Puffin-1

Airframe

Nose cone

A tangent ogive profile, built with bi-axial fibreglass sleeves and MGS LR285 resin / LH287 hardener using a wet layup. The aluminium nose tip is machined on a lathe.

Tangent ogive · Fibreglass · Machined aluminium

Body tubes

The main parachute bay, drogue parachute bay, and motor mount tube use 7781 E-glass fabric with MGS LR285 / LH287 in a wet layup.

Axial compression failure at 90 kN · 25 safety factor · Instron 5585H

Three team members working with fabric around the nose-cone form — Nose-cone layup

Three fibreglass tubes and a nose-cone component arranged upright — Airframe components

Fibreglass tube supported on a workshop fixture — Tube manufacture

Fins & roll control

Fin can

Four symmetrical clipped delta fins use CNC-machined SG-200 ¼-inch fibreglass cores and 3D-printed fillers. Embedded servos operate the rear fin flaps for roll control.

4 clipped delta fins · Embedded roll-control servos

Layered fin construction with integrated servo and wiring visible — Fin mechanism

Fin-shaped components held in an alignment fixture — Fin alignment

Avionics

Flight computer: Student-designed board. Firmware written entirely in Rust using the Embassy framework.
Onboard sensing: STM32 dual-core MCU, Xsens MTi-2 IMU, GPS, and SD card slot
Radio: RFD900x
Video: Onboard DJI O4
Backup systems: Featherweight GPS and RRC3+ commercial units
Hardware: CNC-machined aluminium bulkhead and lathe-machined ejection charge canisters

Populated flight-computer circuit board on a blue surface — Flight computer

Avionics assembly with circuit boards, wiring and aluminium bulkheads — Avionics assembly

Team member soldering at a workbench with the board layout on a monitor — Electronics assembly

Two circuit boards arranged on the electronics workbench — Circuit boards

Propulsion

5015L1115 motor

Classic propellant in a CTI Pro 75 6G casing.

Burn time: 4.5 s
Maximum thrust: 1713.3 N

5015L1115 thrust curve, peaking early and decreasing over approximately 4.5 seconds — 5015L1115 thrust curve

Recovery

Main parachute

64″ toroidal Fruity Chutes parachute, C_d = 2.2.

Drogue parachute

18″ elliptical Fruity Chutes parachute, C_d = 1.3.

Deployment

4F gunpowder and MGS Firewire initiators for ejection charges. Ejection-charge canisters are machined on a lathe.

Orange and white parachute canopy laid out on the floor — Parachute canopy

Orange recovery harness attached to a bulkhead fitting — Harness attachment

Assembly & structural testing

Tube compression testing

We tested our fibreglass tubes on an Instron 5585H, pushing them to failure at 90 kN. That gives the airframe a safety factor of 25.

Team members at an Instron test machine with a tube specimen — Tube compression testing

Tube specimen between the platens of an Instron test machine — Test setup

Unpainted rocket sections, fins and recovery harness during workshop assembly — Rocket assembly

Ground systems

Communications

We built the ground-station interface and a Yagi antenna to communicate with Puffin-1 through its RFD900x radio.

Handheld antenna and ground-station laptop during an outdoor test — Communications testing

Assembled Yagi antenna on a workshop bench — Yagi antenna

Ground dashboard

Our Flutter dashboard brings live telemetry, flight graphs and GPS tracking into one interface. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, with Raspberry Pi support for the field.

Explore the dashboard

Airframe

Nose cone SRAD Student researched and developed

Body tubes SRAD Student researched and developed

Fins & roll control

Fin can SRAD Student researched and developed