I'm the secretary for our local St. Louis rocket club: St. Louis Rocketry Association and decided to bring out my Jdrones frame/APM 1 to the launch to do some 2.5.3 testing and at the same time shoot video of some rockets with a GoPro Hero 2. I'm using the Jdrones stabilized camera mount - although I'm still adjusting the camera mount gains and dealing with jello video. The GoPro video was also sent to the ground with Remzibi OSD overlayed flight data for pointing the camera. I had 6 flights during the day on ACM 2.5.3 with good results in stabilize, simple mode, and altitude hold. Loiter was having I term runaway and I didn't have a chance to tune in the field.
We have an FAA waiver at Elsberry and had to call in an altitude window to Lambert field St. Louis for the 11k ft altitude so I had to loiter 5 minutes or so until the launch actually happened. Luckily the batteries held out and I edited out the wait.
This video is our last launch of the day - SLRA Dan Welling's M powered rocket flying at the St Louis Rocketry's Association Elsberrry Launch on 3/31/2012. Dan calls the rocket Bits 'n' Pieces and is 6" dia x 9 ft tall. The motor was a CTI M1790 skidmark (with "sparky" pyrotechnics) motor (98mm 4 grain) and reached an altitude of 11,140 ft AGL. Dan achieved his Tripoli level 3 certification on this rocket previously.
Comments
I got swivel balls and ball links with the mount and I was able to screw the swivel balls into the servo arm. Then I attached the ball links to the swivel balls.
Cool video! By the way, how did you attach the push arms and loops to the servo/frame on the gimbal? I was expecting flange nuts or something with the shipment.
Great stuff.
Regarding the GoPro Hero 2, personally I am not happy with it. The new Hero 2 image sensor has more rolling shutter issues then the original Hero. So even if you stabilize camera and to video stabilization in post, you never really get the results you want. Especially if there is any quick horizontal movements in the video.
Something I always wanted to get involved in.
Thanks - I was trying to get a feel for what the GoPro and Arducopter could do at a launch - and I plan to be more aggressive in the future to get higher view points with closer views.
For others the actual rocket launches at time code 1:02.
Hello Heino, very nice video. I wasn't expecting the rocket launching on this part of the view, so I had to rewind it just before 1 minute... and again... Pretty impressive stuff! Nice ride with the quad, thx for sharing this video!