Hi Tim,

Yeah, when I saw  the video, I started laughing again because I thought it
was a typical example of a couple of engineering nerds making fools out of
themselves :-) (You can see my partner in crime, Anish, an EE student at
Columbia Univ. in the left of the video frame. He actually hit the launch
button) Of course, I do still consider it a worthwhile learning experience
(it involved DSP, mechanical engineering, aerodynamics, flight simulation,
control theory, etc.)

If you take a look at http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/shb7/btsam.html ,
you can see more about it. Actually, the problem was that I forgot a major
consideration during design: wind. The idea was for the rocket to seek the
target suspended from the balloons you see in the background.

What I forgot to take into account (until the day of the launch when it was
too late) was that wind would cause the target to move around so much that
it was impossible to point the rocket at it. By the time I had the rocket
pointed and stepped back to launch, the balloons and target had moved out
of the light sensor's field of view. SO, we decided to launch anyway(and
see what the rocket might do!) because that was the last opportunity I
would get before I had to go back up to school.

I am attempting to analyze the video to get a rough idea of the rocket path
and orientation. As you can see at the beginning of the video, the rocket
fins are moving, so the search algo was running, and I want to see if the
rocket path was at least consistent with what the PIC was supposed to be
doing in the absence of a strong signal.

I plan on trying again, but due to expense, it will probably be about a
year before I do so.

Sean


At 01:04 AM 9/13/00 -0400, you wrote:
>I love it! The ending laughter made it even funnier. Was the problem ever
>pinpointed?
>
>
>-- Tim H.

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