Which platform?

jes1111

Active Member
I live in the Algarve area of Portugal, where tourism is just about the only industry. I already supply many travel clients and tourism organisations with marketing images - this will extend my "reach" :) I also do a lot of the (very) high-end real estate work here - €3 million and up. I photographed a €25 million house just a few weeks ago :cool:. Once again, aerial extends my capabilities for that. Plus I have a whole notebook full of "image ideas" waiting for a really tall tripod to enable me to capture them.

I'll "communicate" with the camera through a wifi link, so I can use the Nikon/Canon remote control software (or Breezesys). I also have been looking at the Nikon and Canon APIs, contemplating writing a dedicated app which would combine gimbal control and camera control.
 

MombasaFlash

Heli's & Tele's bloke
Well, this thread has blossomed nicely. Thanks to all concerned for the valuable points of view.

Jess, it is clear that you have a good technical understanding of some of the hurdles to be overcome in this AP game, although I suspect you are going to find that practical perfection is not necessarily a natural consequence of theoretical perfection. You might also very well discover that building an airframe around the perfect gimbal will involve as many compromises to the airframe as there would be to the gimbal if it was approached the other way round. Some degree of consideration for BOTH at the various design stages might be beneficial?

Bear in mind that gimbals tend not to behave the same in the air as they do on the bench - I am talking mostly about the stabilisation. For us 'little people' gyros and variants are what is available for stabilisation and whether or not they include accelerometers they will be subject to centrifugal/centripetal forces once the whole thing is airborne. The roll axis is the most important and the most difficult to stabilise because of these external forces that are applied once airborne during turns and yaws.

I absolutely agree that camera and mount mass has a decisive rôle to play in image stability.

However, before you go off spending months of your life designing and building (and then re-designing, modifying, rebuilding, re-designing, etc ....) the perfect gimbal, Bartman has a very valid point. CineFlex-like stabilisation and unshakably level horizons are overkill for stills. A fast shutter speed to overcome any latent vibration and Photoshop to level the horizon would be sufficient in most cases and you could get started right away when you consider the multi-rotors' inherent level flight characteristic. You can always get more complicated later for 360° panoramas.

Without wishing to denigrate aerial stills photography in any way, video is the real attraction with r/c helicopters and their multi-rotor variants and it is video that presents the real challenge for image quality.

On the subject of redundancy, I tend to agree with you in that it should not be the priority. So-called 'redundancy' is an attractive optional bonus with a multi-rotor. Single rotor helicopters do not have this luxury. It simply is not available because the auto-rotation facility available to many (but not all) is more often than not negated in AP by the large payload being carried which turns an un-powered helicopter into a flying brick. I know!

Discounting the risk of motor failure (how does an electric motor 'fail' anyway?), the Y6 configuration is clearly ideal for aerial video because of the wider field of view available to the camera before rotors come into view. It also offers the best chance of mounting the camera along the central axis of the airframe - always a better option to under-slung. But the flat six and the flat eight do seem to promise an amazing degree of inherent stability.

So, in the end it seems that my initial third question at the beginning of this thread is still the most pertinent.

How long is a piece of string?
 

jes1111

Active Member
Naturally the design process is actually iterative around gimbal and frame. Everything is being considered ;)

With a good gimbal, actual airframe performance becomes less important. The airframe's job is done if it can keep its own attitude within the (narrow) limits of the gimbal's ability to correct rotational error, i.e. if the aircraft stays within +/-15 degrees of level on pitch and roll, the gimbal can easily cope with keeping the camera level. Yaw accuracy is required, since my gimbal will be tilt/roll only. I agree I don't need such performance for stills, but I am not excluding video since I may well commercialise the product if it is successful (and/or I might catch the video bug myself). Besides, since I will be viewing the camera's Live View output on the ground, I'd rather it wasn't leaping about like a demon! I want to be able to "frame" my shots very precisely, as if I was on a tripod. You may know what I mean if I say I want a "flying Gitzo" :)

At the moment I am trusting completely in James and the others in the OpenPilot core team to deliver on the stabilisation side. They are geniuses, all of them!

