Christmas Rocket

Brenton Baker -

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, but it’s also the most competitive time of year with neighbours fighting for first place in our local Christmas lights competition. 

To keep my winning streak, I need to deliver a display that’s unique, interactive and guaranteed to please. Combining the nostalgic feelings of free-flowing candy at Christmas and my new found rocket obsession, a Christmas rocket that blasts out candy was sure to be the golden ticket I need to take out the win.

So grab your eggnog, slip into something comfy and join me as we build and launch the first ever Baker Christmas Rocket.

The design

With just two weeks until Christmas, we need to design, build, test and deploy the rocket - fast! The rocket is going to form part of my exterior display, so it needs to be durable, water resistant and look the part.

Features

  • illuminated button
  • mission-control touchscreen
  • mobile app
  • automated air refuelling
  • boost

I have zero experience building rockets, but I have built a spud gun or two, and that’s perfect for the job. The spud guns crafted in my younger years were manually operated, meaning you need to manually pump air into the chamber and release a manual trigger to fire. That’s ok for backyard shenanigans, but we need to level up, after all, Christmas is serious business. 

The key to our technical design will be to take all elements that require manual intervention and replace them with automation. We'll swap out the manual air pump for an automatic pump and replace the manual release trigger with an electronic solenoid that will release air from the chamber and shoot out the lollies in the barrel.  We’ll control all these elements with a microprocessor and custom software. We’ll also build a mobile app so the rocket can be launched by a smartphone from anywhere.

Due to time constraints, I can’t build an automatic candy refill system, so we’ll need to recruit an elf to keep our candy chamber filled this year.

The build and installation

The launch

Enjoy the videos below of preflight testing and the main launch event, complete with fireworks!