DOUBLE HEADER, Two Patron streams this weekend! (Patreon)

Patrons, get ready for the weekend of yOUR LIFE.

Maybe not of your life, but I can guarantee it'll be the best weekend you have all week. Also long post alert ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Super ultra TLDR:

- Launch Stream Tomorrow, May 16th, 8pm ET / 5pm PT: https://youtu.be/Y3Xyv-NRPqA

- Absolution Update Sunday, May 17th, 4pm ET / 1pm PT: https://youtu.be/UGM7mS2liGQ

AVA and Sprint are launching tomorrow! The plan was to launch today, but one of the dev boards literally lit itself on fire. The cause was a shorted pyro channel for which I did not provide adequate protection in the PCB design. I can "bodge" my way around this by flying with a fuse on all devices connected to the channel, but this is a very important item to fix in AVA R2, and R1 no longer qualifies to fly any high-risk flights. Anyway, since the fix is easy and the failure mode is understood, I can fly Sprint with the less crispy board. 

There are so many things to be excited about with this flight, but here are the bullet points.

1. AVA will use its GNSS radio to attempt to stay directly above the pad. This is really important for the 1km shot, where a constant angle of even 2-3 degrees can send us pretty far downrange. There is a lot of noise in the GNSS data, so it will be a little bit of a challenge for the computer. Non-zero chance of an exciting behavior after position control arms itself at T+2 sec into the flight...

2. We'll have a full live telemetry display on the pad and during flight! AVA has a 900mhz radio onboard to beam data back to a ground station. That gets hooked up to the stream computer, and displayed along with the tracking shot. It'll look nearly identical to this, but it'll be live: https://youtu.be/8VvCIbDdbKg

3. The stream quality should be much better than previous launch streams. I've had a few field tests of this so far, but about a month or two ago I picked up a bunch of gear to power a laptop, wifi hotspot, and cell antenna in the field. It might be 4k? Probably 2k, which is just a bit above 1080p. I haven't tested cell service at the site yet, but I know where the cell towers are and I think we have a shot at fairly good quality. Here's a test of quality yesterday: https://youtu.be/E-Q_aep2NBQ

The stream link is here: https://youtu.be/Y3Xyv-NRPqA

We also have an Absolution weekly update stream happening on Sunday, where Charlie Garcia and I will spend an hour or so walking through what happened on Project Absolution this week. The TLDR on my end is that I was focused on getting AVA ready for flight, which included a sort of insane amount of git commits and codebase updates. Much to discuss there :)

Absolution Stream Link: https://youtu.be/UGM7mS2liGQ

Thank you as always for your support, and let me know if you have any questions! I'll see y'all tomorrow, cross your fingers...

Joe