Bixler GoPro

For the second Saturday in a row, I had some fun mounting my new GoPro Hero2 onto something unique in order to capture a cool vantage point. This time, I attached the camera to my stock Bixler remote control (RC) airplane and launched it into the wild blue yonder! If it seems like I’ve done this before, it’s because I flew Gumby on my old EasyStar plane just before Christmas 3 years ago. And if you remember that video, you also remember that the quality was far from perfect due to the live streaming downlink I used at the time. Well now that I have a high-definition GoPro, there’s no excuse for grainy video anymore, but as I found out, the quality still wasn’t quite perfect. I shot all of these clips in the 1080 30fps mode with full-width 170 degree field of view and you can certainly see the significant fisheye distortion along the horizon lines, so the next time I fly, I’ll try the slightly narrower 127 degree field of view which should significantly decrease the distortion. Another minor gripe is that the vibration of the electric motor resulted in a slight “jello-effect” if you look closely, but I’m hoping that the anti-vibration plug accessory will cut down on that on future flights. On the plus side, the plane flew extremely smoothly and there was no need to stabilize the video digitally in my video editing software. Overall, I’m thrilled with the footage from my first 4 flights and can’t wait to fly again!

And if you’re interested in how I mounted the camera, it really couldn’t have been easier. I reused the display mount from the packaging and simply trimmed it to fit within the cockpit area. In order to attach it, I wrapped two of the 2-sided velcro straps around the camera plate and the fuselage and voila, instant GoPro mount for my RC plane!

Gumby Flies Over Boulder!

You read that right, Gumby took to the skies and flew over Boulder, CO today on his quest to return to New York for Christmas!



I felt confident enough to fly with Gumby on the 3rd flight with the live video downlink after just completing this 2nd flight. The new Futaba 7C 2.4GHz RC transmitter worked beautifully and apart from some small video glitches, the EasyStar flew admirably with all the extra weight tacked on! Unfortunately, I didn't heed the lower battery warning signs and wound up with a broken plane. Oh well, nothing a little CA glue can't fix! Enjoy the flying!

My first attempt at FPV flying!

After much preparation that included soldering a custom video wire harness with +5V and +12V connections, configuring my computer to accept NTSC video via USB to video capture software, and fabricating a custom aluminum mounting bracket, I finally got my EasyStar RC airplane out with hopes to fly to it from the first person view (FPV). It was a lot of effort and I got most of it right, but as you will see from this video, I didn't test it completely and could have easily avoided the mishap that went with it!

My first Easy Star flights!

After an initial checkout of my recently built EasyStar RC airplane on Friday by Erik at LASP, I took it out Saturday morning near my house for my initial flight. The November day could not have been nicer- 60's, sunny, and very little wind. I wound up flying for nearly an hour on a single charge of the 1500 mAh LiPO battery, which encompassed 6 flights and only one minor crash :-) Because of the low weight of the LiPO battery, I added my Garmin Forerunner 305 watch into the cockpit as ballast and got some fantastic flight paths recorded! It took two small tricks to make this really useful. First, the GPS watch had to be set to record data every second in order to wind up with smooth flight paths. And second, in order to maintain the measured altitude, the Activity Option to use MB Gravity Elevation Correction had to be disabled in MotionBased prior to exporting the KML file. However once I did this, I was blown away with the flight paths that this little runners' GPS watch was able to record!

Take a look at this playback animation of my last flight which consisted primarily of unpowered gliding high above the ground. Be sure to choose Satellite and Large within the Google map frame, select the playback speed to be 0.5x or 1.0 x, and hit the Play button! Pretty darn cool!

Assuming that you have Google Earth (and you should), take a look at this 3D flight path. Now I want to figure out how to use the built-in flight simulator to fly the recorded flight path!

A more thorough posting that relates to autonomous RC airplanes is over at DIY Drones.