KevinS

• The severe warning about "don't hook the pyro battery up backwards or the charges will fire" seems like the wrong answer. This may be the altimeter used on "Stubby" at the ARS Thrust in The Dust that resulted in the ejection charges firing... As TonyL said afterwards "it wouldn't have taken that much effort for them to prevent that from happening"... To be sure they really meant it, I hooked up an ematch, put on my safety glasses and touched the battery to the terminals "wrong" and the ematch went off... Now I am very diligent when hooking up my batteries in that at that moment, I pause like an autistic person and spend ~10 seconds just looking at the terminals to be sure I am hooking them up right. But that pause is done to protect the electronics - I don't know how long I would pause if I knew that I might fire the charges... Likely I just wouldn't use the electronics....
  • 2008-11-15 Update : I've now seen multiple different ones with this warning so it is not considered a non-standard deficiency anymore. Apparently TonyL even said it was an AltAcc that caused his problems.
• Did my "spin test" with it (see below). Seemed to work for main deployment but seemed to always fire instantly for the "cluster / staging deployment" - maybe it was really doing "cluster" (light the outboards as soon as thrust on the main is detected...?

"Spin Test"

• For a gross reality check of whether an accelerometer based system sort of works and can fire an ejection charge, I use a simple spin test. I mount the altimeter to a board, attach an ematch for the main, hook a wire or string to the "up end" and spin it (this is the rocket thrust phase). Then I hook the string or wire to the "down end" (this is the deceleration phase). Ematch should pop at when you have decelerated it as much as you accelerated it (spun it as much from the bottom as you did the top).