This is a short video of the upgrade to the pan axis on my panoramic KAP rig. The upgrade was to add twelve magnets to the pan gear, and a Hall-effect sensor to sense them.

I found it easier to sense the gap between magnets rather than the magnets themselves. So the algorithm is to rotate the pan axis until it senses a near-minimum, at which point the pan servo decelerates to a stop. Once motion has stopped, the shutter servo is tripped for half a second. Then the pan axis accelerates into the next move.

The accel/decel motion on the axis does a really good job of preventing the pan axis from wobbling at the end of each move. As a result there's no delay at the end of a move.

Tags:   KAP Gear Smoothed Motion Hall-Effect Encoder

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I made some changes to my G-Kites Dopero using advice posted by Wind Watcher on the KAP Forum. After any change to a kite, it's a good idea to test it out in the field!

The wind at Hapuna Beach was soft; unfortunately too soft to maintain the Dopero's flight. But it was enough to see if the kite's tendency to veer off to one side and then the other was still present.

The video speaks for itself.

Tags:   Dopero Video Wind Watcher G-Kites Modifications

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This is how I typically launch my kites when I'm standing out on raw lava rock. (In this case I'm launching from a grassy field, but hey... it was available.)

In this you can see the bow in the kite's spreaders, and should be able to get an idea of what reasonable stability in a rokkaku looks like near ground level.

The higher a rokkaku flies, the more stable it gets. Near the ground they are squirrelly.

Tags:   Didakites RGB Rokkaku Rokkaku Launch

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Nothing too spectacular, but I like watching clouds move. I was working on top of Mauna Kea, and stuck my camera on top of an electronics enclosure with a 4-second intervalometer running. Including all the bumps, wiggles, and wind shake you get from an unsecured camera, a pretty nice time lapse was the end result.

Tags:   Video Timelapse Clouds Hawaii Kohala Big Island

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This is a short video I put together using KAP and KAV footage from a flight over Mala`ai, the Culinary Garden at Waimea Middle School in Kamuela, Hawaii.

The first half of the video is pretty standard KAP fare, from obliques to orthos, low to high altitude.

In the middle is a video sequence I did using the Gumstick DVR camera on a small parallelogram KAV rig suspended just above my Brooxes BBKK KAP rig. It shows the rig in motion, and I left the audio in so you can hear the shutter clicking (barely) above the wind noise.

That snippet of video was run through Video Deshaker, which really helped a lot. In addition to taking out some of the rig sway, it addressed some of the artifacts from the rolling shutter on the Gumstick.

I think there are a number of improvements I can make to the KAV rig that would reduce sway and keep it linked more closely to the KAP rig. But it was something I knocked out in about ten minutes in the shop using scraps and music wire. A more purpose-built rig that involved real time and planning would perform far better. A project for another day.

At the very end is a 3D stereo analgram I made using two of the photos from a drag sequence. The idea is to point the KAP rig 90 degrees to the side, and walk backward while the shutter is held down. This produces a whole stream of images with slightly different parallax. By picking two of them with a good angular separation, making stereo photo pairs is dead easy. The 3D stereo analgram was made using Stereo Photo Maker.

Tags:   KAP KAV Kite Aerial Brooxes BBKK GentLED-CHDK CHDK Canon A650 A650IS Gumstick DVR SPM Stereo Photo Maker ICE Image Composite Editor Movie Maker Malaai Culinary Garden Kamuela Waimea Hawaii Big Island

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