Gathering climate telemetry with a Nano 33 BLE Sense payload

Most mannequin rockets don’t do something sensible — they simply go up actually quick after which come again down extra slowly to land in a discipline someplace. These launches can nonetheless be lots of enjoyable to look at, however they aren’t precisely helpful. Nonetheless, the sky has loads of information of price monitoring and the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense Rev2 is ideal for amassing it. Vlud used that board as a rocket payload to collect climate telemetry throughout flights.

This payload package deal is known as LIFT for “LoRa Built-in Flight Telemetry,” which tells you the opposite large function of the system: it transmits information from the rocket to a floor station by way of LoRa. The rocket, which has a D12-5 Estes motor for propulsion, is fairly standard other than the digital payload. However that payload is ready to seize various fascinating information.

The Nano 33 BLE Sense Rev2 board has a complete host of onboard sensors that make it good for this sort of factor. Of explicit significance are temperature, humidity, barometric strain, and orientation. The orientation, monitored by the IMU’s gyroscope, tells the Arduino when it has reached the apex of the flight trajectory. It may then decide approximate altitude by checking the barometric strain, recording temperature and humidity for any given altitude.

Lastly, it sends that information again to the bottom by means of a Semtech XL1278 LoRa transceiver module. One other LoRa transceiver information the incoming information, so it isn’t misplaced — even when the rocket is.