Rockets and Smartphones
Entry posted by nils
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Once I wanted to record onboard video of my rocket flight. I had Sony Xperia Go smartphone which I didn't use anymore because it was outdated. It's video recording was still quite OK, so I decided to use it as video camera.
I was a beginner and for several reasons the flight failed. But I still got some video:
The Sony Xperia Go was very tough and it survived the crash.
Second time my rocket was much more powerful and it landed 500 meters away from the launch point. I was not able to find it.
I tried to call to that rocket phone to locate it by ringing sound. Then I remembered that this phone does not ring while recording video. I knew that smartphones are limited to 40 minutes of video recording and then they will stop. So I decided to come back at night. It was very quiet night. I called to my rocket phone and I heard it ringing and I found it. It was inside very dense bushes. The phone was damaged but still worked. I did see the onboard video from screen. I used internal memory for recording. The phone died before I had a chance to copy the video to the computer. So I lost it.
Then I found that quite cheap 170€ small and waterproof GoPro session is available. I bought it and built a rocket around it.
I made my rocket unsinkable. Wind direction was from the lake. I had boat ready and I expected my rocket to land in water. But it didn't. Probably the wind direction was different in higher layers and it landed in swampy wild forest.
170€ camera is cheap but still too expensive to lost it. I decided to go back to used smartphones.
I got perfectly working Samsung Galaxy 4 Mini for 15€. It is outdated as a smartphone but it still records high quality video.
Galaxy 4 Mini and GoPro Session 4 both record 1080p but video quality is very different. GoPro's video was poor and grainy while Galaxy 4 Mini's video was just great.
How to keep the video even when the rocket crashes? I found solution - it is surveillance recording app named DailyRoads Voyager.
It allows to record video in chunks. SD card must be used. In this case at least most of the video is still on the SD card, even when the rocket crashes and smarphone breaks.
Next time I will also use some app that sends me GPS location.
There some apps that make flashlight blinking. I hoped that this would be an additional option to make finding rocket easier. Unfortunately flashlight and camera are one piece for the system. Flashlight is not accessible to one app while the other app uses camera.
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