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High Power RocketCam Videos
HaveNoMouth writes "What happens when the founder of Xircom and his brother bolt a DV Camcorder to the side of a 200 lb. model rocket and press the red button? The incredible movies (with sound!) at Gates Bros. Rocketry tell the tale. The quality of these movies is by far the best I've seen from the "strap a camera to a flying toy" community. They have a nice gallery of still photos too.
If only everyone named Gates did stuff this cool."
Tens of thousands of USD is blown up in the air and converted into a couple of movies which can be shown on Slashdot so that we can make insightful comments like this?
if only they could strap a DVcam to the desk pointing at the blinkenlights on their server as the poor thing gets slashdotted to hell and back
You know, since Carmack shares a love of the same hobby as these gentlemen, I wonder if this would interest him? I would say it might. And being that it might, I wonder if he would code a mini-cam for the Rocket Launcher in Doom III? Bullet-time eat your heart out!
Zech Harvey, MCSE, MCDBA, CCNA
I guess it'd be an improvement over strapping someone to a rocket then hoping they survived the landing so they could tell you about it.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
So I build this nice, trim little single stage rocket (solid fuel), and my brother talks me into strapping another zero delay motor onto the bottom....it went fine until the tagged on motor lit the main motor....the rocket tumbled just for an instant, and when the main motor fired, the rocket was horizontal...it quickly made it to a nearby freeway and took out an aged Mustang. We figured since lunch was almost over we'd just as soon head back to the lab and quietly call it a day. A camera on that one would have shown one ticked off Mustang owner, I'm sure.
:)
Don't know if I have the nerve to sacrifice a DV camera...but maybe someone else's camera would be ok
They _really_ should have put up divx there instead of mpeg. /.-ed :)
They're just asking to be
this sig has intentionally been left blank
While the on rocket cams are good, I think the tower ones are most impressive. I'm amazed the cameras still worked afterwards! Wow!
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
"What happens when...."
For one, JVC and Canon camcorder models mentioned in the site get shock certified at 0.6 Mach speed, with forces exceeding 1G. Wow!
"Do something man. Right now."
Is it really really neccessary to have a cheap shot at MS no matter how little the post might be related? Why don't we just have a default sig "Windoze sucks, Linux rulez."?
Just in case the posters read the comments: Please lash out at MS and other scapegoats ONLY when it is justified. (not too optimistic, since not all posters proofread the submissions or even read the articles, it seems... sigh...)
It's pretty offtopic, I know, but does anyone else here really wonder about Bill Gates? I mean, he is a geek, right? Would it be possible to hang out with the guy and have a good time chatting about different clever ways to approximate solutions to the travelling salesman problem?
Does the guy code?
Does he have other geek hobbies?
I mean, seriously. I think this is fascinating stuff. Whether we like it or not, HE'S ONE OF US (but maybe with a different economic perspective). Wouldn't it be interesting to get to know the other Bill Gates?
Oh, the videos of the rockets are OK too.
*rimshot*
What happens when the founder of Xircom and his brother bolt a DV Camcorder to the side of a 200 lb. model rocket and press the red button?
:)
You prove to NASA that it can be done cheaply?
-mo
I just watched the high res version of the on-board camera for Jayhawk...and it was awesome!! Beats NASA's attempt at strapping on a camera to a rocket, if you ask me.
Besides, it landed standing up. How cool is that?
---
Open Source Shirts
strap a camera to a flying toy and fly it into the showers at a local school
Get the best of both, people freaking out hilariously and lots of h4w7 n3kk1d gur1z 8-). You could even have it blow up afterward, but that would ruin the whole video thing.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
...I could finally yell, "Fly lunchbox, fly!"
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Exactly. It is extremely bizarre in cases like this where the thrill is obtained by just burning money and no brains or hack value (which they seem to be hunting for) involved at all. I believe this experiment could have been useful too - but atleast they failed to reveal that on the site. But naturally, it is their money and they can burn it anyway they want. As it must matter for them a lot: hack-value points from the local audience: void.
Wouldn't it be better and more rewarding to give the money to charity than to just blow up DV camcorders.
No.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I'd rather see these on prime-time TV than glorified remote-controlled chainsaws destroying each other... The views of the horizon gliding into place is absolutely breathtaking!
Yeah, I surprised! Those are the best damn dildo commercials I've ever seen!
BTW, if you had actually RTFA or watched the videos, you would know that they recover the rockets using parachutes - which keeps the camcorders from breaking apart when the rockets reacquaint themselves with terra firma.
If you really believe your own bullshit, what are you doing with a computer and an internet connection? For what you spend every month on your internet connection alone you could feed a starving child in Uganda for a year! I mean, really! Shame on you (and me)!
We should be volunteering at our local soup kitchens and donating all our spare cash to feed those poor starving children in some nameless backwater instead of surfing the web, watching TV, and playing with our modded Xboxes. After all, /. user number 601843 says so!
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
So they aren't allowed to have a hobby now? Who are you to tell or even suggest how and where they spend their money?
If you'd have taken the trouble to take a look at the site and the video's, you'd have seen that the object they tried to achieve wasn't blowing up camcorders, it was to send one up in a rocket and bring it down in one piece. Which they did.
As for the "gain" they got out of it... as anyone with a similar hobby knows, it is not about cheap thrills, but about the thrill of personal achievement. And as anyone who has experienced that kind of thrill will attest: it is something worth spending money on.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Bill Gates doesn't do anything cool.
/. reader, he must be told.
As he is an active
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
With the camera sticking out of the side? Many, many rockets have been totally destroyed from just losing one fin. This series of rockets had a whole fairing bigger than a grapefruit protruding from it and it never tumbled. (except the one which had a parachute failure.)
Was there poverty before money?
Ultimately, possesion is what leads to poverty. It also leads to having an economy. If you ask me the jury's still out, but in Western Civilization, inventing shit, finding new ways to do things, and getting rich is "morally right." Cultures that don't hold those values get disappeared by Western Civilization. Our whole "way of life" is in part predicated on greed. It's the Invisible Hand that Adam Smith was all on about.
The problem, though, is how do you get people to share without, well, completely redistributing wealth and resources? And why shouldn't there be poor people? If you're lazy, shouldn't you be poor?
These questions have been debated for centuries, and we still have poverty. We suck.
I'm curious to know: Do you have to get permission to launch these things? or is it a free-for-all
Is there some sort of height limit?
What about the UK (where I live)?
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Have you actually *read* The Wealth of Nations? Do you think that Adam Smith was proposing completely unchecked market economics???
Er... No.
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
If you don't live in the USA you are a terrorist. We will bomb you eventually.
I agree. but you can imagine the networks getting hold of it and making the rockets hit each other "for the 12-18 male demographic."
Sigh. It's true. In the TV business the product is not the show that is sold to the viewers; the product is the viewers who are sold to the advertisers.
Piglet was firmly taped to a display firework rocket (one of those damn huge ones), head facing the sky before being fired into the sky. Can you say "Pigs in Spaaaaaaace!" ;) :)
I wish we could have had a Piglets eye view of it, we kept finding bits of piglet in nearby streets for days
Why are so many slashdotters so seemingly terrified of a critical question about one of the site posts?
Must we really be robots being fed this information or can we actually say something critical occassionally without the need for abuse?
No-one seems to be proposing outlawing hobbies, and frankly I don't propose to, however some hobbies make less sense than others, for example Saddam presumably thinks he has every right to indulge in his 'hobbies' so why are you American's so keen to stop him? Oh right, yeah, because he is a *threat* to the world, he is 'evil'... oh I see claims to a moral position when it suits the *Americans*....
Or would it be ok if he strapped DV cameras to his rockets and posted them to Slashdot?
Does raise the interesting question of this very useful rocket technology information being posted where Saddam can find it easily ...
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
I'm sorry, but I'm thinking of those FoxTrot comics where Marcus and Jason attach the video camera to the rocket which upsets the balance and it flies straight at them. Something along those lines happaned to me once.
What amazes me is that the video camera can still record footage succesfully given the enormous g-forces sustained at takeoff. The clarity of video appears unaffected.
I would have at least expected a bit of flicker as the tape strains, or the motor backtracks a little or something...
Very cool.
And as I have said previously, I am not anti-technological nor anti-progess, merely I believe we need to be more sensitive to issues. Rather than, wow a rocket that has a DV camera, gosh, wow, amazing. Yeah right.. amazing waste of money... hardly creative and hardly useful either...
And I have not said stop buying things. The purpose of the post was to raise a dissenting voice and say, hey, maybe this isn't all that great, is that *so* bad??
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
I can't believe you are comparing rocketry videos with using chemical weapons on your own people. When I was in school, you could tell a debate was degenerating when someone made an analogy to Hitler. Today, it is Saddam.
Congratulations on resorting to the last refuge of a desperate debater. Only took you 50 minutes from your first post.
And I assume you have the credentials to back up this claim? Please tell me which university has granted you a degree in rocket science or aerospace engineering.
