Vern's Rocketry pages are a great resource and contain a wealth of information to be read and digested. I'm not familiar with the Angelfire system but I do know the BigRedBee stuff is pretty awesome. Lots of options out there to choose from. What's your budget limit and do you factor in replacement costs if something were to go wrong?

I worked with Vern briefly at my previous job. He's a VERY smart guy and not afraid to come up with his own solutions to problems. He combined a number of commercial off-the-shelf components for his GPS system (5Hz update, BTW), which outperforms most prepackaged solutions. If you look around his website, you'll find his latest creation which is an onboard live narration of the flight via telemetry and voice synthesis. It announces all the flight events, altitudes, etc. as they happen, and can be hooked up to the PA system at the launch.

Well beyond my level. I think he has lots of spare time to work on this stuff. He HAS to! I, alas, do not.

-Ken

Vern's project is really cool, the text-to-speach has got to be a neat addition to a launch. I've been looking at implementing something similar. There's actually some cheaper stuff out there now. Take a look at this: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/ardupilot-main-page. It's actually intended as an autopilot for RC planes, but is easily adapted to rocketry. Total cost is ~300, including a 5Hz GPS and 2 xbee 900MHz radios, and you can get cheaper GPS and xbee modules.

With all the outputs that has, it could very easily be adapted to trigger a variety of flight events. (Adrian, if you're interested, I'd be up for dealing with the software portion 😀 ) There are actually multi-axis accelerometer and gyro modules for the parent project this is based on (Arduino), combine those with the servo control already there, and you could have a decent guidance system (I *think* that'd be legal, so long as there's no ground control over the guidance, and certainly no target tracking ability).

I've been working with the Arduino for a year or so along with the GPS module and a custom board of my own with 3 axis accelerometer and baro sensor as well as telemetry downlink.

Warren,

Think you'd be willing to share a circuit diagram for that? I started out wanting to just use a base Arduino, but couldn't find info I could use on hooking up sensors. Plenty of info out there, but beyond my knowledge on the electronic interfaces.

What GPS unit and radios did you end up using? I have been leaning towards the uBlox, but that's just becuase it's supported by Ardupilot. The xbee radios seem perfect.

If there's any interest in getting adding the ability to fire ejection charges, airstart motors, etc., I'd be interested. I'd like to learn how to hook up sensors and such, and can work on the software side.

I'd happily show you what I've got and discuss. I have the adafruit.com GPS shield and a bunch of proto shields I'm playing with. Hooking up is easy and minimal glue circuitry is required. My biggest problem is I'm an old TTL guy and this 3V logic freaks me out.

Warren