Infinity: 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: