Checklist vs. Chaos
Team Shobolinsky arrived at the 2024 World CanSat and Rocketry Championship with a project that was equal parts precision engineering and controlled chaos. The rules sounded simple enough: build a CanSat the size of a soda can, launch it by rocket, have it measure something meaningful on the way down, transmit data live, and survive the landing. On paper that looks like a checklist. In reality it was weeks of design arguments, sleepless nights of debugging, and so many drop tests that our neighbors began to wonder why parachutes were constantly appearing in the courtyard.
The Floating Chemist
We chose to turn our CanSat into a floating chemist. Its mission was to sniff the air for nitrogen dioxide, ammonia, and volatile organic compounds—the key ingredients in ground level ozone formation. If it worked, we would be squeezing the kind of environmental science normally done with bulky lab instruments into a soda can tumbling through the atmosphere.
Built to Be Stubborn
The hardware was designed to be stubborn. We gave it a carbon fiber reinforced body that could shrug off abuse, paired it with a parachute recovery system tuned to open every single time, and built the insides as a modular stack to keep sensors from interfering with each other. At its heart sat a Raspberry Pi Pico, small but relentless, running CircuitPython and MicroPython. It was the brain, juggling telemetry, power management, and redundancy routines hammered in by weeks of late night testing.
The sensors were not just bolted in place. We tuned them, calibrated them, and tortured them until they separated background noise from real chemistry. The data flowing down was not random numbers—it was clean telemetry with context.
“Our CanSat was more than a can with sensors. It was Shobolinsky in miniature.”
Launch Day
Launch day gave us the full adrenaline dose. The rocket carried our CanSat skyward, and at apogee the payload deployed. The parachute cracked open, and down it came at a controlled 8 to 12 meters per second. For 120 seconds the little chemist streamed data to the ground station without missing a beat. Then came the landing, which was less graceful. We hit the ground fast enough to earn what we can only describe as a dubious honor: the fastest CanSat landing in history. Not an official category, but we claimed it anyway.
Trophies and Takeaways
The judges liked both the science and the story. Team Shobolinsky walked away with not one but two trophies: Second Place Overall and the Most Professional Team award. Which, if you think about it, is funny, because apparently professional rats are now a thing.
WCRC 2024 gave us more than trophies. It gave us proof that our way of building—obsessive testing mixed with playful chaos—could hold its own at the world stage. It showed us that rigor does not need to be dry, and that engineering works best when paired with humor and resilience. Our CanSat was more than a can with sensors. It was a stubborn little machine that fell out of the sky, survived, and came back with stories to tell.
“Apparently, professional rats are now a thing.”