Marcelo Goluboff's Starlight Is a Raspberry Pi RP2040 Board Tailored Specifically for Model Rocketry
Programmed in MicroPython, this dual-core development board includes rocket-specific features like "ignition" and "ejection" pins.
16-year-old student Marcelo Goluboff has designed a control board for model rockets, built around a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller and offering an on-board inertial measurement unit (IMU), dual temperature sensors, pressure sensing, and connectivity for external hardware including a thrust-vector control interface.
"The Starlight Rocket Control Unit is ideal for model rocketry," Goluboff explains of his creation. "Designed for use in 75mm diameter rocket tubes, it ensures accuracy and stability for your next launch. With sensors such as pressure, temperature, gyroscope, and accelerometer all packaged onto the board, this board allows you to monitor every part of your model rocket during lift-off and recovery!"
Those sensors, fitted to the board as standard, are comprised of a TDK InvenSense ICM-42605 six-axis inertial measurement unit with three-axis gyroscope and three-axis accelerometer, a Bosch Sensortec BMP388 absolute barometric pressure sensor, and two separate temperature sensors — chosen to provide redundancy, Goluboff explains.
These are all connected to a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, with a level-shifter adding support for 5V servo motors for an optional thrust vectoring system — steering the thrust of the rocket to provide finer-grained control.
Other board features include 16MB of flash memory with Execute In-Place (XIP) support, six 3.3V general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins plus two 5V pins separate to the two servo ports, SPI, I2C, and UART buses, and support for 5-18V power — plus a high-power "igniter" pin for use with ignition systems, another for ejection systems, . Programming, meanwhile, is over a micro-USB connector — with a MicroPython library provided.
More information on the board can be found on Goluboff's website, with example MicroPython code on GitHub under an unspecified open source license; fully-assembled boards are available on the Circuit Wizardry Tindie store at $49.99.