A few days ago we finished up building our arduino altimeter and our first parachute. Our prototype parachute is meant for our 1/2 scale rocket, and we'll be launching that possibly after spring break so we wont be field testing it for a while, but we did throw it off of the balcony of the McMichael building attached to a water bottle filled with sand. The parachute is elliptical in shape and has 6 gores (triangle sections).

Here's a video of our 5th test:

And a picture of us about to throw the parachute off a smaller balcony outside:

We finished building the arduino altimeter on Tuesday, but I had difficulty getting the code for it to work. The code was provided online, but the thing was that the thing the code referenced (the library) was missing, so I had a time of finding one that we could use. We also ended up using a different display from what was in the instructions I used, so I ended up having to redefine the pins in the code as well. I am neither good at building electronics or coding; in fact, I have the most technological problems out of anyone I know, so just managing to do that was a major achievement. It's a good day when I don't break anything. Despite my progress, the altimeter is still not displaying correctly, so today I gave the altimeter to the members of our team who actually know how to code and work with arduinos (they were busy before), and we're going to try to sort it out today in time for our launch tomorrow of our 1/3 scale rocket.