The Amateur Spaceflight Association (ASA) of Houston, Texas has a mission:

Breaking the world record for amateur rocket altitude would help accomplish this goal but the ASA needs more than a bottle of liquid oxygen, a box of matches and a really long ruler.

Given a payload of opportunity, Nicolaus Radford, Chief Avionics Engineer for ASA, went ballistic with the Rabbit RCM2300 Microprocessor Core Module.

Getting an 18.5ft rocket ready for launch is not quite as simple as placing it in a large bottle and lighting a long wick! Some idea of the size of the craft can be gleaned from these two photos, courtesy of ASA.

"I got into Rabbit about 3½ years ago, basically just looking for an embedded processor that would fit the form factor and capability I was after. I came across the Rabbit Semiconductor web site, bought one and haven’t looked back since," he said.

The ASA’s most recent rocket launch was about 5.6m in length and 230mm in diameter. It pulled about 8.5G on takeoff, broke the sound barrier and flew up to about 3500m. The rocket had video, telemetry, GPS and full dynamical analysis of the rocket, all in real time.

To measure all vehicle parameters, including acceleration, velocity, pressure and position, they built a custom data acquisition board that had all the components on it.

It used the Rabbit and an I²C bus to read and store data in the Rabbit’s flash memory. At the same time, the Rabbit was also serially interfacing to a terminal node controller and a GPS unit on two serial ports.