There is not a great selection of decent 3 axis camera mounts for gopro sized cameras so I have started building my own. The first one will be a ‘nose mount’ and I may later consider a belly mount for quads etc. It will have one standard sized digital servo for roll and 2 micro sized ones. The belt drive gearing is to increase the rotation angle up to 280deg. All pivots will have deep groove ball bearings.
I hope to mould a thin carbon fibre cover for rain protection (it hasn’t stopped here for 6 months).
This will fit on the nose of the Holden UAV, which has now had many successful flights with an APM2. More of that
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Hi Brent.
I am juggling my time between many UAV projects but the nose gimbal is quite high up the list to do now.
I did a DSLR Gimbal for my Octa.
As you can see, a lot of my parts are 3D printed so I have made myself another large printer.
My DSLR gimbal can easily be modified for use on a nose but would cause C of G problems in the current aircraft.
Any progress on the nose mounted gimbal?
Decided to scale things up a bit so that I can fit a compact camera on the gimbal, anything up to 105mm wide. The tilt and roll systems are finished but am still trying to adapt a pan servo for multi turn with a 3:1 belt drive.
Robert, am thinking of doing my own version of THIS. I will convert a servo for multi rotation and use a quality external pot. Will probably use a 1:3 gearing.
Quick question.
I cant decide whether to fit a 3 turn pot on the servo or a single turn on the output shaft. Might get better precision from the 3 turn on the servo.
The yaw servo is already a Hitec digital set for 180 deg but I guess of you are attempting to film something you are circling it should go some way past 90deg? When slowed down with the servo programmer it seems very smooth. I can see a long process of trial and error ahead.
That design looks OK, the only thing is again, the 2:1 ratio on the yaw. I would suggest in that case, you won't want the servo to *stabilize* the yaw, you only want it to be useful for actually moving the aiming point. ie: use it to change the aiming point in 5° increments, but don't let it try and correct 0.1° errors in the yaw. Really dampen it down so it's not moving around a lot.
Another option, possibly better, is just to use a 180° servo, which are available. Many Hitec digitals can be programmed for 180. There are a few cheap Chinese options too. HiModel has some "robot servos" for like $30.
Back to a belly mount design. Much happier with that arrangement.
Thanks all for advice on potential issues. I am not expecting perfect results first time but will tackle problems as they arise.
I know direct drive servos are not ideal but will see how it goes. The one driving the tilt is a HS-5245. It seems very smooth in the hand.
The roll servo as noted before, is carrying the load of the camera and tilt servo, which comes out at 153g at 3.5cm. This gives a torque of 0.53kg/cm, well inside the 12.4Kg/cm quoted for this (HS-7985) servo, albeit axial load rather than radial. The pan servo will also be a 7985, giving 280deg with belt gearing. It will be soft mounted in the fuselage.
Will probably mould a dome cover and face the camera away from the nosewheel for takeoff else it will get splattered.
Time to start making.
Using something like a Servo Block from ServoCity would help stiffen things up considerably. I use one on my pan servo on my r/c truck and it works great.
Firefly, thanks for offer. Good point re- power supply. I am currently using an ELYQ from a 2 cell lipo, feeding 6v to most of the servos and regulated 5 to the APM. The RX is being fed direct from the lipo (optima9 SPC slot). However I have run out of slots on the Elyq. Perhaps I should consider using some HV servos?
Am also wondering about butchering a servo and remote mounting the pot on reduction gears to get 360deg+ pan but some servos only have half gears I think.
Dany –wow seems like a bargin if they work. Hows the Canadian $?
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