I'm not convinced that flat-6 or flat-8 multirotors are "inherently" more stable. By design, they have a much higher rotational inertia (if that's the right term) - making them effectively more difficult to displace but slower to correct once they are.

Do I know how long a piece of string is? I'm a frayed knot! :)
 

Stacky

Member
jes1111 Im new to all this, Ive only been at it for 6 months. So like you I have been doing a lot of research. One thing that has helped me massively in that research has been flying. Theory and research are one thing but practical application is a huge aid to working out many issues that wont appear during the research phase. I would suggest you knock together a simple junker and start flying, it will give you a slightly different perspective toto some things. For example, orientation. There is tons of reference to orientation online and its something that we think we can understand when reading about it however flying and reading about it are 2 different things. Different types of craft have different orientation issues and also some of the tools we can apply to assist with orientation differ from craft to craft.
I built a Hexa and immediately found it harder to keep track of orientation when I went either higher or further away. Simple fix I thought, put some lights on the rear arms so I can see which is the rear of my hexa. That still didnt solve the issue completely as When I got higher I could see my Hexa was facing the way I wanted but I couldnt tell if it had a slight tilt forward or a slight tilt back, which in turn has a bearing on whether the craft is moving forward or backwards. The problem here is that the further away you go or higher you go the smaller the craft appears and hence it becomes harder to tell if your stick movements are doing much. So I have relalized the way I have my lights mounted all the way along the arms doesnt help me with this and that I need to use different coloured lights on both the front and back and in smaller lengths. I wouldnt have worked this out without experiencing this problem first hand even having read as much as I could on the subject. Thats one little example but there are many other real world things I have been working through slowly.

I also initially thought I would be doing a simple up, click, down operation but there will be situations where it wont be that simple. I have shot in the Algarve and wouldnt mind betting some of the house you will be looking to photograph might have cliff to views with not much room to stand in front of the house and sort out a flying position in the air to take a photo. You will need to be able to fly nose in and there is only one way to be able to do this and its practice and lots of it. I cant emphasize enough how important the ability to nose in fly is, some people learn how to nose in very quickly, most dont.

Also getting the right shot means you need to be able to position the craft in the air exactly where you want. Flying practice will help with this and it would be a good idea to have some flying time under your belt well before you build your workhorse. I was recently involved in the shooting of a big budget TV advert for Mountain Dew. I got a lucky break in being involved and I made sure the producer knew how inexperienced I was and that the approach needed to be if we got something of use it was good but the mostly likely scenario was we wouldnt and I needed to be thought of as a possiblity rather than an actual tool for the job. It was brilliant because it opened my eyes to what was going to be required to be able to do AP successfully as part of my business. The biggest eye opener was that i realized I needed to become very very good at flying.
Until then I had the view that I could simply put the craft in the air, point it where it needed to look, go click and land, job done. Practical reality is that its not always that easy and becoming proficient at flying takes time and plenty of it.
I really believe flying a simple junker of a craft for practice will help a huge amount with your design process for what you want to do. The other thing is there is a double buzz here. One buzz is its a lot of fun to fly, even just a simple hover in the backyard, the other buzz is getting footage or stills back after a flight. Even low res snaps or rubbish video from a wobbly circle in the back yard is a buzz.
I really would urge you to start flying something even before your main design craft, it will really help in the design process and you will have a bit of fun too.

No, haven't flown at all.

