Model Rocket Telemetry

[jonsmith]

I am working on a model rocket telemetry project for school, and I fear that I am in over my head.  I am using a MPU-6050 triple axis accelerometer and gyro breakout along with a HMC5883L triple axis magnetometer and a MPL3115A2 altitude pressure sensor (all from Sparkfun) as my sensors.  I can send/receive wireless data and read it in LabVIEW (2013) and convert pressure data into altitude.  However, I am lost trying to convert accelerometer, gyro, and magnetometer data into velocity and position and plotting it in 3-D.

 

I have been using Starlino's guide to using IMU (http://www.starlino.com/imu_guide.html) but haven't made much progress.  Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

 

Jon

 

2014_10_30_Project.vi

[Neil Pate]

Well, as acceleration is just the second derivative of position surely you just double integrate the acceleration.

 

(I jest...)

 

I think it will be very difficult to infer any kind of accurate absolute position and velocity in 3D space with the measurements you have available, especially on a rocket! As some of the other links show, a Kalman filter type approach may be a good starting point, but I still think this is a very tricky proposition given the speeds your rocket is likely to be travelling at.

 

Can you not add a simple GPS device to your rocket?

[jonsmith]

I know I will need some sort of filter... complimentary, Kalman, etc... but what to do with the filtered data?

[Gribo]

Civilian GPS have velocity limits encoded into the firmware (~500m/s). If your rocket surpass that, you can't use GPS.