April - May 2024
- Abhigna Y
- Jul 31, 2025
- 2 min read
Dev Log 19
Project Update - April 2024
Finished painting Air MK2 (fig 1), white base coat and black accents. Really like how it turned out.
Also got a vinyl Air MK2 logo sticker made (fig 2)
My mentor wanted me to make him a dual deploy rocket for his projects and so I gave Air MK2 to him. But I also wanted a dual deploy rocket that I could fly multiple times to test out TFAC and other hardware, so I built Air MK2 but bigger and faster. I call this new rocket Air MK2.1 (fig 3), here are the stats:
Apogee - 3km
Max Vel -
Mach 0.9
Height - 178cm
Mass - 2.1kg
The booster for Air MK2.1 (fig 4) is almost done, motor mount tube is attached, inner fin fillets done, eyebolt bulkhead epoxied in. Only the outer fin fillets, sanding and painting are left.
Also major tool acquisition this month. I finally got a 3D printer! It's an Ender 3 v3 SE (fig 5), really excited to see what I can make with this!
Project Update - May 2024
Lot of Air MK2.1 progress this month. First things first, I worked on the avionics bay (fig 6), I got the telemetry radio working inside the avbay. It's a pretty noisy environment RF wise with the GNSS, telemetry and a RunCam split.
For both Air MK2 and Air MK2.1 I decided to ditch the carrier boards for the telemetry radio and just directly connect it to TFAC (fig 7). I did this to save space and decrease mass. This new setup is much lighter and has a smaller physical profile which helps a lot with my space constraints.
Also finished the paint job on Air MK2.1 this month. I went with an orange base coat and black accents (fig 8).
This month I started a new project - Actively Stabilized Rockets via Thrust Vector Control. There isn't much I can do in the domain of high power rocketry in India as an individual because of various different restrictions. These TVC rockets are mid powered, so they don't fly very high or fast, so it should be relatively easier to do more with these rockets. That being said I designed PCBs for the launchpad and launch remote for my TVC project (figs 9,10). Both computers have an RFM69HCW radio module that they use for communication. The launch remote has several button inputs that I can configure later, while the launchpad computer has 2 Pyro Channels, 6 servo inputs and a plethora of I/O. Both computers are about 90% of the way done, just have to do some final checks, work on the silkscreen, run some tests to see how well the RFM69HCW works between a Teensy and an RP2040, and then they can be manufactured.
