Prelude: iPhone rocket

2 November 2008 by lolife
Filed under Journal

So…I’m sort of an obsessive person at times. I had two simultaneous obsessions going, iPhone development and model rocketry. I’ve posted a little bit about both of these. One late night I had an inspiration — I should launch an iPhone in a model rocket!

The reasons were obvious: the iPhone has a 3D accelerometer in it, as well as GPS, including altitude, network access and a really great development environment (Xcode).

So my goal was to write a program for the iPhone that would log all of the data inside the phone for later retrieval. At the same time I would send out the GPS position over the network to my web server to act as a rocket finder in case it got lost. I had just lost 3 rockets so that was big on my mind. I didn’t want to send my iPhone into a corn field or the middle of the woods and not be able to retrieve it.

So that’s what I did. I wrote the code, built the rocket and launched it! It was one of the most fun geek/dork projects I’ve ever worked on. Let me add that there is nothing very special about this on either the iPhone dev side or the model rocketry side. People do far more interesting things in both regimes. But, as far as I know, no one has ever launched an iPhone in a model rocket. I did it, I didn’t blow up my iPhone in the process, and I got some nice data to play with.

This is only the prelude — more to come!

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