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DIY kinetic/motion gimbal controller

Posted by Mark on February 15, 2015 at 3:30pm

A couple months back someone posted a pretty cool controller they had built which used a wireless link to feed gyro data from a remote handheld device to a Alexmos/Basecam gimbal controller... It was obviously targeted at the higher end film-maker space, and had a pricetag to match - but it caught my fancy and I had already done a bluetooth gamepad controller for gimbals, so I figured I would give it a shot.

All in all turned out really well and costs well under $50 to build - while it is more complicated than my last controller to build, if you've got some background or experience with electronics and a soldering iron, and a free hour or two, you should be good to go.  Here's a video showing it in action, and giving all the details on how to build one yourself:

Tags: alexmos, basecam, controller, diy, gimbal, kinetic, motion
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Comments

  • nazarudin mohd hashim August 6, 2015 at 10:00am

    I love this but knowledge in electronic is =0. Could anyone DIY for me and pls email the price for it. I would like to combine Ronin + Lightbridge + zoom/focus with the system. Can anyone help.

  • Nuno May 18, 2015 at 6:48am

    Anyone was able to implement other protocol to have more range

  • Mark February 15, 2015 at 8:00pm

    heheh, thank you very much!  It's great to hear that it works both as a controller, but also a good example of using a couple modules... I generally tend to do much more complicated things, so the simplicity of the Arduino and building some of these purpose-build devices is really a nice change of pace.

    Range is always the issue - but as you say, it would be trivial to replace BT with another protocol.  Most of the time when I'm shooting things, I'm usually fairly close to whatever has the camera - either a quad or handheld gimbal.  I figured that if you're going further, doing FPV or whatever else, this would be great framework to build off of, and would require very little rework.

  • Gary McCray February 15, 2015 at 5:35pm

    Hi Mark,

    Great controller design and a really excellent video.

    Bluetooth is probably adequate for close in use, but it shouldn't be too difficult to substitute XBee, WiFi or RC for greater distance.

    Great illustration of implementing a inexpensive small Arduino system with gyro and accel and Bluetooth modules, both hardware and firmware.

    Hard to get more information shoved into less space.

    Best Regards,

    Gary

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