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.