The Arduino BLE Sense is a micro controller that has many built in sensors and 4 times the processing power of a regular Arduino Uno (while maintaining the footprint of an Arduino Nano)

Accelerometer

The on board accelerometer is critical for state detection during flight. By using known acceleration patterns caused by solid motor ignition, the state of the flight can be know allowing the system to start the spin stabilization automatically and safely.

Gyroscope

The on board Gyroscope was used to get the instantaneous angular velocity of the system so that the system can run that through a proportional control strategy to control the spin rate of the ship when the cold gas system starts.

Due to a lack of time, we had to record the IMU data with an Sd card. If this system needed to last more then one launch, this would be replaced with solid state storage. Sd card readers have a mechanical system that can fail due to the massive acceleration spike during launch, which could destroy the chip, or fail to save data.

The mosfets were used to trigger on the solenoids to start the spin stabilization phase of flight. these where chosen over relays because they lack a mechanical activation, preventing failure in similar to SD cards.

The buck boost converter was used to step down the 9 volt batteries in series (18 volts) to 12 volts. This reduced the over size of the flight electronics since we didn't have to use an off the shelf drone battery.

The batteries we used were 9v lipo batteries with a capacity of 850 mAh could output 2.3 Amps. these batteries were light weight, held their voltage under load and could put out more power then we needed to use.