Question Pi Zero W- Wireless camera?

[Honeybun54]

Alright so this is my first time using Raspberry Pi so I really don't know much.

A friend of mine is a student studying mechanical engineering and he often build rockets, pretty large rockets up to about 8ft. I am hoping to use the Pi Zero W camera pack ( https://www.adafruit.com/product/3414 ) to put in/on one of his rockets to record the flight.

The Pi Zero W has built-in bluetooth and Wireless LAN; would I be able to wirelessly control (and preferably view) the camera from a cellphone, computer, or any other device?

Obviously since I want to put this in a rocket it would need its own power source.
I see multiple companies that produce aftermarket batteries for the Pi Zero W. Are they reliable? Good Quality? Which one(s) do you recommend?

I'm not to sure about the boot/install process of Raspberry Pi but I'll figure all that out once I know this idea is feasible.

Any other input it much appreciated!!

 

[OldSurferDude]

cool project. Bluetooth as a theoretical range of 10m and I hope your rocket goes higher than that, so plan on WiFi. I've never done video, but your camera pack probably has some examples of how to do it over WiFi.

I can't imagine your flight times are going to be very long. Think about getting a 18650 3.7V 3400mAhr battery and a 3.3V regulator and connect to the GPIO 3.3V (I saw where someone did experiments doing that and was quite successful) at 200mA (100 for Pi, 50 for Camera, 50 for WiFi) you'd have 17 hours per charge (reality is probably 8 hr)

The battery and regulator for AliExpress would be about $5. (caveat emptor, 20-60 days shipping)

Go for it!

 

[Pied Piper]

I'm currently running Motion Eye OS on some PI 3A+'s. I can view the video feed in a web browser over my WIFI, locally without having to stream to a web site first. It's all on my LAN side of my network. I had originally tried it with a Pi Zero W but it just wasn't up to the task. Lots of lag and pauses. You can also have it record the video right to the Pi's Micro SD card. Motion triggered or just set to continuously record until you tell it to stop. This can all be done via its web GUI in a browser over WIFI to the headless Motion eye setup.
https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneyeos/wiki
https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneyeos/wiki/Supported-Devices