PiX - Rocket flight recorder 🚀

Dashboard

Flight recorder

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Table of Contents

• Bill of material
  • Electronic components
  • Schematic
  • Model rocket
• Getting started
  • Tools
  • Raspbian Jessie Lite
  • Python
  • Mosquitto
  • RPi Cam Interface
  • Node-RED
• Usage

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Bill of material

Electronic components

Component	Description	Source	Price
Raspberry Pi Zero W	Version 1.3	Pimoroni	£9.30
MicroSD Card	64GB	Amazon	£17.49
Camera	Camera for Raspberry Pi Zero	Pimoroni	£14
LiPo SHIM	Enables the RPi to be power supplied from a battery	Pimoroni	£10
LiPo Battery	150mAh	Pimoroni	£5
BMP280	Pressure, temperature and humidity sensor	Pimoroni	£10.50
MPU6050	Accelerometer and Gyroscope	Sparkfun	£21.26

Schematic

Model rocket:

Component	Description	Source	Price
SpaceX Falcon 9	Model rocket	SpaceX	£20.59

Getting started

Let's get started! First thing first, solder the MPU6050, BME280 and the LiPo SHIM to the Raspberry Pi Zero W for the best results. Other means of connection, such as jumper wires or connectors are discouraged as they might disconnect during takeoff.

Now, we are also going to need a few tools, so downloading them now is a good idea.

Tools

• Etcher - SD Card flasher
• Advanced IP Scanner - IP Scanner
• Putty - SSH client

Raspbian Jessie Lite

Download and flash Raspbian Jessie Lite on a micro SD card (preferably a 64GB one) with Etcher, or an alternative flasher. We will be using the lite version of Raspbian since we will not need a video output or many of the software packages that come with the Desktop version.

After flashing the OS on the SD card, we need to enable the SSH server and connect it to a Wireless Access Point in order to communicate with it. Open the micro SD card directory from your File Explorer and create an empty file called ssh. Create another file called wpa_supplicant.conf with the following text:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
network={
    ssid="YOUR_SSID"
    psk="YOUR_PASSWORD"
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}

Where YOUR_SSID and YOUR_PASSWORD are the SSID and Password of your WiFi router.

This is what your /boot directory should look like now

The Raspberry Pi Zero W on boot will read these two files and automatically enable the SSH server and connect it to your WiFi router.

Now eject the micro SD card, put it in the Raspberry and power it on with a micro USB cable.

Now your Pi should have connected to your router, and we need to find out its IP address. An easy way to do this is to use Advanced IP Scanner.

Now that we have found out the IP address, let's SSH into it. We'll use Putty for that.

You'll be asked username and password.

The default user name is:

pi

And the default password is:

raspberry

Now you should be logged in. It is advised to change these credentials for safety reasons.

We're all set! Let's move forwards by installing some essentials modules.

Note that all the following commands will be executed on the Raspberry Pi Zero W through the Putty SSH session.

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Python

Python will be used to read from the sensors and transmit the data to Node-RED via mqtt

sudo apt-get install python-2.7 python-pip

Now let's install the mqtt library for Python

sudo pip install paho-mqtt

In order to read from the I2C from Python, we need to install the smbus module

sudo apt-get install python-smbus

This library is needed so that Python can read from the BMP280 sensor

sudo apt-get install build-essential python-pip python-dev python-smbus git
git clone https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Python_GPIO.git
cd Adafruit_Python_GPIO
sudo python setup.py install

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Mosquitto

Now let's install a MQTT broker, Mosquitto

cd ~	
wget http://repo.mosquitto.org/debian/mosquitto-repo.gpg.key
sudo apt-key add mosquitto-repo.gpg.key
cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
sudo wget http://repo.mosquitto.org/debian/mosquitto-jessie.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mosquitto mosquitto-clients

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RPi Cam interface

RPi Cam Web Interface is a web interface for the Raspberry Pi Camera module. It can be used for a wide variety of applications including surveillance, dvr recording and time lapse photography. We will be using it to capture images and live video from the camera.

Connect the camera with the Raspberry Pi Zero W and proceed with the instructions below.

First, let's clone the RPi Cam Web Interface repository and install it

git clone https://github.com/silvanmelchior/RPi_Cam_Web_Interface.git
cd RPi_Cam_Web_Interface
./install.sh

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Node-RED

Now let's install Node-RED

bash <(curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/node-red/raspbian-deb-package/master/resources/update-nodejs-and-nodered)

Install the dashboard module

sudo npm install node-red-dashboard

Make it autostart on boot

sudo systemctl enable nodered.service

Usage

Clone this repository in your /home/pi directory of your Raspberry Pi Zero W. To run the program on boot, open the rc.local file

sudo nano rc.local

And add the following line at the end, but before exit 0

python /home/pi/PiX/main.py

Open your Pi's IP address with a browser at the /html directory to view the camera feed

www.192.168.1.242/html

Open your Pi's IP address on the 1880 port to access Node-RED

www.192.168.1.242:1880

Add the /ui directory to view the dashboard

wwww.192.168.1.242:1880/ui

Note use your own Pi IP address that you found with Angry IP Scanner