EdEon Rocket Testing

I am a volunteer at Sonoma State’s EdEon program, and have spent this spring building and suggesting edits to their prototype N3 rocket kit, which is part of the NASA’s Neurodiversity Network program. I’ve been working with EdEon for over a year, and have done everything from website maintenance to exoplanet light curve calibrations with them. They asked me to test their rocket kit this Spring, and of course I took up the offer. I can’t publish their guides or specific materials on here, since it’s their educational property, but I can tell you what I did!

I started by building the payload to this rocket. This involved soldering a bunch of sensors to male pin headers, and then cutting and soldering wires and female pin headers to empty circuit boards. This was a pretty long process, as there were a lot of sensors and I had never worked with this type of circuit board before, so it was a great learning experience. After constructing the payload, I ran tests and more tests on all of the sensors using codes they provided (this was an Arduino based project), made suggestions to improve their guides and uploaded the final code to the payload system. I then constructed the physical rocket, which luckily for me, was the exact same model as the rocket I used in my Polygence research project.

I never actually got to launch my rocket, since I was going off to school, but I concluded that their guide was easy to follow and the payload was functional and running on my device! Here are some photos of the payload.