Playing with a cheap brushless gimbal : UPDATE No2

One of the reasons I got hooked in multirotors was to try and take some cool videos and have fun. It has taken me much longer than I though it would learn to fly well, Im still not there, not even close. But every crash and rebuild I learn and try to only repeat the same mistake 2 times. 

After getting the cheap mans gopro, the Mobius key chain camera I started taking videos. The first couple were ok, I spent alot of time finding ways to get rid of the dreaded jello that was showing up and tried a number of differnet DIY systems.

But ultimately I needed a gimbal if I was going to get the shots I really wanted. So after alot of searching I settled on the goodluckbuy one. For the price you cant it bet it. Well not that I have found.

It took about 3.5weeks to arrive and once I had it balanced it worked straight out of the box. Im very happy with the performance. It has survived crashes on to hard surfaces and is very sturdy.

Next I needed to mount it to the 450 quad. I made my own mount out of helicopter landing rails and rubber tubbing. Full details here  The first flights and videos were great I was very happy.

However the extra weight cut into my flght time and with the current setup theres not much I can do. I will have to repurpose part from my other quads to make a dedicated gimbal quad until I settle on a single frame... if i ever do.

I also set the pitch of the gimbal up so I could change that from the reciver to get those looking down shots. So what do the videos look like.

Well first here are a couple I did with out the gimbal. This is the very first video with the mobius mounted on top of the quad.

The next one was using the following mounting system. This had the Mobius camera mounted upside down. I fliped the video post production.

 Heres the video

The following video was done with gimbal mounted as shown at the top of the article.

I was pretty happy with the results ... besides the crash and my crappy flying.  

All videos are done buy line of sight.

To watch videos in full HD flick over to Vimeo.

UPDATE 1

Over the weekend I did some modding of the gimbal to reduce weight and also make it horizontally mounted not vertically 

First step was to completely strip the gimbal down and then work out the simplest way to mount everything. This was done with a simple flat strip of alloy bent to 90 degrees. I drill out the holes required for mounting using the old parts as templates.

The hardest part was to make sure that the new design was balanced in both the pitch and roll axis

The left over bits after the mod

Next I just made a simple right angle to mount the new gimbal setup to the original rubber isolated mount. This allows for easy installation to any number of quads. I just zip-tied it to the frame. I did not have to do any reprogramming or updating of the settings for this to work. I still dont know what software I would use to do this anyway so that was lucky.

I also wired up both pitch and roll to the reciver so I can adjust both axis.

Here is a small video that was taken at dusk using the newly completed setup.

UPDATE 2

After using the gimbal I decided that I needed to try and reduce some more weight and improve the mounting system that I was using. The first thing I did was use some of the fibreglass plates I had made to replace the alloy plates that housed the controller that the gimbal was mounted off. These were longer and had more room to place the controller card in and also move some of the weight closer to the CG. I also used a hole saw to make some viewing windows and to also reduce the weight.

I first tried the rubber isolators that came with the gimbal but in some test flights I was still getting jello, I then swapped them for some that I got off HobbyKing, these were softer and as you can see from the shot below the weight of the gimbal squashes the front one alittle, But they completely removed jello from the video.

The top plate holds the gimbal and the contoller is mounted to the bottom plate. The bottom plate is then bolted to the frame using nylon 6mm spacers.

Below are the measurements of the custom mount made from 20x2mm alloy the I made, the tricky bit was the motor mounting holes and getting the weight balance right. I used the old mounting systems as a template to get the mounting holes correct.