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r/rocketry • … • u/itijara

Testing homemade altimeter with my son

My son has been really into rockets and space lately, so we started launching model rockets. I used my meager hardware skills to make an altimeter so we can test how high they go.

Rocket: Estes cosmic cargo with clear payload section added.

Rocket dry mass + payload mass: 63.3g

Motor: Estes A8-3 (mass 17g, propellent mass 3g)

Altimeter: Adafruit Metro mini + BMP580 breakout + OLED breakout. It's all over I2C with their Stemma connector. So I only had to solder on the battery connection.

I wrote a script to estimate the altitude and got 19m, but I accidentally put 30g of propellant instead of 3g into the simulation, with the correct value I got 27m which is nearly identical to what we saw from the altimeter.

We also launched it on a B4-4 (and almost lost the rocket) and got a height of 80m (predicted 123m).

I'll share the source code for the altimeter and script in the comments, if anyone is interested.

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