This is the story of a group of college students who moved to the Mojave Desert, bought a house, painted it white, and turned it into a makeshift lab. Then they went out to launch rockets.

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Talking to Amogha Srirangarajan from Carbon Origins

But they ran into problems, when they launched their Neptune 2 rocket,

“Our rocket exploded, and we didn’t know why, we needed a data logger …”

and because they’re makers, and all the data loggers they could find were too expensive or just not right for the job, they went ahead and built their own.

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The Phoenix 0.2.1 launch in the Mojave Desert

Their Apollo board is less than two square inches in size and is packed with sensors — eleven of them.

“We called it Apollo, because it has eleven sensors …”

The tiny six-layer board has an accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, and GPS, and can measure temperature, pressure, humidity, light (both UV and IR), and it records audio. But the board also comes with Bluetooth LE and wi-fi onboard, an SD Card for logging data locally, LiPo battery management circuitry, and it has an OLED screen and a vibrating trackball. If you count them up, the Apollo has over 200 components, all packed onto that tiny two-square-inch board.

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Carbon Origins talking at MakerCon in New York

Based around the same ARM Cortex-M3 chip as the Arduino Due, the board will be part of the Arduino at Heart program, and is completely open source. The board will ship with software making use of their own Arduino library that gives access to all of the onboard sensors. However the extra GPIO pins, not used by the onboard sensors, are exposed for use and Carbon Origins will be producing a series of smart shields to make use of those extra pins.

The board is on display here at Maker Faire in New York this weekend, and will be arriving on Kickstarter in the next month or so, and we’ll be back talking to the Carbon Origins team when it does.