A $109 GoodLuckBuy Brushless Gimbal for the H3 GoPro

Here's a short clip, somewhat adulterated by YouTube, of a test of this inexpensive gimbal and controller that I bought from goodluckbuy.com. The Goodluckbuy SKU is 98952, you can look at it by entering that in their search engine. It's made to mount on a Phantom but it's not hard to work up a mount for most any copter.

Here I'm flying it on my DJI 550 Hex "The Witch." I didn't use the provided vibration mounts but rather some stiffer "lord" type mounts I had lying around. Also there are rubber grommets involved.

This gimbal comes without a shred of documentation and I haven't yet figured out how to find the appropriate software. However, it works "out of the box". The only problem is a slight off-level lean on the roll axis, which I've fixed for the moment by simply shimming one end of the GoPro. Build quality is very high. It's all aluminum so not super light.

In this video I've intentionally left bits of the airframe visible to show how hard and well the gimbal is working.

The entire 8 minute flight is as smooth as the 29 seconds seen here.

Slightly off-topic: This clip starts with the hex under manual control in "stabilize" mode, approaching a Geofence that starts at the weed line. When the hex hits the fence it goes into RTL and heads home. It overshoots home (the red landing pad) and neatly turns back to it and ends up right where it should be, at which point I take back control and the clip ends. The slow flight home is my setting, and I think the overshoot might be a result of settings I've made as well, as I'm looking for smoothness, not speed, when I'm tuning.

I'm excited by this gimbal. The YouTube video doesn't really do it justice. If anyone else is using  one of these I'd like to hear from you.

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Comments

  • For the folks asking about size, it is jsut about 3.5" from the top plate to the bottom of the camera plate when the camera is horizontal.

  • T3
    I've not found any good tuning guides. You will need a 4S battery to make it work.
  • I've now tried two different GUI setups and neither can communicate with the board. I get connection then after about 8-9 seconds, the connection drops. Cannot read or write parameters. Assuming I replaced the board with the Martinez board, is there a decent PID tuning guide?

  • 100KM

    Can somebody give me an indication of the height of this gimbal? I'm building some legs for my quad while I wait for the delivery...

    Also - do I need anything else to tune the controller?

  • I think I heard that same noise when I was tuning PID at some point. It did go away when I reached the (for me) optimal settings.

  • Any ideas on how to reduce/eliminate the high pitched whine? Also, has anyone hooked up the pitch control to the APM successfully?

  • The genuine Martinez rev 3 controller board could at least fix the GUI connection problems and it is here for only $35.00: http://witespyquad.gostorego.com/brushless-gimbal-v3-0-controller-m...

  • One other thing - I grabbed the software referenced and while it will connect to the board, it will not load parameters from it and loses connection after a short time. The SW I DL's is BruGi_049B_r161. Anyone know if this SHOULD work? 

  • Just got one of these and started goofing around with it. Seems pretty solid and smooth - I just plugged a battery into it and it seems to work. It does, however, make a very high pitched noise while it is on. ANyone know if that can be eliminated?

  • @mP1: yes, this refers to the GUI that is included in the zipfiles that you can download here: http://code.google.com/p/brushless-gimbal/downloads/list

    This is a maual i found as well: http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showatt.php?attachmentid=5689722&amp...

     

    Hope this helps.

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