Launch rail
Dagger
A GPS waypoint-guided model rocket. Flight computer, airframe, and control surfaces, all mine.
- When
- Apr 2026 to now
- Status
- In progress
- Built with
- Teensy 4.1
- NEO-M9N GPS
- C++
- Altium Designer
- Servos
- waypoint accuracy target
- <2 m
- waypoint accuracy target
- AGL ceiling target
- 300 m
- AGL ceiling target
- sensor fusion
- 100 Hz
- sensor fusion
- telemetry logging
- 10 Hz
- telemetry logging
What I did
- Designing the whole vehicle: custom flight computer, airframe and fuselage, and servo-driven control surfaces.
- Fuses an IMU and accelerometer over SPI with GPS over UART at 100 Hz, feeding a PID loop tuned through hardware testing.
- Moving the flight computer from a wired dev-board build to a custom 4-layer PCB in Altium: power tree, sensors, GPS antenna routing, servo drive, SD logging, and a telemetry radio on one board.
- Bench-validated rail behavior and current draw with an oscilloscope and multimeter before trusting it with a flight.
- Logs position, altitude, and velocity at 10 Hz so every flight can be taken apart afterward.