Alioth's Journal: Crash!!

In between trying to work on the too-many-projects that I need to get done, I did a little bit of RC flying.

It wasn't successful. After not having any crashes in 25 or so battery packs, I crashed the RC heli three times yesterday. Good job wooden rotor blades are only 2 quid a pair when bought in five packs! The worst thing about it was that each crash was down to stupidity on my part.

For your sense of schadenfraude, the heli was actually carrying a camera for the last one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJx7AKgZjpI

Oh well. Off to get superglue to fix the frame.

Lest the ground come up and smite thee...

[Shadow Wrought]

Reminded me of a few of my landings as a student pilot;-)

Neat video

[Short Circuit]

Neat video. I noticed a wobble-warp of everything the camera was pointed at. Did some wobble frequency of the heli resonate with the video scan frequency? (What do you use over there, anyway? PAL?)

Re:

[Tet]

Yes, we use PAL. I'm guessing that's he's using something like an Oregon Scientific ActionCam [oregonscientific.co.uk]. For some reason, they seem prone to image wobble, which seems to be related to vibration. Maybe it's sufficiently slow to capture a single frame that the camera can move between the top and bottom of the frame? I used on older version of that camera on my race car, and the wobble was horrendous [google.com].

Re:

[Alioth]

I'm using a FlyCamOne, a reasonably inexpensive solid state video camera, that records to a SD card. Frame rate is 25 fps (PAL), resolution 640x480 for that camera (which is not PAL resolution)

I think the video scan frequency on these cameras is quite slow - vibration doesn't cause this kind of artifact with my CCD Sony bullet cam (which appears to have a very high shutter speed - note there's no image wobble in the sidecar videos, which use the Sony). The trouble is the Sony needs a separate recorder, and