It is quite simple, these people are *burning* money for no other reason than there own individualistic selfish satisfaction.
It's their money to burn. Maybe the people who do these kinds of things also tend to be socially-conscious people who donate a sizeable chunk of time and/or money to the Good Cause Du Jour. Besides, hobbies, individualism and fun are bad because...?
I am merely stating that when you look around at the world (and the Internet has been enormously useful in helping us to do just that) you see repressive states, anti-democractic regimes, torture, poverty, starvation and unhappiness.
And what exactly do you suggest we do about this? I mean it - if you have the solutions to these problems, speak up! People have been trying to solve these problems for literally thousands of years - if you know how to solve them, well...the Nobel Peace Prize awaits!
When you start to think you as a nation have absolutely no responsibilies to the rest of the globe (ie as America so often does)...
You're right. We don't. Since when did the US (or any other nation) become the world's police force/janitors/feeders/saviours? Why should we have to clean up the messes made by others? Everybody bitches when the US doesn't get involved, then they bitch when the US does get involved. Make up your fucking minds already!
...Resentment caused by the US getting involved and trying to help someone somewhere (regardless of whether said attempts to help were unsuccessful and/or directed at the wrong people or places - nobody ever said the US was perfect, at least nobody who's sane).
And if this is allowed to grow unchecked *no* amount of American hegemony or military muscle is going to stop it.
Hear hear! Personally I'd like to see the US withdraw from the UN and tell them to find another country to hold their parties in, then withdraw all military forces to US soil, to be used only to totally annihilate any nation that invades the country or blows up parts of it. Then tell the rest of the world to go clean up their own damn mess.
But then maybe its true that you *really* don't care and don't want to know...
<sarcasm>You're right. I don't care and I don't want to know. I just want to watch cool videos of big penis-shaped rockets being fired into the air, and speculate on how big of a payload they could carry to blow up schools and hospitals in some third-world starving hellhole.</sarcasm>
(jlanthripp, posting anonymously because of the bleeding heart socialists with mod points)
Isn't it lovely to complain ... about other people.
Giving liberals a bad name.
What happens when?... it gets slashdotted! Help them out, slashdot!
Anybody get a mirror? Maybe slashdot should think about providing mirrors of small time operators' sites when an article like this is posted. We all *know* the poor little guy is going to get slashdotted. At best, he can't show his girlfriend/ dad/ best friends what he is up to. At worst, he gets a hefty bandwidth bill from his ISP. Linking to IBM etc is another thing, but surely slashdot could show a bit of community spirit and responsibility and offer a mirror before posting up articles with links to little guys?
Microsoft sets course for Jupiter
Microsoft Corp will today announce further details of its Jupiter project to componentize and integrate its e-business server family, including Content Management Server 2002, Commerce Server 2002, and BizTalk Server 2002.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Yes, I know divx is smaller. But you have no idea how painful a pain in the, um, what a hassle divx is for some (read OS X) people to deal with. And, personally, I think the quality of divx is somewhere around that of real video, not the purtiest horse in the stable. Naw, they would get /.ed no matter what format they use, so why not the best?
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
The sad part is, that won't even be a joke once GWB gets his way...
I'd like to see a camera strapped on the side of one of the cruise missiles. Well, I guess they already have those. Never mind.
If only everyone named Gates did stuff this cool.
If only everyone named Gates could create a web server that could take a slashdotting.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
Beats me ;)
This is just as childish as anyone else who has a hobby on a side note, I saw these guys launch at LDRS in Amarillo, these guys rockets kicked some SERIOUS ass!! and if you happen to watch the video's rarely destroy a rocket
True. I guess it's just too hard to imagine myself in the same league of money wasting. My original point was however, that it would have been interesting to read some bit more analytical results of the experiments. I'm sure these guys have already a lot to share on the subject. Anyway, it was dull whining from me. I guess I am having a bad hair day. :)
Damn right. That was not the intent either.
What happens when the founder of Xircom and his brother bolt a DV Camcorder to the side of a 200 lb. model rocket and press the red button?
They have to get a new web hosting provider because the old one gets slashdotted, blames them for the outage, and kicks them out?
link to photos of GB rockets at LDRS
Really this is like the 10th time in the past two weeks you guys have hosed someone's site. You should start asking permission before you post someone's site here.
I've been seeing these films on Roadrunner vs Coyote, though they look a little chalky.
...but I'll bite. What you are proposing is that people who work in making DV camcorders and model rockets become unemployed, so we can give them as charity the money we currently waste in such expensive toys?
