DARE – Stratos V Project

The Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering (DARE) is an amateur rocketry society based in the Netherlands. Over the years, DARE has produced several ground-breaking rocketry projects, including the Stratos series of sounding rockets. The Stratos rockets have pushed the limits within amateur rocketry, with the current rocket in development, Stratos V, being based on a cryogenic liquid rocket engine developed over the past two years. One of the core goals of Stratos V is complete reusability, which requires the design of robust hardware systems. Eurocircuits has been a great partner during the previous Stratos projects, and we are happy to see this partnership continue for Stratos V. With its use of a liquid rocket engine, the electronics for Stratos V must be completely redesigned compared to the past flagship projects, which will make it possible to monitor and control the many valves and sensors during flight. With Eurocircuits providing high-quality and reliable PCBs, we can efficiently develop and iterate on this new engine control unit (ECU). Parts of the engine control unit have been designed and will soon commence real-world testing on the ground. To achieve a compact form factor, the ECU is based on a multi-stack architecture, with each board handling specialised tasks such as pressure sensing, valve actuation, or external connectivity.

One of our first prototypes is a general-purpose solenoid and valve actuation board. This board can control up to nine actuators and will be used to actuate the various valves in the feed system. Another part of the ECU prototype is a precision data acquisition board capable of interfacing with standard 4-20 mA current loop sensors. This will be used to gather pressure data from the system during tests, and eventually during the flight. The pressure data will be invaluable for evaluating the engine performance and validating the system models.

Besides the ECU, the flight computer is also under active development. So far, a telemetry and video handling testbed has been designed with PCBs from Eurocircuits. The impedance control and tools from Eurocircuits have allowed for confidence in the RF design process. This testbed will allow for both firmware development and RF testing in preparation for the flight PCBs. Long-range telemetry will allow for data acquisition and aid in the recovery process during the flight of Stratos V.

We are thrilled to have Eurocircuits on board to help us with PCB fabrication as we continue developing other Stratos V electronics, including our Flight Computer.