Aerobrakes — Lesson 4: Writing RocketPy Plugins

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With control theory intuition in place, it's time to learn the actual mechanism the team will use to inject an airbrake controller into a RocketPy simulation.

Objective

students can extend RocketPy with a custom control-surface plugin.

Session Activities

Walk through RocketPy's plugin architecture as a team: what hook points exist, how data flows between the simulator and a plugin, and exactly what state the simulation exposes to a plugin at each timestep.

Then build the simplest possible plugin first — one that always keeps the airbrake closed, doing nothing else. This trivial plugin proves the interface works correctly before any real control logic gets added, so any bugs found later are in the control logic, not the plumbing.

Deliverable

A working plugin skeleton that every team member can explain, not just the person who wrote it. This skeleton is what Lessons 5–7 will build real algorithms into.

Maps to milestone P1-M3.