Grant_Edwards
Well-Known Member
I'd been casually shopping for an LPR video camera for a while, and finally decided that the Estes Astrocam is about the smallest and lightest one that's readily available. It's also a pretty good deal at $30 — and that includes a 16GB SD card and a snap-together rocket. I needed some other snippets and planges from erockets.biz, so I broke down and ordered the Astrocam (it didn't really seem to increase the shipping much), and it arrived this afternoon. I'd never built a snap-together rocket before, so that provided 5 minutes of entertainment. 
If you don't want to be seen flying a snap-together rocket, the nosecone with the camera mount will fit any BT50 rocket.
I've been playing with the camera a bit, and it seems like a pretty decent little camera: 1920x1080 with impressive detail and sharpness for the price. It's very handy that it's a USB mass storage device, so you don't have to fiddle with the SD card to get the video files onto your computer. It produces AVI files, and the codecs used are mjpeg and pcm (not the most space-efficient, but the files are easily re-encoded).
My one complaint is that the power/status LED is hidden underneath the plastic case. If I looked directly "into" the end of usb connector and shielded it from the light, I could just barely see some blue light leaking out though the crack between the edge of the plastic case and the side of the USB connector. There's no way it was going to be visible outdoors when mounted in the nosecone.
So I grabbed my pin vise and a jewelers file, and cut a little notch in the case. I got a bit careless and drilled into the circuit board a tiny bit (white round patch in the photo below right next to the connector edge). Luckily I didn't hit a trace, or it would have been time for a trip to the lab at work where there's a microscope and soldering irons with very tiny tips.
The SMD LED (red arrow) is still back underneath the plastic a bit, but the LED has a broad enough beam pattern that's it's now easily visible:
Hey Estes, here's an idea I'll give you for free: mold a hole/notch in the plastic case so you can actually see the LED!
In order to provide video during descent, the parachute is attached to a string that's tied to the tip of the nosecone. [I'm thinking about doing the same thing on my Mercury Redstone so that the capsule lands on it's base instead of on the escape tower.] So, there's a notch down the side of the nosecone for the string to lie in during ascent, but that notch is way too small for the string provided, and it's a pretty tight fit getting the nosecone into the body tube with the string between the two — another job for the jeweler's file. After tripling the size of the notch, the string lies nicely in it, and the nosecone fits into the body tube properly. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they had originally specified a much thinner string when the nosecone was being designed.
If you don't want to be seen flying a snap-together rocket, the nosecone with the camera mount will fit any BT50 rocket.
I've been playing with the camera a bit, and it seems like a pretty decent little camera: 1920x1080 with impressive detail and sharpness for the price. It's very handy that it's a USB mass storage device, so you don't have to fiddle with the SD card to get the video files onto your computer. It produces AVI files, and the codecs used are mjpeg and pcm (not the most space-efficient, but the files are easily re-encoded).
My one complaint is that the power/status LED is hidden underneath the plastic case. If I looked directly "into" the end of usb connector and shielded it from the light, I could just barely see some blue light leaking out though the crack between the edge of the plastic case and the side of the USB connector. There's no way it was going to be visible outdoors when mounted in the nosecone.
So I grabbed my pin vise and a jewelers file, and cut a little notch in the case. I got a bit careless and drilled into the circuit board a tiny bit (white round patch in the photo below right next to the connector edge). Luckily I didn't hit a trace, or it would have been time for a trip to the lab at work where there's a microscope and soldering irons with very tiny tips.
The SMD LED (red arrow) is still back underneath the plastic a bit, but the LED has a broad enough beam pattern that's it's now easily visible:
Hey Estes, here's an idea I'll give you for free: mold a hole/notch in the plastic case so you can actually see the LED!
In order to provide video during descent, the parachute is attached to a string that's tied to the tip of the nosecone. [I'm thinking about doing the same thing on my Mercury Redstone so that the capsule lands on it's base instead of on the escape tower.] So, there's a notch down the side of the nosecone for the string to lie in during ascent, but that notch is way too small for the string provided, and it's a pretty tight fit getting the nosecone into the body tube with the string between the two — another job for the jeweler's file. After tripling the size of the notch, the string lies nicely in it, and the nosecone fits into the body tube properly. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they had originally specified a much thinner string when the nosecone was being designed.
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