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High Power Certification Flight Success!

On May 31st I launched my “Fanton 438 (EXL)” kit, rebuilt from last time and named Minuteman II. This was my second attempt at completing my Tripoli Rocketry Level 1 certification, my first attempt was not successful. Unfortunately, 2 seconds into flight it suffered a Rapid, Unscheduled, Disassembly. Root cause analysis was performed using high speed footage. The footage showed the motor deployed the rocket’s parachute far too early. Needless to say this was a bad outcome, and one that is difficult to prevent as the motor was a commercial, off-the-shelf variety.

High Power Launch April 2025

On April 12th I launched my “Fanton 438 (EXL)” kit. This is a 64 inch tall, 4 inch diameter rocket. Here is the video, with a breakdown below: Your browser does not support the video tag. Why did the rocket fail? Looking at the video closely, you can see that the rocket deployed the main chhute on the way up, leading to a complete separation of the upper and lower stage.

FIRST Robotics 2025

For the past 10 weeks I have mentored FIRST Robotics Team 6566 “Battering Rams” out of Lamphere High School in Madison Heights, MI. FIRST is an after school program that uses robots to teach STEM topics to high school students, and prepare them for work in a team based environment. Engineering concepts like gear ratios, power/energy/velocity/acceleration relationships, torque, Object Oriented Programming, systems engineering 3d modeling, and most importantly: Teamwork! Just yesterday the team made it to 2nd place in the district championship held in Belleville, MI.

Ham Radio Repair & Upgrade

This is the humble TM-732A, a Kenwood brand Ham Radio, with both UHF and VHF capabilities. Originally, it came with orange incandescent bulbs. These bulbs were attached to a dimmer circuit that used a transistor. It used 4 lights in 2 pairs, each pair with a 10 Ohm resistor in series. Bulbs Dimmer I chose to replace these bulbs, as they had burnt out, with sick red LEDs, to give the radio a more cyberpunk / professional appearance.

Most of the cool stuff I've Done

So in no particular order, here are some of the things that I’ve done that I think are worth mentioning. Ran a First Robotics Team and got to the World Championships One of my most proud accomplishments is getting to the world championships, and I can’t thank the wonderful mentors that joined me enough! Every success and failure was shared and being here at this time and place has truly been a blessing.

Landing Prediction App

This app is designed to solve a particular problem I have discovered in my amateur rocketry setup: The code I use to decode telemetry from my rocket data only runs on a laptop, as its writtin in MATLAB. While I’m out in the desert I want to be carrying as little weight as possible, a 200g phone is much easier than a multiple kg laptop. This code also benefits from sensors in the phone, namely positioning and altitude.

First Robotics 2023

For the last two years, I have been a mentor for First Robotics Team 5901. This year, we advanced far enough to get to the Michigan State Championship as well as the World Championship in Houston, TX. We had a hectic time organizing it last minute but I wouldn’t trade that time for anything. My team performed at their peak, placing well above expectations and predictions. Watching my students put all of their mechanical work, practice, and skill into every match was great to see.

Looking Glass Tips

Looking glass can be really difficult to setup correctly, so heres some tips IVSHEM Device Make sure to disable secure boot in the VM’s BIOS/UEFI. You can enter the bios by using Windows 10’s secure boot options entry in the start menu, then navigating thru that until you find the UEFI settings Scream This one should work out of the box, once you figure out where to download it and how to install it.

Kicad PCB Design

My Apartment does not have in-unit laundry. So, when the laundry is done, I do not hear the laundry machine stop, and would often set timers to avoid my clothes becoming wrinkly. This doesn’t solve my issue though, sometimes the laundry machine takes less time than you expect due to the automatic cycle, which I prefer to use. This PCB is intended to fix that. it consists of: An ESP8266 NodeMCU An MPU6050 Accelerometer connected via SPI This circuit board A strong magnet so I can easily attach and detach my gadget Two AA batteries, for cost effectiveness.

Ham Radio

I found this nifty little code that shows you current local space weather.

High Power Rocketry

Back in college one of my extracurriculars was rocketry. You’d buy a kit, put it all together, drive out to the desert, launch it, and finally: recover it. For me, that last part was the toughest. Here’s an image of the area that I launched rockets in: The geography was very homogenous, landmarks spaced far apart, easy to get lost in. My rocket didn’t have any tracking equipment besides the two eyes in my head and that wasn’t enough.

Drone Mapping Project

This RC plane is designed to fly over an area with a gopro or similar camera and map areas. Its part of my strategy to not lose rockets I have launched in the desert. It will have a wingspan of about 4 ft 11 in. I’m trying to make as much of it 3d printed as possible, so that I can have fun designing it as a side project, and so that I can share it with the world when its done.

