Sunday, October 13, 2013

Gimbal Modification

After getting playing with my new gimbal for a couple of weeks I wanted to change it from a hanging type to a more horizontal facing gimbal to make it easier to mount on my different quads and reduce its overall weight.

First step was to complete pull apart the gimbal and its parts to try and figure out what was required to change its orientation.




After a bit of playing and experimentation the simplest way was to create a simple right angel out of alloy flat strip. I used the removed parts as templates for the screw holes.   the biggest part os to make sure that with everything together that it was balanced in the pitch&roll axis, otherwise it wont work.

The below image shows the completed gimbal, next I made a simple right angle to mount the gimbal to the control board mounts.


Here its mounted to the quadcopter, with the low profile I can now mount it to any of my quads. 



Here are the bits left over after the mod. 



A small video if with channel  7&8 set to alter pitch and roll.






Wednesday, October 2, 2013

We have gimbal

After a very long wait for it to arrive I now have a brushless gimbal.  I got this one from GoodLuckBuy. For that price it seemed unbeatable. I paid my money and it took about 4 weeks to get here. I was starting to think that it would not show up. But it did.



It was boxed pretty well.



In the time I had to wait I did a fair amount of reading and searching to make sure that I would know how to set it up. The biggest thing is to make sure its balanced and that you do have a camera or weight on it to balance in the 2axis when you turn it on.

Here it is with my mobius camera, you can see i had to move it out from center to make the gimbal balance, since it was designed for a gopro.

After I did a quick mount of the camera i powered it up and it work great. very happy with the biuld quality.


Next was to mount it the frame. I had to adjust my homemade camera mount. My mount is made from landing rails from a 600heli, fiberglass sheet that I made, rubber tubing and rubber grommets. 



I had to use taller nylon spacer to get enough ground clearance abut after that it was just a matter of zip tying to the rails.




The battery hangs out the back for counter weight to keep the CG in the middle.



I cant wait to get out and fly to see what the video quality will be like. Videos to come.