Articles

High Power L2 Cert Achieved!

Oregon Rocketry holds meetings roughly every month for rocketeers to hone their craft. In May, the club hosts their premiere spring event: Spring Thunder. I attended and flew my kit rocket, Minuteman II using an Aerotech J350 motor, within a reusable motor system. My altimeter, a Stratologger SL100 powered by a custom fabricated 2S Lithium Ion battery, reported an apogee altitude of 3832 feet AGL. Recovery was nominal, with both parachutes deploying as programmed.

Plans for new wireless setup

I plan to use this guide and this youtube video to put together a long range wireless network for use in low cell service areas, as my new home will be somewhat far away from good service, accessible only via starlink internet. I’ll update this page when I get time to investigate this further.

High Power Certification Flight Success!

On May 31st I launched my “Fanton 438 (EXL)” kit, rebuilt from last time and named Minuteman II. This was my second attempt at completing my Tripoli Rocketry Level 1 certification, my first attempt was not successful. Unfortunately, 2 seconds into flight it suffered a Rapid, Unscheduled, Disassembly. Root cause analysis was performed using high speed footage. The footage showed the motor deployed the rocket’s parachute far too early. Needless to say this was a bad outcome, and one that is difficult to prevent as the motor was a commercial, off-the-shelf variety.

High Power Launch April 2025

On April 12th I launched my “Fanton 438 (EXL)” kit. This is a 64 inch tall, 4 inch diameter rocket. Here is the video, with a breakdown below: Your browser does not support the video tag. Why did the rocket fail? Looking at the video closely, you can see that the rocket deployed the main chhute on the way up, leading to a complete separation of the upper and lower stage.

FIRST Robotics 2025

For the past 10 weeks I have mentored FIRST Robotics Team 6566 “Battering Rams” out of Lamphere High School in Madison Heights, MI. FIRST is an after school program that uses robots to teach STEM topics to high school students, and prepare them for work in a team based environment. Engineering concepts like gear ratios, power/energy/velocity/acceleration relationships, torque, Object Oriented Programming, systems engineering 3d modeling, and most importantly: Teamwork! Just yesterday the team made it to 2nd place in the district championship held in Belleville, MI.

Ham Radio Repair & Upgrade

This is the humble TM-732A, a Kenwood brand Ham Radio, with both UHF and VHF capabilities. Originally, it came with orange incandescent bulbs. These bulbs were attached to a dimmer circuit that used a transistor. It used 4 lights in 2 pairs, each pair with a 10 Ohm resistor in series. Bulbs Dimmer I chose to replace these bulbs, as they had burnt out, with sick red LEDs, to give the radio a more cyberpunk / professional appearance.

Most of the cool stuff I've Done

So in no particular order, here are some of the things that I’ve done that I think are worth mentioning. Ran a First Robotics Team and got to the World Championships One of my most proud accomplishments is getting to the world championships, and I can’t thank the wonderful mentors that joined me enough! Every success and failure was shared and being here at this time and place has truly been a blessing.

Landing Prediction App

This app is designed to solve a particular problem I have discovered in my amateur rocketry setup: The code I use to decode telemetry from my rocket data only runs on a laptop, as its writtin in MATLAB. While I’m out in the desert I want to be carrying as little weight as possible, a 200g phone is much easier than a multiple kg laptop. This code also benefits from sensors in the phone, namely positioning and altitude.

First Robotics 2023

For the last two years, I have been a mentor for First Robotics Team 5901. This year, we advanced far enough to get to the Michigan State Championship as well as the World Championship in Houston, TX. We had a hectic time organizing it last minute but I wouldn’t trade that time for anything. My team performed at their peak, placing well above expectations and predictions. Watching my students put all of their mechanical work, practice, and skill into every match was great to see.

Looking Glass Tips

Looking glass can be really difficult to setup correctly, so heres some tips IVSHEM Device Make sure to disable secure boot in the VM’s BIOS/UEFI. You can enter the bios by using Windows 10’s secure boot options entry in the start menu, then navigating thru that until you find the UEFI settings Scream This one should work out of the box, once you figure out where to download it and how to install it.

