hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2612.txt

Episode: 2612
Title: HPR2612: Liverpool Makefest 2018 - interview with Joe aka Concrete Dog
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2612/hpr2612.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 06:33:08

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This is HBR episode 2612 entitled Limitool Makefast 2018, Inter-New Window Acker Concreted
on, and in part on the series, Inter-New, it is hosted by Tony Hughes aka Tony H1212
and is about six minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
The summary is an Inter-New Window from Limitool Makefast.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge
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This is Tony Hughes for Acker Public Radio.
I'm still at Liverpool Makefast and I've got with me.
I'm Joe or better known, uh, online as Concrete Doc.
Concrete Doc, I like that.
Can you tell us what you're here for today?
Well, I'm here. I'm pretty much obsessed with all things to do with space.
So I've got a load of rockets with me starting from little tiny kind of Estes kits
that anybody can buy and get off Amazon and launch in the park or a football field,
obviously with permission. Through to, I'm also sit on the UK Rocketry Association Council,
and I've got some of my big high-power rockets which lead a bit more,
you lead a few more sort of certifications than things to fly.
Yeah, I've actually just taken a picture of you with one of them,
so that'll go into show notes.
So how did you get into rocket?
I actually got into rockets through another space-related thing.
So I used to rule a forum for people building a small form factor of satellite called pocket cubes.
So I've been obsessed with these amateurs building satellites that go into low earth orbit,
and it kind of just led me down the rabbit hole of looking at all things space.
Yes, somebody bought me a small Estes rocket,
and then of course, cut to two years later, my house is full of massive rocket airframes,
and I'm building Lermen going around and doing workshops about them and all kinds of stuff.
I keep seeing YouTube videos of people sending things up with Raspberry Pi's,
is they got anything to do with your rocket?
Well, this one that I'm right next to, which is quite a small rocket,
in this it's not a Raspberry Pi, but I built a little
altimeter of, it's an Arduino Pro Mini attached to a little SD card and breakout board,
and I can't remember which barometric, oh, sorry, it sounded like somebody let off a rocket,
but it was some air pressure. So a little barometric pressure sensor,
I just kind of wired them all together and wrote some code after it,
it works as an altimeter so I can tell how high my rockets have gone.
Oh, that's really cool. So what do you use for actually programming them?
So the Arduino stuff, I just, I've got Linux, I'll be latch up and just, yeah, a little, you know,
serial, I can't remember, it's really a CP2102, sorry. Yeah, some of the bigger rockets,
people build all sorts of aviolics into them, things that deploy extra charges so that they
can do multi-stage release of parachutes, so that you can release a really small one at
apogee, and then a really big one when you say 100 meters off the ground, people build
beacon's GPS systems to locate, some of the big ones might end up, you know, a couple of miles away,
so, so having, you know, having a GPS system that will send back its location or a radio beacon,
you can kind of triangulate, download, it's pretty useful. Do you have cameras on any of them?
Yeah, lots of, I haven't done so much of that because I've done a couple, there's a classic
picture of a library, I said well up and I forgot to set the date right, and it looks like I've
invented a time machine because it's like the date stamp in the call, it says it's like 27 or so.
But yeah, lots of people send cameras up, and lots of people actually send cameras up obviously
to catch images of the earth, but to, to sort of film bits of their rocket to see how they
actually separate, so usually there's a kind of, you know, to see what's going on, you know.
Like that famous satin one where one of the boosters is dropping off.
Yeah, exactly, yeah, and like it's a great hobby because like I'm really into designing and building
my own designs, but there it's got that whole thing of like, there's people who do, you know,
and scale model rockets that are like, you know, I haven't got the patience or the skill to do it,
but like they build these amazing scale things, then there are people who do like, you know,
competition rockets for like the smallest, you know, like thing that can carry an egg and return
it to it. There's all kinds of different aspects, including altitude records.
I'm currently the UK, I hold the altitude record for the, the smallest class of rocket,
which is A impulse rocketry, which are the smallest rocket motors you can get. So I've got this
tiny airframe here that's about, this tiny rocket that's about, what's that? 6, 8 inches long,
see I was going to go SI units there, like 20, 20 celibators. I'm old-school.
And I got, it holds the current altitude record of 244 meters, no sorry,
240 meters, and the old record was 140, and I beat it through reducing the mass by using
some clever 3D printing ideas and stuff. Well, include a picture of that in the show notes.
So the bigger rockets, what's the altitude record, your personal altitude record for some of
your bigger rockets? Not very high actually. I've got less than a kilometer. I couldn't tell you
the exact height, but I've got plans for the, I'm going to build something sort of about the size
of this big black airframe in the background that hopefully I'd like to get up to, like sort of,
maybe the next couple of years I'd like to be lucky on five or six kilometers and beyond that
who knows. I've just got this other big airframe here that I'm speaking later on that. I've also
opened source in some of my designs because I want, I would really love more people to get into
high power rock tree in the UK. It's difficult to get the kits that over here that a lot of them
in the US. So yeah, I'm trying to open source my designs as much as possible so that other people
have a bit of a clue, even if they just look at them to get ideas. So where would we find those
we want you to look for them? If you search out a concrete dog, you'll get a load of people selling
lies garden ornaments and somewhere amongst it you'll find all my nonsense and then you'll find
the link to my get. So yeah, search concrete dog. Right, thank you very much and thank you for
agreeing to be interviewed. No problem, man. Thank you.
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