The system I'm developing will be "guided autonomous flight", controlled by OpenPilot Pro/INS and a laptop/tablet. Although I'll need to master basic "manual" flight with an RC transmitter during testing phases, it will be no more than "up, click, down again" :)
 

Macsgrafs

Active Member
MombasFlash, I came into the MR world via a trex600ESP heli, with a underslung askman mount, which has a seperate RC receiver with live video downlink that my mrs uses to control the camera with. It carried my canon 40D many a time, but was right on the weight limit...landing was fun....full throttle at 40 feet up & pray it slowed down enough before the deck ;)
I then started looking at MR aircraft & came across Droidworx..what a find & Rob & Linda are so approachable, I get many emails from them every week so I bought there new CS8 octocopter camera ship. It will carry 4kgs in weight, I'm still building her & have to get the flight control electronics etc. My total cost to get the CS8 airbourne is about £2700.
If you want to see aerial video from my old trex 600 heli, then have a look at http://www.youtube.com/user/Macsgrafs please excuse the mrs on the sim ;)

Ross
 


MombasaFlash

Heli's & Tele's bloke
I definitely like the look of the Droidworx machines.

I wonder what sort of battery power is going to be required for a 4kg payload and what sort of flight times will be achievable. Which mount are you planning to use?
 

jes1111

Active Member
I'm evangelising the new eCalc Multicopter calculator all over town. Markus got the maths sorted now and it seems to be a pretty accurate tool. Once you get to understand it, you can play some very interesting "what if?" games - trying different voltages, different motors/props, etc. So long as you can estimate your AUW reasonably accurately (and remember to change it if you change batteries, etc.), it will give you good, valid answers.
 

jes1111

Active Member
Only problem I can see with the CS-series is the sheer size of the thing - diameters of 930mm for the CS6 and 1050mm for the CS8. Besides the obvious transport challenges of such a large machine, that diameter (plus the radius of the props, remember) means you're going to be somewhat restricted on angle of view anywhere approaching "level". That wouldn't be acceptable for me - YMMV.
 

Bartman

Welcome to MultiRotorForums.com!!
flying style is going to play into frame/camera performance quite a bit. smooth flying will dictate that roll and nick be gentle, smooth, and kept to a minimum. about the only time i'm seeing the boom in shots is with the wind off the nose when i'm low trying to get a straight on shot of a house or building. with video, the camera is usually pointed down enough that the booms aren't going to be in the shot. more often than not it's not a factor even though it sounds so plausible that it would be a bigger problem.
bart
 

jes1111

Active Member
Yep - for video I guess it would be less of a problem. I'm a bit of a wide-angle freak, though - 17mm tilt/shift is my "standard" lens and I want a clear view straight ahead with a 14mm, too :) My Y6 design is achieving that with the camera in the plane of the fuselage.
 


jes1111

Active Member
@Stacky - yep, I see your point, but I can manage nose-in, etc. just fine on the simulator. The OpenPilot Pro/INS system will (eventually) allow me to fly in what I call "guided autonomous mode" - basically like flying in Position Hold mode all the time, using a joystick attached to the laptop to "move the waypoint". At any time if you let go of everything it will simply stay were it is.

Nevertheless, "Gimbal Mule #1" will be in the air before too long and I'll be using conventional RC. Should be interesting!

I want to concentrate on photography, not flying ;)
 

Stacky

Member
Im like you, the photography is the most important bit but what has become very apparent to me is how important it is to be able to actually fly first. Sims are great but they still dont prepare you for the myriad of issues you will come across. For example, the type of light you are shooting in. A cloudy day is going to give you problems with orientation in certain conditions, you might have a job where for whatever reason you end up shooting at a particular time of day and your flight path to enable a shot means you have to fly into the sun briefly. Relying on a sim and also the technology is a major mistake IMHO.

All the best AP guys who's work I follow closely online have started out with RC Helicopters. I spent a couple of months learning to fly on a Honeybee V2 and a Belt CP v2 and understand just how skilled those guys are. The more air time you can get in before you start to do this for money the better. I could write a small book on all the little issues nobody ever mentions that have caused me minor problems that could lead to bigger problems. Orientation, light type, timeline pressure, variable wind issues, obstacles up high, people talking to you while you fly, sudden distractions or noises, unexpected quirks in flight, the effect of different props in different conditions, access to the site, your position on the ground with respect to the shot you need, the list is pretty long. Sitting in a comfortable chair indoors flying a sim is a lot different from flying outside with all sorts of noises and distractions. Even for what will seem like a simple case of up, click, down you need to be able to handle anything that comes your way. Nothing worse than fumbling around with a problem in front of a client.

