I've been playing with ArduPlane for quite a while and have finally got to the point where I can make it do something useful. I've been inspired by others on this site to use it for aerial photography to make 3D maps and the like.
I have an ST Models Discovery as the airframe (awesome platform for Arduplane by the way) and have made my own camera mount out of plywood for the bottom. It has one servo for roll stabilisation using CHAN 8 on the autopilot to keep the camera pointing down. It's basic but works pretty well (see pics)
Last weekend I flew over a small island on the river near my house. I managed to get 155 photos in around 10 mins and produce quite a reasonable 3d surface using hypr3d. I gotta say that these guys rock with great personal service and it's all free! They did struggle a bit with that many photos, but you can see the result below
I'm not in the same league as some of the other makers of aerial maps on this site, and have no idea of the accuracy of this map, but was pretty happy with the early results and would like to work on this more to get better results.
my setup is
Airframe - ST Models Discovery Trainer with stock motor and 30A ESC
Arduplane 2.24 with Magnetometer, airspeed kit and xbee - a few lines of code added to output roll stabilisation
Home made camera mount with roll stabiliser
Canon IXUS 50 camera 5MP (this is a very light P&S camera) running CHDK
Spektrum DX 7 2.4GHz tx/rx
2200 mAh 3s motor battery + 1000 mAh 2s battery to power all other electronics via a UBEC (the stock BEC is too small)
I used Mark Willis's aerial coverage spreadsheet to calculate the waypoints before launch and it seemed to produce a good result.You can see the waypoint in the following screenshot
Cheers
James
Comments
Great!! Very impressive.
Does Hypr3D provide you with score/correlation channels? And what gridding of the point cloud do you achieve with your setup?
Tormod
Very good job!
Hi James,
very impressive! That's exactly what I want to do with my equipment (EasyGlider, Ixus, APM).
How did you realize the camera stabilizing? Because I've no experience in programming I would be happy to get the code you used.
Frank
Have you looked this? Then you can use free RC channel to launch camera.
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/how-i-made-a-chdk-launcher-to-c...
hi sir Kunang, have you booted the chdk "os" not the camera default onboard os?? you should see a diffferent minimalist menu if you're on the chdk enviroment
For triggering, I am just tringgering using the script. I set it off manually before takeoff. You can trigger using arduplane if you have either a servo over the shutter button or some kind of IR trigger, but that seemed like overkill for my needs.
Hi James, I'm using Canon S95 and already uploaded the CHDK incl interval script into it but i could'nt find it in the camera menu. Also interested to know how do you trigger d camera via the mission planner.
Hey all, I just wanted to say "thank you" for your patience as we gear Hypr3D.com up to handle more traffic. Special thanks to the several of you that wrote with thoughts, suggests and "server down!" notices! That was all very helpful. We've figured out most of the problems and have solved most of them. We'll be knocking off the rest over the weekend. Thanks again for your patience and interest, and keep the feedback coming! -Tom (Hypr3D.com)
@Thomas. Thanks for the heads up! We just restarted the WebApp workers so it should be good again. We've been tracking down a memory leak for a couple of days now in the Hypr3D webapp code that has been exacerbated by the (awesome!) increase in site traffic. Thanks for using us and being patient with us...we're working to nail everything down and your input helps! If there's any more trouble just send another note/comment and we'll address ASAP.
-Tom (Hypr3D.com)
Being able to download a point cloud or mesh easily is a real game winner for hypr3D...on the other hand, the application server has been down all morning, so I havent been able to upload photos!
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