DIY 2-axis camera gimbal

After doing some drawings and research, we built this 2-axis (roll and tilt) camera gimbal for a GoPro Hero3. This gimbal uses 2 micro servos to rotate the camera, controlled by the same Arduino board used for flight control. The advantage of doing this is that you already know  the quadcopter attitude and only need to invert the angle to compensate pitch and roll.

The internal gears of one of the servos  ended up broken after a hard landing. We are trying to find a metal geared servo to replace it and see how it goes.

Gimbal stabilization test (in front of the bathroom mirror.... sorry about that):

Even dough it's not very smooth, it does the trick.
Next version hopefully will use brushless gimbal motors like this one.

Improved landing gear

After a hard landing, we ended up with a couple of broken legs (not ours but the quadcopter's).

So, here's the comparison of the previous and current legs so you can see the difference:

Old landing gear

New landing gear

See the difference? New legs work really well, are much more resistant and even allows a better camera mounting.

Plastic frame test flight

As you can see on the video, a hard landing gear is a MUST. It was "fixed" with duct tape and even then, didn't last for a long time.