Fun & inexpensive payload ideas

[mjennings]

My son has an Estes Olympus, that's got a pretty sizeable payload bay. Outside of eggs, we are looking for other payload ideas. He was hoping to do something with his micro butit boards but the accelerometers on those max at 2g. Any thoughts?

 

[David Schwantz]

Candy drop for the kids watching. A mess of toy soldiers with tiny chutes. Mini light sticks at night. Small paper airplanes.

 

[waltr]

Try the 2G accelerometer anyway. It is just for fun and to learn something.
It is possible it will not get pegged during lift off.
An interesting part of the flight is the coast period. This is when the accelerometer will measure the Drag of the rocket.

What is the rockets lift off weight? which motor?
How old is your son?

Get OpenRocket and do a simulation to get idea of max G's. Then compare accerelometer measurements against to simulation.

Then get a different accerelometer to try.

 

[Scott_650]

I’ve flown this little data logging thermometer a couple times just for fun - I bought mine on Amazon for less than $20 but the list price isn’t too bad https://www.elitechus.com/collectio...0-points-high-accuracy?variant=14465674051648. The sample rate is adjustable but it only goes down to 10 seconds so you’ll need to get it fairly high to get any data - on one flight the temperature was fairly static but on a couple over 1K feet I ended up with some pretty nifty curves.

 

[mjennings]

He's about to be, the Olympus is a 24 mm bird, so likely D and E. @waltr that's not a bad idea in the drag measurement. I put it in RocSim and liftoff was well over 2g. @Scott_650 the Micro Bit might have a thermometer on it to. It's got some other features we might be able to use.
Thanks