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Hi,

In Belgium, our local "FAA", the so called "DGTA" (as painful as in the US) has just passed last week a law regulating the use of drones. They defined a number of categories among which the "all-up-weight" of the ship is a criterion. Among the categories, a ship under a kilogram does not require a pilot certification nor all of the administrative burdens & associated costs. They allow you to fly a sub kilogram ship (except in public spaces) up to 10 meters (basically it is considered a "toy" under a kilogram).

So, this was my motivation to try to build a "Subonekilo" ship, based on Arducopter (with all the goodies including autonomous flight capability), embarking a full HD camera on a 2 axis gimbal. All of it, battery included, under a kilogram.

The ship built in this video does just that, with a flight endurance of 33 minutes @850grams without camera. It weighs just about a kilogram with a Mobius installed on my previously designed 45gr 2-axis Alexmos Mobius gimbal (see video here :45g Mobius gimbal ).

Forrest Frantz, we all know here, is the inspiration of the antivibration "struts" I'm using in this build, which is a way to isolate the frame from a platform holding all of your electronics, flight controller and battery (for maximum weight and thus minimum vibration amplitude) resting on anti-vibration isolators/dampeners. As a result, I get extremely low vibrations on all three axis X, Y, Z (see end of video for chart).

Last but not least, a big thx to our divine Ardupilot DEVs to provide such an excellent autopilot. Note that the flight shown in the video is done with the latest APM:copter 3.3.3 out-of the-box without any tuning , standard params (it wobbles a bit as the ship is way overpowered, hovering at 35%-40% => I have to lower Roll/Pitch P rate and maybe a bit D also).

A part2 will come once I've some nice video footage to show with the gimbal+Mobius (some fiddling still needed + ship tuning).

Cheers,

Hugues