I'm looking at the RVJET as the platform for my drone, and so far, I like the look of it. I have only one issue, which is the camera mount. From what I've seen, the tilt plate sits inside the pan ring, which means that when you're looking straight down (relative to the aircraft), the pan servo will rotate the image in place rather than panning left and right. This seems like a big oversight. As a secondary concern, there's also no roll axis on the mount, which means no camera leveling as you bank.
My first thought was that I could mount the system sideways, so that the "tilt" servo pans and the "pan" servo tilts. With the outer ring now used for pan, the camera can scan left to right when looking down. Unfortunately, the housing isn't circular, as it has to attach to the front end of the fuselage, which is oval. Take a look:
Now, it's only a few quid for a replacement housing, so I might try carefully cutting away the innards (a job for the Dremel) and re-gluing them 90 degrees round from their current positions. I just hope the pan servo doesn't cause problems when it moves round to become the tilt servo; I might have to build some sort of mount for it because I think the place it'll need to be is currently free space a couple of centimetres away from the housing. Alternatively, I guess I could bend some stiff wire to form my own rods that'll reach.
For roll, what I'd like to do is make a sort of Y-shaped mount where the upper tips of the Y mount those red pivots, and the shaft points along the aircraft's roll axis (or rather, a few degrees above it, because the dome is tilted down), so that a third servo can rotate it to add camera roll. Clearance might be a bit tight though, so it might be easier to cut away the ring that holds the dome cover and rotate that in a similar fashion.
If all else fails, I might look at 3D-printing a custom housing - or more likely printing a mounting cage, and vac-forming a fairing to go over it. At that point I'd probably also make it split horizontally so that it has top and bottom halves, rather than left and right, so that the top of the housing could be removed in the field while the aircraft is sitting on the ground. In its current left/right configuration I'd be worried about getting grass and mud in there.
Does anyone have any bright ideas? I'd like to minimise the extent of the modifications; these two criticisms aside it's a very well-designed aircraft and I don't want to deviate too much from the original plan. Also, there's the obvious weight concerns - the more complex the mount gets, the heavier it'll be, so I don't want to add too many parts on top of what's already there. The most complex plan I have so far is the Y-mount for roll, and that adds about 5cm of spare carbon fibre rod, a piece of plastic roughly two-thirds the volume of the pan ring, and a servo.
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