Hi , I'm looking to get a camera to use with my apm 2.5 for aerial mapping . What is the best camera for this in the price range of around £100 I don't mind if its second hand as long as it works . I haven't seen many people mention the canon sx240 ? are these any good for my purpose ? . Thanks .
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Hi Carloss84,
I have been using a pair of Canon A3200's one which was converted to NIR. They work really well and are well within you price bracket. The only trouble with them is that they struggle to take images at very short intervals. The image quality drops significantly.. Other than that they have been flawless and are almost disposable..
Hi Bradley,
Thanks for the information. Do you have any more information on how to "make sense" of those NIR images? I mean literally what to do next and what kind of information can we really benefit from them? I have read some papers and also discussion here, and I have an impression that what you need is actually NDVI images to be able to say something on for example "health of plants". Am I right or am I wrong? thank you so much Bradley and good luck with your project and looking forward to learning lots from you.
Best wishes,
R
Not answering your question...actually Im interested also.
There some interesting threads here to lok thru first:
http://diydrones.com/forum/topic/search?q=aerial+mapping+camera
Including this
http://www.suasnews.com/2011/11/10219/the-secrets-of-photomapping-a...
Hope that helps until more people arrive to answer :)
-P
Does anyone even use this forum anymore ??????? 18 hours 21 views and not 1 reply , doesn't look good does it .
Hi Carloss84,
I myself just started some months ago in using UAV for mapping. The work is going to be in a quite tough area in the Borneo rainforest. However, I have tested my DIY H-copter as well as DIY flying wing in Europe. I use CANON sx 230 hs triggered with CHDK (Canon Hack Development Kit) as I learnt from others who have been doing this (i.e. look for flight riot in youtube). To my understanding there are lots of type of CANON pocket camera which can be used, check the CHDK websites. However, to my understanding there are two types which is "affordable" for poor researcher like me :), Canon sx 230 HS and Canon 260 HS which has GPS. My idea was also to be able to triangulate the altitude/longitude position of the picture during geo-reference, using the GPS from the camera and using the GPS of APM. I am not aware of any other pocket and cheap enough camera which might fulfil this (our) mapping needs, although before knowing Canon and its CHDK, I bumped into several camera which also has GPS functionality.
I bought sx230hs in ebay (second hand) for 60 EUR (I guess 70 USD?) and I bought another cheaper ones (like IXUS, and Powershot A ...) which CHDK website says that these camera can be triggered with CHDK. I have tested these camera by bringing each one of them at my DIY H-copter (not yet the flying wing) and perform autonomous flight following waypoints while also taking pictures (90 degrees down). It works well! I haven't done any further steps with the pictures though (i.e. stitch them, make a model, etc) however the pictures are visually satisfying. I still have to modify the camera with the kits from www.publiclabs.org to produce NIR (near infra red) or NDVI images for further analysis. I will let you know and post how it looks once I manage to do it.
Hope it is useful.
Best wishes,
R