Well, it’s coming up soon this year! What? you say… Why BALLS, of course. Not Small Balls, not Sweaty Balls, but THE Balls! What’s Balls, you say? Balls is the premier high power experimental amateur rocket launch in the world known universe. It is held in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. See http://www.balls22.com/ for the grisly details.
Some of the local rocket nuts experts are going. We’ve built a super spiffy launch tower and I built the worlds most advanced wireless launch controller system (if I do say so myself). One problem with launching big honkin’ rockets is you don’t want to be near them when they shredenergetically disassemble take off gracefully. Rules is rules and the rules say if you are launching a big honkin’ rocket, you need to be a big honkin’ distance away. Like maybe half a mile or so. Believe me, you don’t want to be anywhere near a “P” class rocket motor when it struts its stuff… or not.
Well, with a bunch of launch pads sitting out in the far aways, how do you tell just which one is you? For this little task, we built an optical beacon that is mounted on the launch tower. It uses 9 x 330 lumen, 12V, MR16 light bulbs powered by a 4S RC lipo pack. It draws 4-5 amps. Hopefully it will be visible a half mile away in Full BlackRock Noon Day Sun… Originally the light was going to be a 50 watt “wall wash” floodlight, but those spew light over a 140 degree arc. The MR16 bulbs are 35 degrees, so the apparent brightness is 16 times higher.
The beacon is controlled by the wireless launch system box out at the pad (which is controlled by the Launch Control Officer’s box a half mile away… the radios supposedly have a 20 mile range). The beacon can be wired to the pad control box with a cable or it can use its own 315 MHz short range wireless link (big honkin’ rocket motors tend to vaporize cables). The beacon flashes when the launch control box at the pads is selected by the Launch Control Officer. When the pads are armed for firing it comes on continuously.
Its a 5mm red led driven with 5 milliamps… just a reminder that the power switch is on. It needs to be visible in sunlight. The internal battery is a 3500 mAh LiPo pack. The unit draws 17 mA when idle (with the receiver connected), so the battery would last around 1 week. It draws 50-60 watts when lit up.
BTW, the case for the beacon is made from two 9” nested cake pans that are bolted together. One pan is the back of the beacon box and contains the battery, wiring, and electronics. The other has the tower mounting bracket on it. When not in use, it can be removed from the back of the unit, flipped over, and used as a protective cover.
those two things go very well together. High power amateur rocket launches and population centers sounds like a bad idea. Looking forward to the light in action!
Got a chance to take it to a local park and give it a run today. No problem seeing it at 1546 feet (the launch control boxes have GPS receivers in them and can calculate the distance and bearing between them). Then we ran out of park… need a bigger park.
