Makers Corner

All great suggests.

Eggtimer has a kit they call the Duel Deploy. It is basically the Balsa Machining School Rocket 29mm with an ebay and everything you need to build a duel deploy rocket. Black poweder, ematches and batteries not included. The price is only $100. Guy and I have one but have yet to build it. They have detailed instructions that you can download.

I think you'll find all of those recommendations work well.

I like the Jolly Logic altimeters for their simplicity. Egg Timer is fun for building.

For dual deploy, the Jolly Logic Chute release is a great, easy-to-use and reasonably priced altimeter.

If you want a more traditional dual-deploy altimeter that fires ejection charges, it's hard to beat the price of the reliable PerfectFlite Stratologger.

My overall favorite these days is the Blue Raven for a full-featured dual deploy altimeter. The phone app which connects via BlueTooth is particularly good.

@Alberton, yeah, a lot of the solutions are geared toward high power rockets which we haven't gotten into yet (but will).

The build we just did is an Estes So Long. It has a payload section and takes one or two E/F engines. So, it will be fine for a Jolly Roger AltimeterTwo type device but not for any kits with Arduinos and things like that.

I may go with an AltimeterTwo to get started collecting data quickly and easily and then start researching beacons and high power kits. The Eggtimer Rocketry kits are really appealing and it would be really fun to do GPS tracking.

Thank you for your insights.

Those Eggtimer kits would need more lifting power, than say that Altimeter Two. What sort of rocket motors are you looking at using? A G impulse class motor can do a lot, and you wouldn't even need an L1 or L2....

I mentored the Londonderry HS for this years ARC, and we (okay, they) used the Jolly Logic Altimeter Two. Seems to work well. It's very lightweight and will fit nicely in your Estes rockets. The tiny LCD screen doesn't like cold weather though, and the display seemed to be slow or lag behind as it cycled through it's various readings. Other than that, it worked well. I'm actually thinking of including it (yep, I bought one for myself) in my AGM58 (L2 attempt build) as an additional altimeter (flight data only).

I have one of the Eggtimer kits (Proton) I'm thinking of using for the dual deployment in my L2 build as the backup. It is still in kit form so I still need to solder it up...

@Alberton, I can do electronics repairs and solder things and could put together a kit of parts with a board. I guess to get started I'd love to see what's available off the shelf but I'd really love to hear from someone who actually owns and uses or has built one of these kits.

Some of the options I found:

Estes model 2246 Rocket Altimeter ($40) which could be a good first step.

The Jollylogic AltimeterOne ($60) and AltimeterTwo ($80) products look promising for off-the-shelf since they seem to do a lot more than the estes product.

An Arduino DIY project could be cool but I'd love to hear from someone in the club that's been down this path.

https://www.instructables.com/Arduino-Rocket-Data-Logger/

This RRC3 looks cool but it's sold out

https://www.sierrafoxhobbies.com/en/electronic-devices-for-rocketry/1486-altimeter-rrc3-missile-works.html

Eggtimer Rockety kits look cool for DIY options

https://eggtimerrocketry.com/home/altimeters-av-bay/

Here's one from Perfectflite that's recommended by the folks from the American Rocket Challenge..

http://www.perfectflite.com/pnut.html

If you don't mind some soldering, you can try a product from Eggtimer Rocketry..

https://eggtimerrocketry.com/home/altimeters-av-bay/

This is a question that can be a lot more complicated than you might think. Chris, are you looking to create your own electronics, or use something that's "off the shelf" ?

I would find this topic very interesting. I am looking forward to people's responses.

I've poked around the forum a bit and haven't found anything on this topic. I've built many rockets but I've never included any electronics into my builds. I'd like to integrate at least an altimeter into the payload section of a recent build.

If anyone has advice or warnings regarding kits, products, links etc. please share them. I'm also interested in other functionality like a tracking beacon or trajectory flight recorder function etc. Lots of possibilities that I know others have experience with.

Thanks in advance.