FailSafe Alt – The altitude at which the Main was fired in FailSafe mode, if it was enabled and
reached, and the time from LD. Note that this supercedes the Main Alt.
Flight Time – The elapsed time from LD until landing detect, which is when the rocket drops below
½ of the apogee and hasn’t moved more than 10’ in 5 seconds.
ASL Alt – The Above-Sea-Level reading of your launch site.
Temp – The temperature in Farhenheit at the time of launch. This will be very accurate if the
Quasar has been powered on for 10-15 minutes, but will tend to be on the low side if you fly shortly
after powering up.
Settings – All the flight settings that were selected for this flight.
As you can see, that’s a lot of stuff to look at. Particularly right after landing, it gives you a pretty
good idea of what happened. For example, we did a test in which we intentionally didn’t install a
drogue charge and left out the motor eject, and turned on FailSafe as a test. (We don’t recommend
that YOU do this, though…) We expected the Main to pop 3-4 seconds after apogee, but that didn’t
happen, instead it came out at about 500’ as if there was a drogue. When we looked at the Flight
Summary data, it turns out that it never fell fast enough to trigger FailSafe… it was a light Estes
rocket on an Aerotech F24, and the drag was enough to slow it down below the threshold.
We’ve had other flights in which we had FailSafe enabled as a safety measure, and it triggered when
we though it should not have. Turns out the drogueless rocket fell faster than we expected…
obviously we should have modeled it better! All of this data can tell you a lot.
Downloading the Flight Detail
In addition to the Flight Summary data, each altitude sample during flight is saved into memory, and
the data can be retrieved and time/event correlated as a standard comma-separated-variable (.csv)
file by clicking on the ‘Detail’ link at the bottom of the Flight Summary page.
A .csv file is basically just a text file, with commas separating each field. Depending on what apps
you have on your device, it may do one of three things when you click on the Detail link:
1) It may display the data as if it were a text-only web page
2) It may open up some kind of application (i.e. Excel if you have a laptop)
3) It may just sit there and hang because it doesn’t know what to do with it
We generally do NOT recommend that you analyze the data with a smartphone, it’s just too danged
hard to see. That being said, we HAVE done it with an iPhone after installing WPS Office (the
default on an iPhone is to display it as a web page). The advantage is that you can literally get a
graph of your flight within seconds after landing. The disadvantage is that the screen is too small to
be really useful, even if you zoom in.
To Next Page
Loading...