So I talked to Jack and am talking to Frank in email; it turns out there is
an interesting story on this and
only a few of the units ever built had this problem. Frank did send email
to every customer warning them
of this issue, and asked those customers to either return the unit and he
would give their money back or
they could keep the unit if they were not sold. Jack sold me his unit, and
he did warn me and tell me to read
the instructions and be careful with the unit. The launch was a bring your
own gear launch and unfortunately
that meant most everyone used this launch controller. I trained as many
people as I could, but there were still
some folks that did the reasonable thing and just plug in the leads. It's
easy to see how one would launch a
rocket, turn the pad unit off, forget to disconnect the Molex connector
which attaches the leads to the base-station
and then go and recover their rocket. What would then happen is the next
person would see the unit there, load his rocket, connect the leads, walk
10 feet to the pad unit, turn it on and launch the rocket.
I looked at the system, at first glance, and looking at the behaviour, he
has some ground loop and/or no isolation of his firing output - I will have
to get the schematics and look at them to be sure.
Long story short, I won't lend my system to anyone again and until I really
understand this issue I won't be using it myself
and in the future, we should really bring the club mission control and away
relays at a minimum - that is the safest system
out there.
More later ...
On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 9:03 PM, Chris Attebery <chrisattebery1971@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Yea Rob. That would suck wouldn't it? Not only does the rocket take off
before you expect it to, but if it lawn darts because of the launch
controller, ARGGGG.
On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 8:01 PM, Rob Diehl <rwdiehl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Sounds like an interesting setup.
I hope the electronics were armed first.
Rob
-----Original Message-----
From: tccrockets-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:
tccrockets-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Weinshenker
Sent: Monday, July 06, 2015 7:20 PM
To: tccrockets@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [tccrockets] Re: wireless Launcher
James Dougherty wrote:
if you didn't know how to work the unit, connected the igniter leads,
and then turned the receiver unit on, I wouldn't expect it to light
the igniter!
Yeah, that sounds like a weird sequence requirement... one would, I
think, prefer a system where you could hook everything up with power off,
and then switch on and confirm that you had continuity, but weren't in an
unexpected "firing" state, before you actually enabled it to apply ignition
power.
-dave w
