PerfectFlite MiniAlt/WD on Mac OS X

Matt — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 07:21:58 +0000

My very understanding wife bought me a rocket altimeter. This handy little device will let me control the descent rate of my higher altitude rockets, so they have less time to drift under the parachute. Less drifting means I won’t have to walk a mile across the dry lake bed to retrieve my rocket, and less chance of losing it. Last ROCstock I flew the upgraded Mean Machine on an Aerotech H128W-M. Gary at Rocketography took a nice photo of the launch. It blasted up and out of sight in seconds. I couldn’t find the rocket after a long search, but I got a call a few days later from someone who found it a couple of miles from the launch pad. Anyway, the altimeter is the MiniAlt/WD (MAWD) from PerfectFlite, ordered from What’s Up Hobbies along with the USB adapter. It doesn’t have as many sensors as some other flight computers, and it’s not very programmable, but several people recommended it as a reliable choice for what I want to do. The USB connection is only supported under Windows and Mac OS 9, but I got it to work under OS X. All I had to do was install the drivers from http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm, and then do “screen /dev/tty.usbserial-A9009jvE 38400″ from the terminal to talk to it. I even wrote a little C program to download the flight log over the serial port. We’ll see how well it works when I fly the altimeter on Martian Sunrise 2 in a couple of weeks. If that goes well, I’ll look into connecting it to some pyros for dual parachute deployment, probably on the Mean Machine or the new 4″ rocket I’ve been designing.

(Update) Here’s the MAWD dump program with source code: Dump MAWD.dmg. It’s a command line program that takes the path to the serial port as a single argument.

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PerfectFlite MiniAlt/WD on Mac OS X