Joe Barnard Sets a Camera Spinning to Capture Stable Footage From a Rapidly-Ascending Rocket

Model rocketeer Joe Barnard has set about finding a solution to a thorny problem: getting stable, high-quality video from a camera mounted on a rocket that is spiraling skywards at an impressive rate — without relying on a purely software stabilization solution.

"Why is this rocket spinning so fast," Barnard asks rhetorically, over footage of a rocket doing just that and rendering the footage from its on-board camera unwatchable. "Maybe it's because the fins are misaligned. Maybe it's because I did a bad job building it. Maybe I just enjoy blurry smeary video because I'm working with NASA to conceal the fact that the Earth is flat."

While that particular rocket was spinning more quickly than it should due to misaligned fins, it gave Barnard the challenge of solving the more general problem: how to get usable video when camera is spinning round and round, as it would tend to do on a rocket in order to provide better stabilization in flight. A few potential solutions present themselves — including using a 360-degree camera and software to fix the viewpoint to a single location — but Barnard opted for a different approach.

"So here's my pitch: the rocket needs to spin and we want a good camera shot, so what if we just unspin the camera," Barnard explains. "Here's how I think we do it we: mount the cameras on a shelf that spins around a bearing; on this little shelf we mount the cameras, batteries, control electronics, and a motor to spin the whole assembly around. Is this over complicated? Maybe, but I am an engineer — which means that it is my job to over complicate things."

The resulting spinning camera setup rests inside custom-milled bulkheads which can be fitted to a rocket ready for flight. A hefty bearing, rated for 1,500 pounds of dynamic loading, keeps things running smoothly - so long as the rotation of the rocket body is above 40 degrees per second, anyway, a limitation of the motor used in the prototype.

In testing, however, the prototype proved to have a few other problems. "This was not a successful flight in terms of the thing that I wanted to have happen," Barnard admits. "It was a successful flight in the sense that the structure was strong enough, that it held together. I was a little bit concerned about that. The camera spinner did activate and it tried to work, [but] it obviously didn't work great."

"This motor is not the right choice," Barnard says of the core issue behind the failure. "I have put way too much work into this device to give up on it so quickly, so I have some ideas going forward. One of them is this little tiny stepper motor — I am fairly certain that we can take this existing camera ring, which albeit is quite dusty and has a bunch of dirt from the desert, clean it up a little bit, get rid of this massive gear train and brushless motor, and replace it with the stepper.

"The stepper just barely fits in there, and that might be able to get us over the finish line of having really smooth stable video on the way up. I am not yet ready to give up on the idea of spinning the cameras instead of using a 360 camera."

More details are available on the BPS.space YouTube channel, along with raw in-flight camera footage and videos of the milling process for the bulkhead and camera shroud.