I have been playing around with GPS based rocketry components for a bit as well as the ideal flight computer.

Here's my first pass on the all inclusive.

I wanted to find a very cheap way of receiving a rockets GPS position without having to have a complex telemetry device. So, I thought why not have if call back it's postion via a FRS radio. Simple and easy - yet it's not a legal use of the FRS band. Oh, well. I built a GPS device with MP3 playback and then it essentially calls back its GPS position data. After a launch detect, I read back the barometric altitude, range and bearing from the original launch position.

I wanted to launch this in the Saturn V, but the first hand made board was not stable enough. So I built a new version.
This time I decided to throw in everthing except deployment. I don't want to mess around withe deployment at this stage as there are so many reliable products out there that I already completely trust. That frees me to play with other features.

Here's what I have in this version:

- GPS
- Audio and MP3 playback (yes you can play your favorite songs)
- Barometric Altitude
- 3 axis Accelerometer
- Temperature Sensor
- Humidity Sensor
- micro SD memory card (2GB of memory) for data logging / MP3 files
- MaxStream 9xTend telemetry module (up to 40 mile range)
- fits in a 38mm body tube

Here's a pic:

The next step is to further reduce the size and simplify the design. My thoughts are to build a simpler version to see if there is any interest from those in the rocket community.

Also, I want to keep it a bit modular. For example many will not wan't a temperature/humidity sensor. I just threw it in for the heck of it.

I will also add pyro channels down in a future version. I just want to get the reliability down first.