LIFT Taps an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense to Turn a Model Rocket Into a Short-Lived Weather Satellite
On-board sensors and a Semtech LoRa transceiver pick up environmental data at the flight's peak and transmit them back to the ground.
Mononymous Romanian maker Vlud has spent a year developing a weather telemetry package for model rockets — transmitting data using a LoRa link driven from an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense Rev2 board.
"LIFT [LoRa Integrated Flight Telemetry] involves a rocket equipped with a telemetry system for providing real-time weather data," Vlud explains of the project, which he says has required "a significant amount of time and money" across several prototypes to get to the stage it is now. "The [rocket] assembly is propelled by a D12-5 Estes motor."
The payload for that rocket is the LIFT system itself, which pairs an Arduino Nano 33 BLE sense Rev2 development board with a Semtech SX1278-based XL1278-SMT LoRa transceiver module for low-bandwidth long-range wireless communication.
When the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense's on-board inertial measurement unit detects a 60-degree inclination, indicating that the rocket has ceased its climb, it begins to transmit environmental data — temperature and humidity plus altitude estimated by barometric pressure, again gathered using the board's built-in sensors.
"What you […] see is the result of one year of work," Vlud says of the project. "There have been multiple prototypes and a significant amount of time and money invested."
Vlud has not yet released source code or design files for the project, but some additional information is available in his Reddit post.