Yesterday I happened across a link illustrating what is essentially a selfie stick attached to a motor (for the sake of the bearings only) attached to an external camera that is free to rotate around the drone . I thought the end result looked pretty cool so I duplicated it. There are a couple of ways to go about it, and I went with a counterbalanced rod with a central captured bearing.
This was following a bit of internal debate over the control dynamics- the example I originally saw, linked here: (https://www.micrathenefpv.com/) Appears to simply attach an adjustable arm to the top of the drone. (edit: I heard from him and I guess it also is counterbalanced & you just can’t see it) It works well for him- and I wonder if the loading of that arm allows the drone’s IMU to avoid a lot of hysteresis when trying to balance that load. I also considered using a simple string attached to a balanced rod & camera so that I don’t have to try to resist it purely with brute force of a small mass drone like the mini 2. I also went with an underside mount depsite my having to avoid blocking too much of the main heatsink airflow. I taped up that thin wall plastic cover as well which significantly reduced flex. While I originally designed a minimalistic combined camera module & head assembly, I later shortened things up and moved the weight closer by just moving that module inward and leaving only the camera head. I also changed & relocated batteries such that we can reduce our overall payload and not have to take on useless ballast weight.
Incidentally, I have a handful of mini2’s now after fixing up some broken ones- this one has a wonky gimbal as you can see but it’s still mostly working so a good candidate for this experiment.
Anyway, the video pretty well illustates the idea, the fails, and finally the (pretty much) success, so I’ll let it tell the story. That’s it for today! Happy 4th!
Ok.. just one more because me & D paid a visit to 1st ward park..