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Water Rocket Servo Deployment Example
These settings will work for a 2 litre or larger water rocket using a micro servo to trigger a
parachute after apogee. Water rocketry is an art all to itself, if you haven’t looked at it lately do
a little Google’ing… you’ll be amazed what they’re doing. The Eggtimer is the only flight
computer that will modulate servos without any extra electronics. All you need is a 39 ohm ¼
watt resistor across the deployment channel outputs to provide continuity and pull the servo’s
control input to ground when the channel isn’t firing.
You will want a very low LDA, 50’ should work. 10 samples per second should be appropriate,
and 2 samples/sec for descent. We set the main channel to deploy at nose-over, with the servo’s
PWM at 6; this will give us pulse widths of 800ms and 2400ms lock-to-lock, which should make
almost any servo go full range. The rocket is obviously not going anywhere near mach speeds,
so we’ll set the Burn Timer to the minimum value, 1.
Eggtimer Build_1.48b Flight Settings
T:23.50
A 50 LDA <50-500 by 50> P:97804.00
B 10 Ascent Samp/sec: <4,5,8,10,15,20,25,33> A:975.39
100 Interval (ms) Main:0
C 2 Descent Samples/sec <1,2,4,5,10> CHB:0
500 Interval (ms) Batt:3.12
D 2 Main Mode <0-Off, 1-Igniter, 2-Servo CCW, 3-Servo CW>
E 0 Main Altitude <100-2000 by 50, 0 @ Apogee>
F 6 Servo PWM <0-9>
G 0 CHB Mode <0-Off, 1-Igniter, 2-Servo CCW, 3-Servo CW,
4-Airstart, 5-Airstart w/o Breakwire,6-Delay>
H 2 CHB ON-Time <1-9,0-Cont.>
I 2000 Burn Timer <100-20000 ms by 100>
J 0 Airstart/Delay <0-9900 ms by 100>
K 0 Airstart Min Velocity <0-700 by 50>
L 0 Telemetry
O Comments: H20 rocket servo
Options: Esc, A-O, ?