Website creation

I created this website to hold onto important things I’ve found on the internet, and to more generally carve out my own little spot. I hope you like it! On the bottom left are contact pages so you can get a hold of me if need be. This website uses Hugo to generate the HTML because I dont want to do it myself, and it uses a theme called “Digital Garden” to make it look nice, expecially for phones.

Ghost Image Display

This display uses a string of LEDs (WS2812b, if you want to buy some on amazon), connected to an arduino and SD card. The arduino reads images from the SD card, and displays them one column at a time to make this ghostly display. Any image sized corectly will do! Here is a couple more pictures of this display! and here is another one, with (in)famous frog, Pepe.

Inav Telemetry Fix

I’ve Been running Matek boards on my quadcopter for quite some time due to their nice build quality and associated PDB. However I was never able to get their telemetry working via softserial. I recently got the Matek F411 Wing board for a drone project and attempted to get this fixed. After hours and hours of banging my head against the wall and trying to get my boards to output that sweet sweet data, I found the one thing I needed to do all along: Screw around with half duplex.

using new disks for LVM tutorial

use lsblk to identify disks to use. on a blank disk, use sudo pvcreate /dev/<diskdevicename> If you get this error: Cannot use /dev/<diskdevicename>: device is partitioned Use this line to completeley wipe the disk: sudo wipefs --all --backup /dev/<diskdevicename> use sudo pvs to see your volume groups and disks associated with them. use sudo vgextend /dev/<volumegroupname>/<logicalvolumename> /dev/<diskdevicename> to add your new disk to your existing volume group. I ticked the box during OS installation to use LVM, so I already have a volume group.

High Power Certification Flight Success!

June 6, 2025

On May 31st I launched my “Fanton 438 (EXL)” kit, rebuilt from last time and named Minuteman II. This was my second attempt at completing my Tripoli Rocketry Level 1 certification, my first attempt was not successful. Unfortunately, 2 seconds into flight it suffered a Rapid, Unscheduled, Disassembly. Root cause analysis was performed using high speed footage. The footage showed the motor deployed the rocket’s parachute far too early. Needless to say this was a bad outcome, and one that is difficult to prevent as the motor was a commercial, off-the-shelf variety.

For this event, I had to the same model motor, an H100W-14A. It was sourced differently however, from the club’s cache of cert motors, instead of the club’s motor seller. This was enough to ensure a successful certification launch. As you’ll see from the data, I was able to reach 800ft AGL and deployed parachutes at almost exactly the apogee.

For this launch I included fixes and improvements to my telemtry hardware and software. My radio receiver got 2 new upgrades: anti vibration Nyloc nuts and padding to prevent internal component separation. On the software side I improved my android app with a data export function and an audible ping when receiving a packet, which is useful for direction finding, and can always be silenced if wanted. Here is the launch video and below that is some photos from the rebuild process:

Launch media

Repairs and Improvements

On the first attempt, the high speed parachute deployment lead to separation on two of the strings. I used rip stop nylon patches to repair the tears, and sewed the strings back on with the help of my lovely assistant, Sonya.

parachute repair

The fin can was damaged by fire, too severly to be reused so I put together a new one. This time I made sure to use an organic composite COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) fillet former, aka a popsicle stick. The rocket was also cured vertically to avoid epoxy flowing out of shape.

constructed body, inverted

Here it is primed:

primed body

Then I painted it a rather nice shade of stainless steel, here it is compared to the upper section of the original rocket:

primed body

For this next section, I am a bit wary sharing it. For completeness though, I did make my own parachute deployment charges using the same method illustrated by BPS.space. I used half inch vinyl tubing, sealed with hot glue on one end (the glue cures very nicely if you let the tube sit upright on some parchement paper). I used 777 brand muzzle loader powder, FFFg variety. This was ignited using an Estes STARTECH motor starter. I used electrical tape to ensure no short circuits. I found that soldering wires directly to the igniter, while dangerous, is the best way to connect them. This was all held in the tube using Estes recovery wadding and electrical tape. I made sure to pack finger tight, maybe just a little tighter. This powder is designed for high pressure combustion so I figured that more compression would be best.

These charges were tested on the ground to ensure they were large enough, and I used BPS’s great motto: “Blow Up or Blow Out” to help size the charge: more is better. I ended up using 4 grams of powder for my main chute deployment. I will need to test for the small chute for my level 2 certification.

parachute charge