gyros

Chopper Test Flight

10/13/11

Dudu flew a few of the Makani team out to their test site last night, primarily to locate the field and also to test the video equipment in the helicopter and check out a gyroscope camera mount. The gyroscope was noticeably helpful and the test yielded beautiful footage that could easily be motion stabilized for stable aerial views of a kiteboat or a wing test. In the attached video, Andrea started with a shot of the airport that was filmed before the gyroscope was attached to the camera and as you will see, it is very shaky. The gyroscope takes ten minutes to get up to speed, and does not change direction very easily, but with a little forethought and practice, any […more]

Android + Bluetooth Servo Controller

2/11/11

We are exploring the use of our new Nexus S Android phone as a kite-based programmable wireless camera and pan/tilt controller. The first step in making this happen was to make a bluetooth connection to an RC servo controller and control it from the phone.
For extra fun, we mapped the phone’s orientation to its commands so that the pan/tilt unit tracks the phone’s rotations.

Next we will improve the app so that a user interface on a second phone or a remote computer can control the phone remotely over a socket connection. The final step will be to transmit both low-resolution, low-latency “preview” images and full-resolution images from the phone back to its client.