Learning programming and engineering in Arizona

Date: 2016-2020

I was backing up my computer and came across pictures from some rocket projects my friend and I built. Growing up with TJ is the reason I learned so much about robotics, programming and engineering.

This is TJ on the left and I'm on the right. TJ was part of all of these projects and there is no way that we would have accomplished what we did without his help.

We started with a cheap pen camera. It was easy to poke a hole for the camera and we recorded a video.

Here is a still shot from the video showing our camp and the shock cord from the rocket

While this car is not a rocket, we learned how to program with this project and used similar hardware in the next one. The code for this car is on github.com/jaxlo/Vulture-Team

I spent a lot of time designing parts in TinkerCAD because it was easy to build accurate models quickly.

Unfortunately, we could not get the Raspberry Pi (main computer) to power on when we were ready to launch. This was likely due to my inexperienced soldering or a hole in the LiPo battery.

We decided to design a whole new rocket and this is an artistic picture of those sketches.

Learning from out past mistakes, we designed the next version for redundancy and strength. We had 2 Raspberry Pis with a camera for each and a LoRa feather that broadcasted the GPS location of the rocket so we would not lose it.

We thought the massive G motor would take it far but our rocket was so heavy that it only went a few hundred feet at the most.

Special thanks to Dr.Howardell for 3D printing these parts for us with the super expensive PVHS CREST 3D printers. Every one of our rockets except for the first pen camera one was printed by Dr.Howardell at no charge. Thanks!!

Covid hit at the end of our last year of high school and our next rocket was scrapped. The goal was to go over Mach 1 and a mile high with a J motor.

I'm still proud of this vented fin can design that I'm 99% sure would hold up under the stresses of breaking mach. I'll still build it someday after I graduate college.