Tuesday, March 11, 2014

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.


Sunday, March 9, 2014

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.

Saturday, March 1, 2014

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.





Saturday, February 22, 2014

Building the plastic frame

After a couple of tests, we found that the plastic had a nice rigidity when bent in a proper form. So we did a couple of additional tests.



And then, started to build the new frame.

Drawing and cutting took more than 2 hours...





Finished version 2.0
Everything looked promising, except for the legs. It would take just one flight for the legs to break.


Friday, February 14, 2014

Working on v2.0: New plastic frame

High‐impact polypropylene was the selected new material for our frame v2.0.
These are some of the reasons we chose that material:

  • Not too expensive
  • Light weighted (not as much as carbon fiber but good enough)
  • Very easy to cut (with a paper cutter)
  • Very easy to bend (applying some heat)

So we started the new design inspired on the XProHeli: