Hi Guys,
I’m new here but I’ve been playing around with a few different camera gimbals including cheap servo driven efforts and more recently the Aeroxcraft brushless gimbal which work well enough for some applications and this week I managed to obtain a Zenmuse H3-2D which I’ve installed on my F550 with Wookong-M.
The Zenumuse 2D-H3 itself works excellently and appears to give a far superior level of stabilisation over the Aeroxcraft (which is simply an Arduino based solution), but then it costs twice as much and you’d expect it to be better. It’s also more compact and the wiring solution on the Zenmuse is exactly what you want … no trailing AV cables from the GoPro at all, which is a major downfall of other brushless gimbals. The major issue I found with the Aeroxcraft gimbal is that in forward flight the wind resistance of the external cables would cause the gimbal to continually glitch and reset. I tried securing the cables any number of different ways and it’s really hard to do it in such a way that they are not dangling in the wind but are also sufficiently loose enough to allow the gimbal to move freely. With the Zenmuse this is a complete non-issue and as such it works very well in fast forward flight – which is actually the main reason I bought it and so I'm satisfied with that aspect.
However … now time for the gripes … as mentioned I’m using it with a Wookong-M and the gimbal requires the X3 channel to control the pitch. Also, the ‘Return To Home’ uses X3 and it’s a feature I use quite a lot, and even if I’m not using it then knowing it’s there gives me a great deal of confidence as it is a nice safety blanket. I now no longer have access to this feature whilst the gimbal is attached. I think the Zenmuse pitch not being able to be controlled by a regular RX channel or a user-defined X2 or X3 is a major design flaw and I can’t for the life of me understand why it is essential that it’s is controlled over X3. It’s just crippled a major feature of my Wookong-M. If it’s connected then I have no choice and I can’t even lock the gimbal pitch it into a fixed position and leave it there so I can regain X3 for RTH.
DJI need to have a serious think about this. If it’s not going to be fixed in a future Wookong-M and/or Zenmuse firmware release then I will need to look for an alternative to Wookong and if that’s the case then obviously I would have to get rid of the Zenmuse too.
I’m really very disappointed by this and I’m less likely to use IOC than Return To Home. I would at least expect to be able to make a choice and I can’t. If it was possible to extend the control range thresholds for the RTH switch then I could at least program a TX mix to retain some pitch control if they are on the same X3 channel – ie, the RTH could be trigged if the gimbal was made to go into the last few degrees of pointing upwards.
Anyone have any work-arounds for this?
Phil
