Been a bit of a whirlwind week with my day job, even so I managed to squeezae the last few things on this project into the odd free moment. Here's the final bit of work I did....
Without a gimbal you still need a way to secure a GoPro to the multi, and since this one seems to have a significant amount of vibration present (could use some better props or a good balancing of the current set), a vibration isolation mount is what's needed. Here's the first rough prototype of an idea I've had kicking around for a while that was eaily adapted to the job.
This one uses the soft rubber isolation balls that are common on most every brushless gimbal coming out of China these days although the Chinese aren't using them properly, in this case I designed the mount so the isolators are in compression rather than in tension which is the way these are supposed to be used.
The nice thing about 3D printing is its very easy to make changes in design and almost immediately have the object in hand for testing, here's the V2 prototype under construction...
Once I had that done, a couple minor tweaks to the CAD drawing and then print the final version. Large structures can be set to be filled to different percentages of material so while it may look heavy, it isn't, the entire center post is mostly a honeycomb structure with 2mm thick solid walls...
The final version assembled and installed...
I'm finding having a 3D printer in house to be quite a useful tool, the only limitations of what you can do are the capabilities of the printer itself. In this case the print area is 8 x 8 x 8 inches with a normal print resolution of .3mm although it can go as fine as .1mm but the print time at high resolution is much longer than at .3 Still as long as you have the ability to work in a CAD program that can create the STL files used by the printer, you're good to go. Here are a couple other things I've done with it.
A 250mm Flamewheel style mini-quad, that's a DJI F330 arm next to it for size comparison...
Making new arms for my Honey Badger FPV frame, the original design and manufacture is from Delrin and it isn't nearly as strong as it needs to be, I've broken every single piece of this frame so far without what I consider a bad crash, doesn't take much. Using ABS plastic, thickening and strengthening where needed, I hope to fix that problem. The red arms are the new ones from the 3D printer and the beginning steps of this project...
So, now back to the Aero 550. I've done as much as I can with it, there are a few things I just don't have the time or right pieces to fully refine such as the rubber isolators in the GoPro mount aren't the right stiffness for the amount of weight hanging from them. Chris may need to add a little weight or maybe use the factory case with the Hero3 set to record upside down to get to a point where the video is relatively smooth in all conditions. Another is the matter of the props, these are cheap Gemfan and while they work well the balancing leaves a lot to be desired. Having a couple sets of these of my own I know they can be time consuming to balance properly and unfortunately I just don't have the spare time to deal with them without depriving Chris of his 550 for another week or two.
I can say it's flying well and I was able to get an acceptable level of video from it in a very limited amount of testing, so it's time to break it down, box it up, and ship it back. If I can get that done before the local Post Office or UPS store closes it will go out today, otherwise it will be on its way Monday.
Ken
