Did a quick test during easter. Mounted my FPV equipment on a 1/10-scale RC car and had some fun. Lots of fun!
This was roughly what I saw in the goggles. (No, not that quality, this is a HD recording from the GoPro on the car.)
FPV what?
FPV is “first person view”. The art of mounting a camera and a video transmitter on remote controlled equipment. Then you sit down with some video goggles and the remote control. And drive the car based on the video feed. It gives you an amazing feeling of sitting inside the vehicle you are controlling. Like a video game. But in real life.
Fun when controlling RC planes and helicopters. But also fun (and much safer) when controlling RC cars!
If you want to snap images or record video from your quadcopter it needs to be as vibration free as possible. When you manage that you get shots like these:
But when you start googling you get the same answer all over:
1. Balance your propellers
2. Balance your motors
But I did that:
And I still had vibrations, blurry stills and jelly-looking video. After a lot of trial and error found the solution.
It doesn’t matter how much you balance your props if they’re the wrong props. You need high quality very stiff props for aerial photography (AP). So, on the same quad, with perfectly balanced props I had lots of vibrations with one set of props and no vibrations with another.
I have had best results with Gaui props and Graupner E-props.
In addition to this I made a dampening system. First I tried to mount the camera directly on a small plate that was mounted on the quad with rubber dampers. That din’t work very well:
(Dampers = red)
Then I made a long extra board under the quad. Mounted it to the quad using four rubber dampeners and mounted both the camera and the battery on that one. Wow! No vibrations with any of my cameras!
(Dampers = red)
Update:
And this is how video looks like if you don’t limit the vibrations.
Now I just need to buy a GoPro HD Hero 2. I’ve already ordered a stabilizing mount.
Cost and flight time
$200,- for the quad (frame, motors, speed controllers etc)
$100,- for the Copter Control Board
$25,- for a 2500 mAh battery giving 10 minutes for flight time
$70,- for a second hand Futaba 8U radio
Build time: approx 10 hours
Time spent learning how this stuff works, learning to fly, waiting for parts from china: don’t know…
While out testing an audio recording software on my iPad a bird is singing close by. So I record it.
When I start editing I realize that the bird answers to the audio on the iPad. So I grab my phone and try to document this cute conversation between the bird and the iPad. Or… the bird and itself.
Tech:
I’m using MultiTrack DAW on the iPad. A Røde Video Mic and an IcematAudio external USB audio capture card connected to the iPad camera connector kit.
This is Eirik Solheim's prize winning experiment. I use this page to share information about media, marketing, technology, photography and stuff I find important. I have been running this page since 2003. And since I started using Statcounter in 2005 more than 2 million people have visited my site.
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