"If only everyone named Gates did stuff this cool."
:)
What? Windows for Warheads?
... he's one of us and everyone else is jealous of the fact that not only did he have the skills but the business sense to cash in on it all?
Oh, thats right, the whole struggling 'artist' concept applies- it's good to suffer the injustices of the majority for your craft....
By definition, if it weights over 1500 grams, it is NOT a model rocket. Their web server is /.'d, so I can't read their details. Assuming their rocket really has a lift off weight of 200 lbs., it is going to require a substantial motor of that would clearly put it into the high power class.
If only everyone named Gates did stuff this cool.
Yeah..... sadly, all Bill Gates does is donate hundreds of millions of dollars to finance vaccinations for children in third-world countries who otherwise wouldn't receive them. But then again, not everybody named Gates can put their fortunes to such practical use......
</sarcasm>
There was also a Tribes 1 mod that allowed you to deploy a base station which you could load with various missle types (my favorite was the one that exploded in poison gas) and then fly them around the map. You had to put them on the ground or on a structure, and you could only carry one missle ata time, so they had to be near an inventory station. My brother and I found a bug which allowed you to delpoy them on these floating, mid-air platforms with inventory stations. He'd fly a bomber waaaay up into the sky, I'd jump out, deploy the platform, fall to my death. He'd fly above the platform, jump out onto it, then set up a transporter. I'd respawn in the base, set up the other transporter, and wind up on the base in the sky. Then we'd set up missle stations and fly around destroying things. The best was when you had a missle in the air and you saw a scout car (really fast one-man vehicles). They were the same speed as the missles (except for one type) and catching them was a challenge. Occasionally, we'd get three people flying missles around. It took about 4 minutes to gain air superiority over most of the map. It took about 8 minutes for the other team to find our base in the sky and blow it up (or try, we'd defend it pretty well).
Anyway, flying missles around is great in CTF-type FPS games, especially when they have ultra-large, indoor/outdoor maps like in Tribes -- it gives the game a "Gulf War" flavor.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
If I were them I'd start worrying about over-zealous lawyers coming after them for damages. The worrying thing is, the lawyer might have a case. I mean if hundreds of US are repeatedly pointing out to slashdot how irresponsible/lazy it is of them to not at least give warning, knowing that a slashdotting is imminent...
I'm serious! The lawyer might have a leg to stand on. And I'm sure slashdot doesn't really want to end up spending what meagre money it has on lawyers of it's own.
Not that I or you think that they'd be justified. Put your stuff up in public, no fault of anyone else if an interested crowd shows up. Bah, I'm just trying to scare them into it.
Giving a warning WOULD be a courteous thing to do.
Slashdot hosts text, and the few images it feels it needs for the UI, which are cached by most browsers. It needs beefy database and application servers, but the bandwidth is relatively low.
Slashdot's 'content', what people come for, is all hosted by other people. It almost always is full of multimedia. They pay the real bandwidth costs.
In this business, at sufficient scales, bandwidth approaches 100% of the costs, the servers nearly factor out. So, Slashdot offers a service to its readers for almost nothing by passing on the content costs to the sites it links to.
Don't get me wrong, the slashdot infrastructure is well-done, it's highly available and you do need good capacity to handle the user base it has, but it couldn't be profitable if it had to pay for all the bandwidth the 'Slashdot-experience' requires.
Now, if they had caches for 'gold-level' subscribers, that might be profitable, say at a hundred bucks a year.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Dude. this is slashdot. you don't have to read the article to be an expert.
;-)
By the way, it was brilliant how you refuted my arguments simply by positing that I never read the article. And I don't know how you inferred what you did in the part before the ???
For the record, my point is: The same forces which creates so many of the good things in civilization also ensures there will be bad things, and that bad things will happen if an individual sees a compelling enough good to offset the badness.
Take for example that time-bomb oil tanker two miles underwater off the coast of Spain. That's a bad thing. But before it sank, it was good. It would create wealth and add value for so many people along the way, as it gets unloaded, refined, distributed, sold, and combusted.
We all get in our cars in the morning and drive to work, knowing that by doing so, we guarantee that eventually things like this oil tanker disaster-in-the-works are bound to happen. So on the one hand we have the "good thing" of being highly mobile and the freedom that brings. And essentially the Western World has decided that we'd rather have cars and run the risk of a huge ecological disaster than NOT drive cars, and NOT run the risk of a huge ecological disaster.
The ways society justifies or rationalizes that decision-making process are many, but a really important one (possibly paramount) is Capitalism. We do things for no other reason than they will create wealth. They need not perform a useful function, creating wealth is utility in and of itself. It seems innocent enough, but a lot of it has "hidden costs", or at least costs that the capitalist won't have to pay directly, because they'll get some big government bailout or corporate welfare or special law passed, like this thing shielding Eli Lilly from lawsuits because they used mercury in their injections. See, the immunization of children represents a "good thing," they used a mercury preservative because it was cheaper, which had a "hidden cost" that didn't show up on the balance sheet at first. And now society is stepping in, to shield Eli Lilly from paying that hidden cost, because we've decided that we'd rather have Eli Lilly around in the future to create more value than to make them pay for their "oops." Which wasn't really an "oops", except in the sense of "oops, we got caught." Monsanto, GE, the S&L bailout... It's pretty obvious why we have poverty. If I could stop paying to clean up other people's messes, things might change. But that might put thousands of decent, hard-working people out of good-paying American jobs, and we can't have that!
This is all probably nothing new to you, since you've read Adam Smith.
peace bro
You have an ID in the thousands and just noticed that sites linked to from Slashdot have a tendency to be "hosed"? Are you often told that you are very perceptive? ;-)
I think that we all know when that happened.
Yeah lets compare.. with a President who *Stole* the election from the American people...
Yeah interesting eh?
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
Here's another site with videos from both low and high power rockets:
www.videorocketry.com
(videos available Here)
One prime candidate for a low power camera is the discontinued Intel Play Digital Movie Creator. You record video onto a chip and upload to your PC via USB. I believe I saw this camera resurface at Toys R Us under the manufacturer name "Digital Blue". Anyone?
Here is an example of the Intel camera at work in an off-the-shelf Estes rocket with a payload bay added
And here is a rocket with Gumby as the pilot.
If you don't want people to look at your website, don't make it public.
/., they don't have to ask anyone's permission before linking to your site. A similar situation is, if someone finds a cool web site, they don't have to ask permission before forwarding the URL to their friends (even though that might cause it to be forwarded on to thousands more people)
If you DO make it public, and a lot of people suddenly look at it, and as a result you exceed your bandwidth/transfer-limit/server-specs limitations, this means one of two things:
(1) Your site has become, at least temporarily, far more popular than you anticipated! Hooray!! Now to call the ISP...
(2) You can't afford to be popular, so you probably shouldn't have made it so public. You, the server administrator, made a mistake. Perhaps you should have required a password to access the resources.
If someone runs their own web page, like
If someone makes your server so popular that you can't handle it, that's really not their problem.
-=Ivan
This might get modded as a troll or whatever, but I don't care. Moderators, do your worst.
I prefer the capitalist model: That $700 (or whatever) DV cam was designed by a team of engineers, tested by a group of consumers, packaged and sold by JVC, and manufactured using hundreds of components from all over. Each motor, lens, PCB, etc. all has vast amounts of engineering behind it. Then JVC sells this camera to distributors, who truck it to your local Best Buy or whatever electronics shop, where it is put on the shelves and sold at the register.
My point is, that a $700 camera has untold thousands of people getting paid for its development, manufacture, and sale. Many of these people have kids and grandchildren, who will no doubt contribute to the charities you speak. They got paid from the sale of that $700 camera.
Some people tend to forget that money spent in the great engine of capitalism can improve the lives of thousands, where a pittance of direct aid might improve the life of a few if it's not siphoned off by a corrupt government.
Granted, I'm not telling you to stop donating to Your Favorite Charity, but keep in mind there are other ways to help.
my US$0.02
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
I built the SR-71 as well, and you're not kidding about the time. Mine went straight into retirement as a static display...no guts :)
Links to movies on Slashdot's main page?
Duck and cover!
*server explodes*
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Thats modded up as fun, but its insightful too. Perhaps the original poster should have given a months cable bill to a charity instead of posting on slashdot?
Your definition was tending towards the libertarian aspect of liberalism -- the "keep your laws off my body" sort of thing under the umbrella of "civil libertarianism." This IS very different from libertarianism in the American sense, which one friend described as "mutant Republicanism."
Liberalism goes beyond these prohibitions to impose affirmative obligations on society, as you note, and thus liberals tend to approve of government intervention to effectuate justice. This ranges from affirmative application of civil rights laws (desegregation, etc.) to welfare to social security to medicare and so on. (The older conservatives get the more sound these latter entitlements seem to them.)
I like the ring of "free-market liberal," intended to emphasize individual/group rights without the cloying overgoverning of socialism.