In the middle of last year's pandemic, I got myself a 3d printer; there was a good deal going on. Somewhere on the vague "list of future projects" that I keep in my head, I decided I wanted to 3d print a drone.
Well, I'll get to that eventually, but you know what I already have on hand? An old cell phone and a kite from the dollar store. Let's see if I can get some aerial beach photos with that!
So I searched Thingiverse for "gopro kite mount" and printed out this thing1. It didn't come out very good, but maybe it'll hold the camera from the kite line. The way I figure, the phone case is probably great at holding the phone, so I just need to attach it to the plastic doohickey with some zipties maybe.
Here's the Air Vehicle for this show. I don't really know where it's from. A prominent label on the package says "$1.99".
I think this kite line hanger was designed for, like, a good kite? This one doesn't have enough strings?
Quick test flight with just the phone holder. Flying okay so far...
nope. Can't get more than a foot off the ground with the phone on there.
I guess it's too heavy. I'm loading this thing way past capacity here.
Went on the internet and bought the largest kite that five minutes of searching and $20 could get me. Also, it's a windier day.
Kite is calling itself a "giant black dolphin" -- I wonder if the word for "orca" is the same as "dolphin" in Chinese?
If I was smarter, I would have assembled it somewhere where it wasn't windy, first.
Test flight with no payload. This guy has some lift to him!
I reprinted that same camera hanger at a lower infill percentage to save a few grams.
Success Whale!
It doesn't like to fly very high when loaded down like this, but it does okay when I give it some extra line.
I don't have a good way to remote control the phone camera, so I just set it up to record video before the flight.
It's shaky and mostly pointing straight down. But I think this is a good proof of concept!
This is the part where I actually do some research into this. Apparently some French guy2 figured out how to properly hang a camera from a kite, like, a hundred years ago. So I printed a new mount for the camera.3
Also, I want the camera to point sideways and not nadir. Since I'm still printing parts designed for a gopro, let's take a model of a gopro frame, crop out all but the bottom side of it, print that, and stick it on that phone case with epoxy!
Nice setup! This will dangle from the kite in a way that should be a bit more stable, hopefully.
It's a bit better - still swaying quite a bit side-to-side, but very stable forward and back. Here's a sample of the footage
Extracting some pictures, I got some decent shots!
I think, in retrospect, I tied the picavet wrong - the string should be set up so it can move back and forth on the kite hanger, instead of getting tied in a knot at the end. Will fix that for the next attempt. But I'm pretty happy with this so far, I think I'll get a real camera for it next. Tune in next time!