Sean Reichle

I chose this accelerometer specifically for it’s ability to accurately measure up to 250g’s of force. It’s one of the key components to these experiments since I’m really curious how many g’s and what kind of speed my rocket booster will produce in the upper stratosphere without any atmosphere. The data logger will save these measurements so I can do the math to calculate just how much booster I’ll need to achieve the necessary speed for a low earth orbit.

I’m still researching what transmitter I can use that fits my package limitations and requirements which are fairly simple, broadcast my audio message. I’d like to be able to transmit data but I still haven’t found a solution for this distance. Any ideas?

This is one of the coolest components I got for this project. It’s driven by an arm processor and accepts a simple serial data stream and writes it to the Micro SD card. Since it saves all the data In plain text files I’ve been writing the software for the computer that reads all the sensors to output all the collected data In an XML style markup language so I can upload the data file to my server and parse each sensors data to store in the database from each flight. I can then express the data in charts later on my web server and log as many missions as I need for easy comparison. It wasn’t very expensive and it’s fully programmable. Just compile your arm program and save it to the sd card you load on the device and the boot loader initiates that program on boot. With support for up to 2gb micro sd cards it’s a very capable and versatile component for any scientific data collection project. You’ll find it at sparkfun.com