea the paper board
• Bad idea to expect and ideal world of circles and triangles, real world is more complicated, specially if you have an arduino with a lcd keypad which makes kind of thick

• Bad idea to just hold the battery with duct-tape, the sun can make struggles in duc-tape
• It was a good idea to use a bridle to hold all the cables.

• I think a need to set more ballast an obviously put that helpful plastic bag inside the nose in case the parachute does not open!
• Once again, bad idea the duct tape of the battery.

• Great idea that kind of switch that I set outside the rocket

• You can see how thick is the electronics. That's why the world is not perfect and it does not perfectly fit in a perfect round bottle inside a perfect circle witin a perfect triangle. The world is not perfect, thanks God!

• The servo really does not need to be in the corners.

Water Rockets Summer II --- MATTEO V.I --- (part i)

Intro

What have I been doing this summer?
My favorite hobby, arduino and water rockets. Here it is a taste of what I'm going to tell you:

That's a lot! Many things, many, many.
Last summer (2013) me and my assistant, did a first version of the Matteo Water Rocket, the Matteo 4.0. It was really cool but we're missing a parachute. So we let the parachute for this year project.

By the way, let me introduce you my assistant

We thought that setting up a parachute was an easy task (Wrong!!!) We discovered we it is called rocket science. As long as you enter in this passionate world you will be introducing more a more tech. Digging into the internet I did not see a real mechanical mechanism for the parachute deployment. I was really dissapointed! Really? Should it be that difficult? Well, the only appeling thing that I saw was an electrical programmable lock.

I will be honest, if you want to build the deployment mechanism just follow this web, or do a little web digging.

Let's begin by the electronics. It is really easy, nothing fancy, it is just a timer and when it is done just opens the door holding the parachute.

The hardware side:

Electronics mechanisms for parachute deployment of water rocket using:

• Arduino 
• lcd shield (http://www.dx.com/p/2-6-lcd-keypad-shield-for-arduino-green-black-161359)  
• microservo (http://www.dx.com/p/mg90s-metal-geared-micro-servo-for-plane-helicopter-car-boat-red-orange-black-274655#.U_dqgMWSw4E)

The software side:

  Really easy but if you like, you can find my code here: 

How it works

At the moment of this video the parachute was not already done but the mechanism. I realized a couple of things, first, 

• it is no 100% relaible, 
• the material of the door has to be the same as the bottle itself so when building this kind or rocket you need at least 3 bottles.
• The ejection plate has to be as close as the opening door but not as to get blocked. 

Once the parachute was done, the load got like this:

Public presentation before launch off

Presentation done by my assistant:

Locked door

Main CPU and flight control

Parachute and nose see atached parachute to the main throttle

The flight (23 Augost 2014 @ 15:00 CET, 38°50′25″N0°06′3)

You can hear someone laughing in the background ... :-)

Next ...