¶ Welcome!
This is the official Wiki for the Alabama Rocketry Association. It serves as a colletion of documentation, tutorials, courses, and projects that are publically available, with the goal of making knowledge in amature rocketry more acessible to others.
Only club members will be able to add or modify pages, however anyone can freely acess this website and most of its materials.
The rest of this article details to club members the features of this wiki, and standard procedures for adding and editing pages.
¶ Navigation
If you enter fullscreen mode, you can see a navigation bar on the left. Every page on this website is organized into separate categories, such as "Courses" or "General."
This diagram shows the current (planned) structure of the website:
Everything falls into 4 major sections on the wiki:
¶ Home
This section is for the basics - anything which overarches the club as a whole. This includes safety procedures, the club constitution, contacts, executive board bios, and sponsors. This section should remain relatively unchanged throughout the course of the year.
¶ Courses
This section is for beginner courses. It offers introductory information and very basic tutorials for new members to ARA. This includes an introduction to Python, Solidworks, and more.
Someone should be able to read all documents in a single "course" sequentially, and get a good foundational understanding of the related concept. Just like the Home section, this section does not change frequently throughout the year.
¶ General
This section is for advanced knowledge pertaining to specific topics. Any information about an electronic device, interface, part, component, or engineering/physics concept will be contained in here. Everything in this section should feel similar to a Wikipedia article, in the sense that it contains detailed information about a specific item or concept. Some examples of possible articles include:
- A tutorial on a procedure: "Interfacing with the Raspberry Pi over USB-C"
- Detailed information on an item, its use, and other relevant information: "Drogue"
- A new concept which is not implemented in the beginner courses: "The Rocket Equation"
To help keep organization and reduce the chance of duplication, everything is sorted into sub-categories and sub-sub-categories. All pages will be under some sub-sub-category, like so:
An article titled "Interfacing with the Raspberry Pi over USB-C", for example, should be found under General>Microcontrollers>Raspberry Pi>Interfacing with the Raspberry Pi over USB-C
If you want to make a new article called "Drogue," it would most likely be found under General>Rocket Design>Recovery>Drogue
An article on "The Rocket Equation" should be found under General>Physics>Astrodynamics>The Rocket Equation.
There should never be a "sub-sub-sub-category" - for example, you should never create a page such as
General>Physics>Astrodynamics>Equations>The Rocket Equation, because the pageThe Rocket Equationis buried under too many categories (in this case, the sub-sub-sub-categoryEquationsis too specific, and should be removed.
This organization scheme means that anyone looking for information regarding an item they're working with can locate it with ease, since all pages regarding a single concept are located in only one place on the website (with the exception of the beginner courses).
It is absolutely vital to keep the organization scheme described above to ensure that anyone looking for information on this wiki is able to locate it. Admins are responsible for ensuring new articles are placed in their respective locations
¶ Projects
This section is dedicated to current and past ARA projects and project teams which have existed. They contain information about the design, construction, testing, deployment, and results of past and present rockets, test stands, payloads, and other projects.
These items are here for other team members to reference when working on new projects of their own. They should contain diagrams, technical reports, schematics, test results, solidworks models, github links, pictures, part lists, budget spreadsheets, timelines, and as much detailed information about a project that exists.
The pages in this section are available only to ARA members, to prevent leaking too much information about team progress and internals to other potential competitive teams. You must be signed into a crimson email to view the pages here.
This section of the wiki should be updated regularly with new documentation as the year progresses, by all team members which make such contributions to the project.
¶ Creating, Editing, and Publishing
Creating a new page on the wiki is a very simple process.
¶ Making a New Page
On the top-right, you will see an option for creating new pages:
You will get a pop-up menu which lets you choose the location of your page, as well as the page URL. The left side of the menu shows all the folder locations for your pages. Use them to navigate to where you want to place your new page. The right side of the menu shows all existing pages in your current directory.
On the bottom, you will see the URL of your page. The text following the final "slash" on the URL is unique to your page, and by default, is labeled new-page. Change its name to your preferred page URL name, with dashes instead of spaces and no uppercase characters.
For example, if you want to create a page titled "How to Pick Up A Duck", the URL will look like
/general/ducks/care-and-maintenance/how-to-pick-up-a-duck.
Once you have the appropriate page URL and location, hit the "select" button.
¶ Making a New Category
There will often be times in which you need to make a new category. No worries, simply fill in the URL manually when you select your page location, and these new categories will automatically be created for you! Here's an example:
Once you have the appropriate URL, hit the "select" button.
¶ Editor Type and Page Configuration
On the next page, you will be presented with a page editor choice. Select either the Markdown editor or the "What You See is What You Get" editor (WYSIWYG). The Markdown editor is preferred, but you may find the WYSIWYG editor to be more to your liking. The editor type can be changed later, but "translating" your page to the other editor may not be 100% perfect.
Next, you will be presented with a page configration menu. Here, you can edit the page title, URL, descripton, and add tags. If you want, you can also navigate to the other tabs and edit the publishing status, publishing date, and HTML/CSS addons:
¶ Markdown Editor
If you selected the "Markdown" editor, you will be presented with this menu after setting up your page configurations:
The left side of the page is where you write or make edits, and the right side of the page is the "rendered" view that everyone will see. Try typing some text in the left side, and see how it appears when rendered.
To learn about all the Markdown features, visit the markdown tutorial page here:
markdown-tutorial