Aerobrakes — Lesson 5: Algorithm Implementation — Bang-Bang

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With a working plugin skeleton from Lesson 4 and real control-theory intuition from Lesson 3, the team starts implementing for real — beginning with the simplest of the three algorithms.

Note

Lessons 5, 6, and 7 are one combined three-session block covering Bang-Bang, PID, and Responsive control. They share the same underlying activity structure and metrics table; each session's page here highlights that week's specific algorithm.

Objective

each algorithm gets implemented, tuned, and evaluated against the OpenRocket benchmark from Lesson 2.

Session Activities — Bang-Bang

Implement the bang-bang controller in the plugin from Lesson 4: full airbrake deployment whenever predicted apogee is over target, fully retracted otherwise. Tune it against clean, noise-free simulated data first, before anything realistic gets introduced in Lesson 8.

Metrics

Starting this session, the team keeps a shared comparison table tracking four metrics for every algorithm: altitude error versus target, overshoot magnitude, actuator cycle count, and settling time. This table gets referenced and extended in every subsequent lesson that touches algorithm performance, through the Comparative Analysis in Lesson 9.

Maps to milestone P1-M4.