This article is a review of the Feiyu-Tech G3Ultra 3-axis gimbal for GoPro Hero 3(+). The bottom line is this thing works great right out of the box.
The gimbal comes wi with everything seems to be a bit more stable when powered off a 4S so I power it off my flight battery. The gimbal comes stock with a bracket that fits around the lens and two screws that screw into the back plate of the camera holder. I don't like hanging my $400 bare lens out there to be easily scratched during a crash. So as you can see in the photo I've used a LayerLens from FPVManuals. Instead of the bracket and screws the velcro strap holds the camera on the back plate of the gimbal. Works well and helps me fly more relaxed.
By default the gimbal is in "heading follow mode", this means that as your aircraft yaws the gimbal smooths things out. This does create a lag between the aircraft yawing and the camera following so I don't recommend trying to fly through the gimbal. It also has two other modes which I've not played around with much.
● Heading And Pitch Following Mode —— Camera Roll angle remains constant. Heading follow the nose position and Pitch follow the elevation of the aircreft.
● Locking Mode —— Heading, Pitch and Roll are all locked to point at one position.Heading and pitch can be control by RC.
You can switch between these three modes via a dial or three-way switch on your transmitter by plugging the mode control wire/connector into a spare channel on your radio reciever. In a quick bench test I did not have much luck with the Heading and Pitch Following Mode, but the Locking Mode is cool and would be a handy way to keep the camera pointed at a feature of interest while you maneuver your aircraft.
There are also control wires for pitch and heading angle if you have two more spare channels. I don't have that many spare channels, so I fly with pitch control only. This is great for those cool downward looking shots (see the first video). You can either put the pitch control on a switch and adjust the endpoints to set the camera to the angles you want or on a dial/slider to manually control the angle. I prefer the switch option because then you can flip it while flying and the camera smoothly swings down or back up.
Let's get to the good stuff...below are a couple of videos of the gimbal in action on my scratchbuilt quadcopter. I've posted photos of that below too...don't laugh too hard...it is kind of funky looking but it works great!
Finally some photos of my platform. I'm happy to post the specs and details about the quadcopter on request. I get 7-9 minutes of flying time on a 4S 4000mah battery.
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