Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Make It Great: Smartphone Rocket Launcher”.
In a recent iphone ad, the actors launched a group of model rockets with an iphone. I thought this was insanely cool, but unfortunately i wasn’t able to find how they did it. So i decided to start from scratch and design my own system using a raspberry pi web io, pi relay board and a modern smartphone for the software side of things. I started out by installing the webio pi framework. Next i created folders to house the project. I created an html page to allow us to use one large button to control the rocket the python file i created helped the html page control the gpio pin. I edited some configuration files to make everything work right and finally, i connected the raspberry pi to my wi-fi hotspot. I connected power and signal wires between the raspberry, pi and relay board, along with wires that lead to the rocket igniter. A small pocket travel router will create the wi-fi hotspot that both my phone and the raspberry pi will connect to.
There are a few things i had to do before i could shoot rockets. First, i had to clear an open area. Next, i connected the raspberry pi to a usb battery pack. The model rocket was placed on the launch pad with igniter connected.
I went to the raspberry pi’s ip address, followed by webio pi’s port number on my phone and finally, the time i had been waiting for had arrived. Three two one awesome, three, two one: all in all this project surpassed my expectations and turned out, just as i had hoped, thanks for watching and check back soon for more awesome projects from make questions, comments, build ideas or projects you’ve made can be sent to make It great lewisproductions.com .