Quadcopter
Videography / Dec 2015
A number of years ago, a good friend of mine and I wanted to get into aerial videography (this was right before a majority of the turnkey solutions came out). We found a friend who was willing to invest some money to make this dream happen. We were shooting high so we started by attempting to build an octocopter (8 motored remote controlled device) that could carry our Canon DSLR cameras. Sadly, we made some research mistakes which resulted in the failure of that attempt. When fixing this research problem, we discovered it would take a lot more money then we had available to get what we needed. At this point, the turnkey solutions were becoming very prominent.
Due to a lack of funding for our desired turnkey device, and the left over parts from a failed octocopter, we decided to build a custom quadcopter (4 motored remote controlled device) that would carry a GoPro Hero 4 black edition. That is what has turned into the device you see now. We have had our fair share of struggles with this device too such as crashing and destroying all four motors or plugging in a cable which fried the gimbal.
Just recently we became very close to our desired set up. We have a 5.8 GHz FPV (first person view) of the GoPro. We have dual control so one person flies the quad, and the other controls where the camera points. We are using a Spektrum DX6i and a DX5e for this control. The other electronics on the quad are from Hobby King. A DJI Naza v.2 is used as the control board which we had to program to have level flight.
We flew this quad a number of times capturing some aerial footage that is compiled in the video below. It has been a very fun journey to design, build, and fly this quadcopter, but it did come to an end. We took this qauad to a beautiful place in the mountains, and started to get a great shot of the Salt Lake Valley. As I flew the quad upwards, a rock got between the quad and my radio (however not blocking my view of the quad). This resulted in a loss of signal causing the Quadcopter to crash into the mountain. Many pieces broke including the GoPro. This put an end to our fun... At least for now.
Overall, this project has been wonderful. We got close to a device we were very happy with, but we had lots of struggles to get there. We have learned from our failures (such as doing proper research), I hope to build another multirotor in the future utilizing the knowledge I have recently gained.
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MichaelJanssen
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