Hello... my name is Rick Winscot and I'm the unofficial evangelist for extending and integrating the Adobe Flash, Flex, and AIR platforms with microcontrollers. This week - I'm all about processing water rocket telemetry in real time with Flex.

I got my first water rocket (translucent red top with an opaque white body) when I was about eight years old or so. I'm surprised I had any skin on my fingers at the end of that summer... it was awesome. The next summer it was bottle rockets around the fourth of July... and... well... I didn't have a whole lot of skin left on my fingers come August. I've always loved rockets, the little sling-shot paratrooper dudes, and blowing things up.

Speaking of blowing things up... my dad and I made a sick firecracker one year out of a huge smoke bomb hollowed out and filled with a table spoon worth of powder retrieved from some 200+ black cats. I'll have to tell you about that one another day - I digress!

A couple of months ago my interest in water rockets hit a high point - enough that I did some research and built a couple basic rigs for launching the garden variety water rocket. We did this as a family... and it was a ton of fun. A month or so later we had a scout activity and again... water rockets were a solid choice. So solid that the young women, who were having an activity that night as well, ended up coming over to see what all the whoosh and pop was all about. They wanted to give it a try but things were already winding down for the night... so we issued a challenge for the next combined activity. I water rocket battle to the death! Er... maybe not death - but you get the idea.

Problem: Competitive water-rocketry requires some way to judge the altitude or effectiveness of a design...
Answer: An accelerometer, bluetooth, and Flex... a sweet real time telemetry solution.

So, lets skip to the implementation. I bought a WiTilt v2.5 from SparkFun an eon ago... it has a reasonably sensitive accelerometer on it and bluetooth to-boot. Add a Java socket server and Flex can process the incoming data right? As I approached this experiment I wondered how smooth the data stream would be and if I would have to come up with a solution to post-process the data. As you can see from the footage - I think we are good to go.

I'll be doing some trials on Monday night... and will post a follow-up then.