LVL1 Has A Rocketeers Group, Is Not Working On ICBMs.

We’re very familiar with the Louisville Hackerspace LVL1 here at Hackaday. From their GLaDOS-inspired sentient overlord, an evil box to filter the Internet, and a friggin’ moat, LVL1 is the closest we’ve got to a mad scientist heard cackling from a wind-swept castle on a stormy night. It turns out they also have a rocketry program. Now we’re just waiting for confirmation of their subterranean complex of missile silos.

The rocketery-oriented part of LVL1 spawned from a University of Louisville’s group. The goal of the group is to compete in the NASA University Student Launch Initiative, dedicated to competing against other teams to launch a scientific payload to 1 mile AGL. At the competition last May, the team placed 5th out of 42 teams and won the award for best website. We can’t wait to see what they come up with next year.

Even though the team is out of school for the summer, they’re still cooking up a few rocketry hacks. They’ve built a test stand to measure the thrust of off-the-shelf motors, kitbashed a few Estes Baby Berthas (very awesome and very easy if you have a laser cutter), and are starting a pulse jet project.

We’re assuming the LVL1 Rocketeers group is just a front for their yet to be unveiled moon-based “laser” project, but you can check out a few videos from the ULSI competition after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL4leFzR-Ic&w=470]

5 thoughts on “LVL1 Has A Rocketeers Group, Is Not Working On ICBMs.

  1. Slightly tangential, but if someone is bothering to install GLaDOS at their hackerspace, what do they use for a voice synthesizer? “say” just isn’t quite creepy enough, unless someone has some patches? Yes, I know the game uses a heavily processed real human opera singer voice, but surely someone has solved that problem by now. :-)

  2. A Moon base that is too old school for me.
    My current favorite plan involve Penguins with lasers(for obvious reasons), but am corrently thinking of going the fluffy animal.

    If anyone have any experience with using fluffy animals (real or stuffed) in plans for world domination I am interested in hearing about it.

  3. Good Work Guys!

    When you take your thrust measurements you should make sure you filter the signal being fed into the ADC to at least 1/2 of your sample rate (preferably more), so that you don’t get high frequency reflections all up in your datas. Just a little tip, I got some pretty bad noise/HF reflections on a static test which mucked up the usefulness of our data.

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