Fine day flying at Berwick 10/5/2013

OK, so it's our sibling club and not CMASS, but what a great day.

Relatively small turnout, perhaps a dozen or so cars. We had about 60 flights by 2pm, not quite sure if we hit 100 for the day. Kenn would know. He was our LCO for the day and a couple of us took turns relieving Scott at RSO.

For me and son Carmine, it was a day of firsts:

1. First E engine, which also turned out to be...

2. First CATO. The motor just blew through the top of the rocket (my Mega Alpha) taking the motor mount with it. Airframe intact though, so I get a chance to rebuild it properly. Filed the MESS report and reported to Estes.

3. First cluster flight(s). We flew the Deuce's Wild on 2xA8-3 and then later on 2xB6-4. What a nice flying bird! I can see why people scale these up. It's my new favorite rocket.

4. First I motor. I flew the Super DX3 in dual deploy mode up to nearly 1700' on a CTI I170. Good flight and recovery.

5. First real-time telemetry. The XBee that I fly in the DX3 altimeter bay worked this week and a lucky few in the crowd got to see the altitude data plotting real-time on my PC, and to see me very excited, for it was wicked cool! For the geeks, it goes like this:

Perfectfilte data port -> On-board XBee DIN -> On-board XBee transmit into the ether -> Ground Station XBee receives -> Ground station XBee DOUT to PC Serial port -> Processing sketch reads serial port and plots the data real-time. (Also, ground from PF data port is ganged to the XBee ground so that there is a common reference for the data signal).

The ground station is much simplified from my first attempt last week at Amesbury. I realized that I didn't need to use the Arduino microcontroller at all. The XBee acts as a serial pipe, so it was easy to use Processing to read directly from the serial port that the ground XBee was writing to. When in doubt, do as much as possible in software!

I think me and the DX3 are ready for L2. I'll ask to take the test (maybe even show up in Saugus on the 15th to do so at a club meeting), and assuming I pass, will try to fly the DX3 on a J-something in Amesbury on the 19th. With main at 500' I should be able to safely fly and recover on the hay field, wind permitting.

- Matt

Darn, I have still yet to see a Kenn Blade flight! Sorry, it's tough with the long ride home to leave much later than 4:30. Next time I'm sans-Carmine I'll stay to help break camp.

I'm sure after about 100 or so more telemetry flights the excitement will wear off! I've been wanting to fly some sort of telemetry rig since I was a kid and read about the 'Wee-watter' in the first edition of HOMR (I still have my library-bound copy). This setup worked as designed and is a good base for more sophisticated telemetry payloads.

I'll be making and testing some mods to the software to save the data to a file as well as to render the plot both to the screen and to a PDF file (latter so I can post here).

- Matt