Flight Computer SWIFT

The second fully student-developed rocket of the Riga Technical University High Power Rocketry Team (RTU HPR) aimed to reach a target altitude of 1.6 km. Other goals included using a dual deployment sequence and demonstrating and testing self-developed components in flight.

The avionics team developed a custom flight computer (FC), as well as a new base station (BS), and separate camera module (CAM). In my position of avionics team lead, I was mainly responsible for design and flight planning, electronics testing, and writing all the software for FC as well as other components. The rocket was launched in November 2022 and was safely recovered after achieving an apogee of 1930 m, and a top speed of 1006 km/h.

Among other things the development of the FC included:

• creating a 2 thread state machine code architecture
• writing and testing a Kalman filter for apogee detection
• communicating with the ground via LoRa
• storing flight data

Code developed for the FC, RS, and CAM is available on the 2022 Avionics Team Github Folder, as well as a full .pdf file with the code schematic can be viewed here.

Some data from the flight is visualized below:

Finally, here is an image of the FC PCB, and RTU HPR 2022 team.