Kicad PCB Design

My Apartment does not have in-unit laundry. So, when the laundry is done, I do not hear the laundry machine stop, and would often set timers to avoid my clothes becoming wrinkly. This doesn’t solve my issue though, sometimes the laundry machine takes less time than you expect due to the automatic cycle, which I prefer to use. This PCB is intended to fix that. it consists of: An ESP8266 NodeMCU An MPU6050 Accelerometer connected via SPI This circuit board A strong magnet so I can easily attach and detach my gadget Two AA batteries, for cost effectiveness.

Ham Radio

I found this nifty little code that shows you current local space weather.

High Power Rocketry

Back in college one of my extracurriculars was rocketry. You’d buy a kit, put it all together, drive out to the desert, launch it, and finally: recover it. For me, that last part was the toughest. Here’s an image of the area that I launched rockets in: The geography was very homogenous, landmarks spaced far apart, easy to get lost in. My rocket didn’t have any tracking equipment besides the two eyes in my head and that wasn’t enough.

Drone Mapping Project

This RC plane is designed to fly over an area with a gopro or similar camera and map areas. Its part of my strategy to not lose rockets I have launched in the desert. It will have a wingspan of about 4 ft 11 in. I’m trying to make as much of it 3d printed as possible, so that I can have fun designing it as a side project, and so that I can share it with the world when its done.

Website creation

I created this website to hold onto important things I’ve found on the internet, and to more generally carve out my own little spot. I hope you like it! On the bottom left are contact pages so you can get a hold of me if need be. This website uses Hugo to generate the HTML because I dont want to do it myself, and it uses a theme called “Digital Garden” to make it look nice, expecially for phones.

Ghost Image Display

This display uses a string of LEDs (WS2812b, if you want to buy some on amazon), connected to an arduino and SD card. The arduino reads images from the SD card, and displays them one column at a time to make this ghostly display. Any image sized corectly will do! Here is a couple more pictures of this display! and here is another one, with (in)famous frog, Pepe.

Inav Telemetry Fix

I’ve Been running Matek boards on my quadcopter for quite some time due to their nice build quality and associated PDB. However I was never able to get their telemetry working via softserial. I recently got the Matek F411 Wing board for a drone project and attempted to get this fixed. After hours and hours of banging my head against the wall and trying to get my boards to output that sweet sweet data, I found the one thing I needed to do all along: Screw around with half duplex.

using new disks for LVM tutorial

use lsblk to identify disks to use. on a blank disk, use sudo pvcreate /dev/<diskdevicename> If you get this error: Cannot use /dev/<diskdevicename>: device is partitioned Use this line to completeley wipe the disk: sudo wipefs --all --backup /dev/<diskdevicename> use sudo pvs to see your volume groups and disks associated with them. use sudo vgextend /dev/<volumegroupname>/<logicalvolumename> /dev/<diskdevicename> to add your new disk to your existing volume group. I ticked the box during OS installation to use LVM, so I already have a volume group.

High Power L2 Cert Achieved!

May 18, 2026

Level 2 Cert flight plot

Oregon Rocketry holds meetings roughly every month for rocketeers to hone their craft. In May, the club hosts their premiere spring event: Spring Thunder. I attended and flew my kit rocket, Minuteman II using an Aerotech J350 motor, within a reusable motor system. My altimeter, a Stratologger SL100 powered by a custom fabricated 2S Lithium Ion battery, reported an apogee altitude of 3832 feet AGL. Recovery was nominal, with both parachutes deploying as programmed.

Level 2 Cert flight plot

The rocket required an altered integration plan. For the previous flights, with a single parachute deployment, loading the main chute in the fin can (lower fuselage) was preferred, as I could deploy the parachute either with an electrically triggered black powder charge, or using the motor’s integrated chute deployment charge. For this launch, I re-ordered the parachutes, putting the drogue parachute in the fin can and the main parachute in the much smaller space above the avionics bay. This allowed the motor deployment to be used as a backup for the drogue. This setup worked perfectly. At apogee, the altimeter triggered the drogue release, putting the rocket into a 125 ft/s descent. I programmed the altimeter to deploy the main parachute at 600 feet above the launch altitude, and at precisely the right time, the main parachute deployed, reducing the descent to a safe and leisurely 9.2 ft/s.

