Hey I hope everyone has been having a good holiday season. I haven’t been posting much lately as I’ve been keeping pretty busy with work and playing Battlefield 3.  I picked up a GoPro Hero 2 HD camera a couple of weeks ago and have been having some fun with it. I’ve been wanting one of these forever and the opportunity finally came by. It’s a good thing that it happened after the Hero 2 came out, the wi-fi backpack looks like it’s going to be great  but might be a couple of issues with using it with 2.4Ghz RC equipment.  Oh well, there’s always 72Mhz and the 433Mhz amateur band available.

The GoPro camera will be great for my FPV flying. It will shoot full 1080p video while I fly through the video goggles.  Unfortunately I won’t have HD visuals in the headset, but I’ll be able to record the flights and hopefully some great scenery in the spring and summer.

Anyways with flying season coming to an end and Winter finally starting to poke it’s head out I did manage to get a couple of videos with the GoPro mounted onto some aircraft.

This first video is the GoPro mounted to my flying buddies Outrage Fusion 50 electric helicopter running 12S.  The camera sat sideways so the video is sideways. I didn’t have a mount handy to hold it right side up as I still need to get some more mounting accessories so I apologize in advance for the ‘I don’t know how to hold my iPhone when shooting video’ look but the video still turned out cool.

These videos are best watched in full screen at 720 or 1080 resolution setting (bottom right hand corner of the video windows, click where it says 360 and select a higher resolution)

(Note: I’ve replace the original video with this much better video. We shot a second one this weekend with the camera in the right direction and it’s a big improvement.)

For the second video I mounted the GoPro on my Twist 60, it was sprinkling a little bit so there are some water spots here and there. This is the first time I flew the Twist after I lost 2 4s packs while doing a snap roll and the plane fell to the ground.  The video is pretty long so feel free to fast forward or randomly poke about the timeline. To attach the camera I just used one of the flat mounts on the forward fuselage. I did run a piece of string from the camera housing to the landing gear, just in case the mount broke free.

Another cool feature of the GoPro Hero cameras is that they are able to do time lapse photography. On the Hero 2 you can have it take photos anywhere from every 0.5 seconds to every 60 seconds.  Here’s a video I recorded out the window at work one day just as a sample. I believe this was one picture every 2 seconds for 46 minutes. (I have a wimpy 4gb SD card that only holds about 1400 frames.. That card just quit working for me today so hopefully I can get a hold of a nice 32GB one soon!)

Hopefully I can get out on the weekend during the day and shoot some nice time lapse stuff off a tripod with no window reflections. I’m also going to mess around with the slow motion recording the Hero 2 offers. You can shoot 120 frames per second which is about 1/4 real time when played back at 30FPS so some neat effects might be possible with that too!

While the temperatures are pretty low these days I don’t do much flying and mostly do indoor stuff.  Since the rest of the house aside from the living room is at like 40-45 degrees I’m not doing much of the CNC stuff either, but sticking to the living room that’s warmed by the electronics and computers so I’m not sure what kind of updates I might post here this winter, but I have a few ideas in mind.

Happy New Years!

Update: 1/7/2012

I shot some more videos with the GoPro.  I shot a new heli video for my friend with the camera sitting the right way for some real high quality HD viewing enjoyment.  I also shot a couple more fun videos of the Twist 60.  I’ve placed the new heli video up at the top of this post to replace the original cruddy one. This again is my friend’s Outrage Fusion 50.  He’s running 12S with a Hextronix speed controller, scorpion motor, high voltage servos and a a Skookum 720 flybarless controller.

Below is the second video I shot of my Brushless Twist 60 EP.  The specs are all over this site if you do a search for ‘Twist 60’ in the bar above. This video is with the camera mounted backwards and it looks pretty neat.

And in this last video I almost wrecked the Twist. I cut out a lot of the excess video footage so this video is relatively short compared to most things I capture. It gets pretty exciting when I have my near wreck but fortunately I only flattened the landing gear a little bit and was able to bend the stamped aluminum struts back into their proper position and the GoPro was no more worse for the wear either.

 

 

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