Igniter Controls and DAQ (2022)

Chase MacDonnell

Nov 14, 2024 — 2 min read

A hot-fire of Florida Rocket Lab's Igniter V2.

As part of my role as the Director of Avionics at the Florida Rocket Lab, I developed the original controls and data acquisition system for our igniter. This system was divided into three sections: a Arduino based PLC (Controllino) for controls, a IO-Link Master for data acquisition and a computer to send and receive commands from both the PLC and IO-Link Master. The firmware for the Arduino based PLC was written in C++ and communicated with the computer over a custom UDP protocol. Then the computer communicated with the IO-Link Master over HTTP.

The software on the computer was split into two parts: a "agent" and UI. The agent was written entirely in Rust and communicates with the PLC and IO-Link Master, then the UI communicates with the "agent" via a custom RPC protocol.

Setting up the igniter test stand for a test.

GIF of the igniter firing for a single second.

Photo of the fluid system supplying the igniter.

Photo of the P&ID viewer without a connection to the test stand. (This is NOT the correct P&ID, I took this picture while testing the SVG viewer)

Grafana based data viewer being fed with mocked data.

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Trailer Test Stand (2024)

Igniter Controls and DAQ Rev 2 (2024)

EtherCAT over 100Base-T1 (2023)

Florida Rocket Lab ERP (2023)