oapogeev0.1 design stage

Open source rocket telemetry

A small, cheap sensor package that tells you exactly what your model rocket did.

oApogee records altitude, acceleration and orientation through the whole flight, logs it onboard, and can send it live to a receiver on the ground. It attaches to a rocket you already own.

Armed

Ground reference locked, ring buffer running, waiting for motion. The status LED and buzzer say so from several metres away.

Diagram of the flight state machine, not recorded data.

The whole payload, one sheet

Four sensors onto one microcontroller, the log written to flash that is soldered down rather than to a card that can shake loose, and one connector for power, charging, configuration and offload. Generated from the same parts list the bill of materials renders, so it cannot quietly stop matching the hardware.

oApogee system block diagram. Barometer, IMU, high-g accelerometer and GNSS connect to an RP2350 over I2C, SPI and UART. The RP2350 writes to QSPI flash, drives a LoRa radio to a ground station, drives a buzzer and LED, and offloads over USB-C. Power runs USB-C to charger to a 1S LiPo cell to a 3V3 buck-boost rail.

Three tiers, one board

Every tier is the same PCB, the same firmware, and the same enclosure. Moving up a tier means populating footprints that were already there, not building a new payload. Nobody who starts with Solo has to start over.

oApogee Solo

Barometer, IMU, onboard logging. No radio.

A first build, a classroom set, and anyone who wants a flight profile rather than a live readout.

oApogee Link

Live telemetry downlink to a ground station.

Club flights where people want to watch the number climb, and any flight where losing the payload would mean losing the data.

A Link payload is not usable on its own. Budget for the ground station, which is a separate build and a separate bill of materials.

oApogee Track

GNSS position for long walkaway recovery.

Big fields, windy days, tall crops, and anything with a long descent.

ModulesBreakout boards wired by hand. Buildable today.BoardThe custom oApogee PCB. Not yet fabricated.

What it will not do

oApogee is a passive instrumentation payload. It watches the flight and records it. It does not act on the rocket. Deployment control is the domain of certified high power rocketry, it carries a completely different set of failure consequences, and it is out of scope. If a payload that fires charges is what you need, oApogee is not that and will not become that.

Safety and rules

Nothing here has been built, and nothing has flown.

So there are no prices, no masses, no ranges and no battery figures anywhere on this site. Not estimates, not placeholders: they are absent, and each gap records what evidence would close it. A page full of confident invented specifications is worse than an empty one when people spend money and fly hardware over other people’s heads based on it.

See exactly what is verified and what is not