Gathering weather telemetry with a Nano 33 BLE Sense payload

Most model rockets don’t do anything practical — they just go up really fast and then come back down more slowly to land in a field somewhere. Those launches can still be a lot of fun to watch, but they aren’t exactly useful. However, the sky has plenty of data of worth monitoring and the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense Rev2 is perfect for collecting it. Vlud used that board as a rocket payload to gather weather telemetry during flights.

This payload package is called LIFT for “LoRa Integrated Flight Telemetry,” which tells you the other big feature of the system: it transmits data from the rocket to a ground station via LoRa. The rocket, which has a D12-5 Estes motor for propulsion, is pretty conventional aside from the electronic payload. But that payload is able to capture quite a lot of interesting data.

The Nano 33 BLE Sense Rev2 board has a whole host of onboard sensors that make it perfect for this kind of thing. Of particular importance are temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and orientation. The orientation, monitored by the IMU’s gyroscope, tells the Arduino when it has reached the apex of the flight trajectory. It can then determine approximate altitude by checking the barometric pressure, recording temperature and humidity for any given altitude.

Finally, it sends that data back to the ground through a Semtech XL1278 LoRa transceiver module. Another LoRa transceiver records the incoming data, so it isn’t lost — even if the rocket is.