Hey everyone, hope everyone is keeping well in these tricky times.
So I’ve been trying to get stuff moving with regard to more opensource rocketry and have been setting up Open Research Rocketry and trying to get some small opensource projects up and running… (especially whilst out core ideas around non profit research flight opportunities are on lockdown as the rocketry ranges are closed).
We have a couple of projects/repos up and running on the open research rocketry (ORR) gitlab, the first is a small pcb for igniting e-matches which get used for deployment charges in rocketry systems or for airstarting second stages, its a pretty simple piece of hardware but useful in ground testing or GSE and could inform design of flight hardware.
Other projects on their are small (and due to my level of input, badly formatted!) python scripts that form the maths for various design tools for parachutes and descent calculators. Rather brilliantly other contributors have used this to create an online parachute design calculator which we are continuing to update and hopefully will soon incorporate numerous parachute designs and other useful stuff!
Finally, we have just opened another project, the ORR Flight Computer and database which we are really passionate about as we think it solves some challenges in rocketry but also could add a heap of value and data useful to rocketry. It is currently a pretty empty repo but has a wiki of collected thoughts from a few early ORR contributors on features, use cases, a concept draft schema, and other bits and pieces to try and start us off. I’d love it if people here across the LSF diaspora could take a look, and raise ideas as issues or comment directly in the gitlab project here.
Finally, we have a riot chat room set up for general ORR discussion here and a chat room for the flight computer project here. Hope to see you there or on twitter sometime!