I studied photography at the Royal College of Art in London for 2 years. I learned more in my first week of work as an assistant than I did during those 2 years at art college. The practical experience of simply messing around with a little quad of some sort will start you thinking differently about all the things that theory and sims dont prepare you for. In fact the practice of flying a simple craft outside will aid you in your design processes.
 

jes1111

Active Member
I built an aluminium Y6 frame as a quick "proof of concept" - I may well put some motors on that soon and go do some tree pruning ;) - I can guarantee you there will be no video posted, though! :)

Remember that with the camera feeding its Live View to me on the ground, I'll be flying a sort of semi-FPV - that'll either help me or confuse me: we'll find out soon enough!
 

Stacky

Member
Cool, you will have a blast. FPV is totally different to flying line of sight, thats another useful practical lesson too. My next build is likely to be Y6, it seems like the perfect format for photography. Dont post the video's but make sure you record some. I have some footage from my first flights in Feb and its nice to compare and see progress.
 

Bartman

Welcome to MultiRotorForums.com!!
fpv is great for setting up shots but the first time you have to fly just feet from a tree limb because that's the only place to get the right perspective, you'll appreciate how important flying skills are. i had the same ideas about relying on GPS and other technologies to make the copter my camera mule but in the end my flying makes the difference and more often than not the locations require I switch off the stuff and just fly it. i'm still not that great flying these things but I can do enough to get the camera where I want it most of the time.
 

Droider

Drone Enthusiast
built an aluminium Y6 frame as a quick "proof of concept"

JEs.. get your self a little Gaui.. for all the stick they have had in the past theres nowt like flying something straight out of the box. You may be able to build something a little cheaper but for the time and effort I dont thik the Gaui can be beet.. I still fly mine around the yard at night just because I can and I love scaring all the blood cats round here ;-)
 

MombasaFlash

Heli's & Tele's bloke
Jess, listen to Stacky. He is talking lots of sense. Post #34 pretty much says it all.

To highlight just one issue, simulators are useful tools but they cannot simulate the nerves that have to be quietened when you have to do an awkward flight angle or manoeuvre for real. There are 1001 little gremlins that stay hidden until you do a job in front of a client.

Do not assume that FPV will be the answer to orientation problems. FPV is a whole new set of skills that all sounds very straight forward but, like the simulator, it is not a nice safe, cosy computer game and the reality is A LOT different.

Nonetheless, there is nothing wrong with confidence and positive attitude (as long as it doesn't stray into blasé) so Good Luck.


PS. If the shots are not working give me a shout and I'll come and do it with the big gasser ! :)
 

hugh4g

Member
New Member - Full time photographer

Hello, my name is Hugh,

This is my first post on this forum. I'm a full time photographer in the cultural history and architectural sector. I also specialise in panoramas and immersive photography.

I've followed this post with interest. I'm waiting for Flying wings in UK to finish their camera ship before spending any more money.

I was advised a while ago to buy a little contra rotating helicopter. It continues to throw itself against the walls and anything else it can, although a little less now.

I already have several clients who want aerial photography, and my plan has been to try and find a way into the aerial camera (stills) in a progressive fashion. The first aim is to 'prove' the theory, and convince clients that there is a future here, both for them and for me. That done, then I will invest a bit more heavily in the 'flying camera' game. I'm keen to be progressive and not lose too much money from lack of experience.

Flying the little contra rotating helicopter is a real lesson in the need for excellent flying skills... and the one thing that might be the break point of a successful project.

That said, I am keen and find the prospect of flying a camera exciting. And the possibility of making aerial panoramas is very attractive.

One question though, what is the practical difference between open pilot and Arducopter, and how do they differ from MK and suchlike?

Best to all


Hugh
 

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