Discussions

Hi everybody,

I have a Skywalker X8 that I've been building for aerial photography (wildlife population management), and I'm having an issue with a way to trigger the cameras. The two cameras I have onboard the plane at a time can be triggered with a servo, as I don't want to open them up and mess with the switches. I have read in the ArduCopter forums that for some reason, the camera trigger option doesn't work except after a dummy waypoint, or something like that. It may have been fixed, no matter. I'm looking for something a little different.

What I would love to see in ArduPilot 2.69 or 2.70 would be a continuous shooting mode, where the APM will trigger a channel once every couple seconds or so for the duration of the flight. I know that most of the other aerial surveying platforms like the Gatewing X100 and the Sensefly swingletCAM use something like that -- they collect hundreds of images, one taken after another. Now, I'm aware that I could just take (low quality) video and use software to extract a high quality map of the area, but that wouldn't be optimal as the camera I have can't take higher than 320x240, which is terrible.

Basically, I'm looking for an option in the Mission Planner for a small piece of code to trigger a servo channel continuously every few seconds. I don't really care about the distance between points, the X8 will be flying at a pretty constant speed. Does anybody know if this is possible, or is coming up in 2.69? 

Thanks for looking,

Paul

PS. My camera isn't capable by itself of continuous shooting -- it's also not a Canon, so no CHDK for me.