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"lock" mode available on 3 axis board?
  • BikeHolden
    G'day guys, I am an aerial photographer and being forced into making short movies/doco's for my clients.

    I have built a hand held gimbal with the new 3 axis BGC. latest firmware and GUI.

    Been using and testing for the past 6 odd months.

    All is going well with the testing..albeit bit of vibration coming through when do close up shots..can be fixed easily with isolators.

    So I do wide angle shots.. as well as close ups of the actual building from 1500ft as we orbit around the building.

    Question is..I haven't worked out yet.... Since I am in a moving target (chopper and airplane). How do I set this up so I move the image of, say a building, in the centre of the screen with my joystick..then "lock on to the "target" no matter what we do with the aircraft, the building will stay in the centre of the screen??

    Is this possible? turning off or on follow me..doesn't seem to do any good. The building just wavers around the screen until I relocate with the joystick to correct.

    Basically the same as what we see on the News from their choppers..

    Any ideas would be appreciated.

    Cheers and thanks in advance.

    Craig
  • Garug
    I am not sure I understand how you would like it to work?

    The Basecam board just simply follows the outer frame moves (follow mode) or stays on the direction it is set to (non follow mode)

    Joystick can be used in both follow and non follow mode.

    Follow mode can be configured separately for each axis.

    On non follow mode her is always some yaw drifting, so it will not stay always to same direction.

    There is possibility to use magnetometer. On ideal conditions that removes the yaw drifting.
  • Mrimstad
    This would be undoable withouth major parts.
    Either laser tracking, or ir tracking with a beacon.
    There is allready standalone solutions for this kind of tracking out there.

    theres is also advances in software only tracking, but even then you still need wait for alexmos to support it in some way.

    Other solutions like ir tracking is your best bet for cheap now days.
    http://shop.soloshot.com/#
    For instance.
  • BikeHolden
    Thanks Garug and Mrmstad. I appreciate the response and I understand what you mean. It all makes perfect sense. The news choppers and traffic chopper underbody cameras must have a different type of system. The only reason I was asking, is that with quadcopters..they have designed "lock modes so they rotate around, say a church steeple and stay same distance with the church steeple in the middle of the picture. Thanks alot for taking time to answer my question. I will post an update when I practice some more and change some settings..back to testing!!
  • Garug
    "lock modes so they rotate around, say a church steeple and stay same distance with the church steeple in the middle of the picture." That is a bit challenging shot to do controlled manually, hopefully you have a camera man who could keep the framing while you are flying.
  • Mrimstad
    Itcould be done with flightcontroller poi feature.
    And a good steady gimbal
  • BikeHolden
    I think I have another idea too.

    the problem is because the frame is still..but the chopper yaws (as they do a small amount) especially when zoomed right in.

    What if I put the frame IMU clipped on to the chopper somewhere?

    Then it can compensate for "frame" movement being the actually chopper itself.

    I would then use the joystick to centre the shot.

    I will give that a go next and let you know how I go.

    PS Mrmstad..I use ardupilot..might give it a shot too. I am sure I can get this to work.

    What a feature it would be if I could get it to work.
  • MdG_NL
    Hello Craig,

    I'm almost sure you will need some 3rd parts to make this work well.
    The POI is normally controlled with the Yaw axis from the multicopter.

    I see there is a option to use a open source 3-axis gimbal controller:
    http://www.olliw.eu/storm32bgc-wiki/Main_Page
    http://copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/mission-planning-and-analysis/mission-command-list/#do-set-roi
    If you buy one Storm32bgc and a strong enough Gimbal-Yaw motor, there is hopefully something possible.

    I think you have to play with your normal Gimbal Yaw motor.
    You can still use the Follow mode, so you get smooth movements.
    A other option is to turn this motor off and lock it mechanical, so you only use the extra Yaw motor.

    I haven't test this setup, so I'm not sure this will work well.

    Regards,
    Marten
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