During this time, I was tracking the rocket with my custom built Telemetry stack, and I was able to track the rocket during the full flight, including the boost phase, although the location data isnt necessarily trustworthy at that time, due to unavoidable GPS inaccuracy as a result of ITAR restrictions. Commercially available GPS units are speed limited. I used a hobby grade GPS unit outputting NMEA data at 1hz, an Arduino Nano to collect that datastream and boil it down to only the necessary data (plus battery voltage), and an HC12 transmitter operating on the 70cm wavelength amateur radio band. On thereceiving end I have a 6 element Yagi antenna, connected to a custom HC12 hat for the Arduino Nano, which is then connected to my android phone using OTG mode to power the Arduino off my phone directly. Once the data is on my phone, a custom android app I developed reads this data to the screeen, as well as extrapolates a landing location.

Once the flight was over and the rocket landed safely, I was able to continue communicating with the rocket, and the rocket accurately reported its position even while the GPS was face down. the 70cm band is excellent at transmitting through small brush and plants. This allowed me to walk directly up to my rocket while getting consistent second by second pings.

Level 2 Cert flight plot

Lessons Learned:

  1. Parachute packing is worth getting an extra pair of eyes to look at. Z folding is a great choice but cannot help if deployment charge / parachute orientation is incorrect. Set your rocket up sort of like a cannon: Shoot the parachute out of the airframe with the charge.

  2. Use ematches for your parachute charges, and build/test these well in advance, at least a couple weeks for testing. it is not fun trying to rebuild charges in the windy desert. Use good quality LOW CURRENT igniters. They use less energy, and have a far reduced chance of causing brownout conditions in any electronics that share a power source.

Important issues avoided:

  1. Make sure you test your telemetry setup extensively. Use 433mhz/70cm band if you can. Use a Yagi antenna if you can, or a helical antenna with many turns. I tested my setup at 800 meters on the ground and found good success at 3800 ft altitude AGL. DO NOT rely on dipole antenna for recovery. They have poor range, and cannot be used for direction finding once your rocket has landed. If your rocket is outputting B.S. location coordinates, a YAGI/Helical can help you find which direction you should be walking, at least. Look into Featherweight brand trackers. Have redundancy! Don’t be that guy wandering in the desert with a single antenna just hoping he will stumble upon his rocket. a Directional antenna is a MUST HAVE. Make sure its tuned well if you made it yourself. In fact, do that anyway. A NanoVNA will serve you well here.

  2. Investigate shear pin options and test them with your black powder setup. For my 7lb, 4" diameter, 65" rocket, I used a single nylon 2-56 machine screw threaded into a 3/32 inch hole thru my paylod section and into my thicker electronics bay tube coupler. I also used Pyrodex as a Black Powder substitude. it burns, you just need 25% more for the same energy. Test your charges weeks in advance and youll have great success. I highly suggest investigating this option: if your airframe is a weak material like cardboard, drill an oversized hole, fill it with epoxy, then drill and tap a 2-56 hole. I had pretty good success with just a 3/32 hole. 1/8 is too big, dont oversize this hole or youll run into hole bearing failures in cardboard.

  3. Try to poke yoke your rocket if possible. Make it easy to put together correctly. Most electonics bay tube couplers have a single band to separate the lower and upper sections of your rocket. Try adding some tongue and grooves to your rocket so that your tube sections slot together in the right orientations. Make integration easier by engineering your rocket differently beforehand.

  4. Investigate power draw with your setup. Connect all your electronics together and get them operating in “Pad Mode” or however you set it up. My full setup, including telemetry running and transmitting, was using 84mA. ~50 for the GPS, ~30 for the HC12 TX, and 4 ish for the arduino and Stratologger. For my 2S Lithium Ion battery setup, that equated to about 24 hrs of pad time. If you arent ready for hours of pad time, especially on larger rockets, I highly suggest a ground station with a battery tender. TP5100 chips can be connected to your battery through 2 bullet plug connectors through your airframe, and they should disconnect on launch, as they are only held in by friction. Another option is the following: USB C Battery bank -> USB C Cable -> Magnetic charginging & Data cable, with the plug glued into your airframe -> USB C sink/dummy connector set to output 12v -> TP5100 -> Lithium batteries.

This launch fulfilled the requirements for the Tripoli Level 2 practical test, and in conjunction with the online test, fulfilled the total requirements for Level 2 certification. Up next is level 3, wish me luck!