This time I worked with Scott to try to film from the quad. Again flying Line Of Sight, even with a slower plane and cooperating with the pilot I simply couldn’t keep up with the plane. The quad just couldn’t get enough speed, when I increased the power to try to speed up I had to be very careful not to gain too much height. If I did gain height then I had to drop the power to come down again so couldn’t get much speed. And again with the wide angle lens the plane was a bit of a dot in the landscape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm3uBnz_b54
From this I think the probability of actually successfully following a plane with the quad is quite low, fly pasts may be possible, and flying FPV may allow much closer fly pasts than line of sight flying.
Also I think the gimbal that I have used on the quad is lacking.
all the weight of the gimbal and the camera is being held on the tiny screw into the front of the servo. I’ve tried with metal geared servos, and plastic geared, neither are particularly satisfactory. So I have had a new gimbal printed which uses a much larger servo for the connection to the quad.
Hopefully this will be more robust, give less wobble, and if I can add some anti-vibration to it then I am hoping the video quality will improve.
Let me run this up the flagpole and see if it flutters. The quad isn’t fast enough to catch Scott’s express planes but if you are both careful I reckon you could get some good head on shots. Do be careful though.
I reckon that flutters. That was the kind of thing that I was thinking of, particularly flying FPV we could judge better where the plane is going to pass and so hopefully get some nice shots.
I did also forget to add that I was playing with the return to home, I’m not sure if it requires a certain number of satellites to determine home is accurate. To start with it didn’t work, I removed the FPV from tapping the GPS signal and it still didn’t work, plugged it into the laptop and it got a home position fix on arm, and showed the correct return to home data as I wandered round the car park, so took it back to the field and it worked. So not completely sure why it didn’t work to start with. Will have to do more testing.
The option to land is a bit hairy! That may work better with the barometer covered.
To be fair Mr Chris, even though you couldn’t keep up, there were some nice passing shots and you kept the plane in frame almost all the time.
Just glad you can’t hear the noise of the petrol engine at the front of the plane 😉
Hopefully that new gimbal will work well, it looks really good.
Its a good job the farmer’s cows didn’t hear it too 🙂
The new gimbal seems more robuts, hopefully it will work well.