In 3 hours we will have finished our project!

For this week we mainly focused on what we had left to do and making sure we will be able to finish for next Friday. This week we didn’t really have any highlights other than splitting roles between us and talking throughout.

This week we returned back to University after the Easter break. Since coming back we were told that we now had the opportunity to use the wind tunnel on campus. This weeks highlights were:

• We tested the improved rocket in the wind tunnel
• We began to plan the next few weeks before the deadline

During the Easter break from the 26th of March to the 19th of April our priority as a group was to make another rocket and launcher together based on the previous prototype. The highlights from these three weeks was:

• 4 of our group members were able to meet up (the others were not in the country so could not attend)
• We managed to successfully build a rocket, with a space to add in the Micro:bit
• We were able to improve on original launcher mechanism to allow space for our fins

(Amir pressuring our rocket)

This week we have been focused on making sure that we have a good amount of work available on website for our formative assessment. Our highlights this week are:

• We discussed on some of the issues with the prototype made a few weeks ago to make sure that we avoid making them again for the final design
• We made a list of tasks for everyone to do before/for Monday
• We have also been discussing different design shapes for the bottle rocket and plan on getting some CFD models soon

Fingers crossed Monday goes well, and our work is good enough so we know if we are heading in the right direction to get top grades!

This week we finally received our electronics kits from the University, unfortunately, none of us had worked with a micro:bit before! The weeks highlights are:

• Despite our inexperience we researched into the micro:bits to work out how to code them and experimented
• We managed to experiment with the built in accelerometer for the micro:bit even though we believe that the coding for the final project will be different as this didn’t give the results we would expect
• We have also decided that we will try and make the final water rocket during the Easter break as lockdown restrictions are lifted slightly and majority of us will be in Brighton to make it

This week our focus was to make some kind of prototype so we can test whether or not our ideas from the previous weeks will actually work, and they did! We now know our release mechanism works, so we can now continue to test and perfect our design for the rocket itself. Some of the other highlights this week was:

• We now have a more accurate Solidworks model to the size of the bottle we will be using
• We are looking to add more to the website over the next weeks to prepare for the formative assessment
• We can now test various design variations on the rocket

It might look like less progress has been made this week however we can now start to get a good amount of the project done before the formative assessment.

After the progress that we made last week we had so much to go off for this week. This meant that we were looking to improve these initial designs and try to make more decisions about the rockets overall design. The highlights this week were:

• We familiarised ourselves with a program called Open Rocket so we can can work out where the CP and CG will sit within the rocket – this will help us to work out whether the rocket will be stable when flying
• We decided that we would release our rocket using a pull wire mechanism and that we will be using a parachute to make it safer when the rocket falls back down
• We have also got a bottle size and type that we have decided to use so we can begin to use those dimensions in the various CAD designs
• We had look at what other materials we might need to purchase to make some prototypes of the rockets so we can experiment with fin shapes and make sure that the release mechanism will work

This picture above shows a design made using Open Rocket with the CG in front of the CP.

We have had just one week together as a team and already so much progress has been made! Some of the highlights from this week are:

• We sorted out some general admin – arranged regular meetings, decided how we will communicate with each other and some basic roles
• We chose as a group to make this an education package
• Lots of research has been conducted by the whole team, ranging from various bottle shapes to how a parachute could be deployed using gravity or electronics
• We have even had a couple initial design ideas made on SolidWorks