Almost 2 weeks ago now and I did not mention the BeNeLux (Belgium-Netherlands-Luxemburg) RCAP meeting on my blog...

The weather was good but not excellent. In the morning the sky was blue but in the afternoon it was clouded. As last year, it was a rather windy day.

This was the third edition of the event and what an evolution! The first year all brought planes with a photo-camera. That year I also experimented with my brand new FPV equipment. There was one guy with a home-built tri-copter. I had never seen such a device before...
The next year there where some quadcopters and this year there was one FPV plane and there rest where quadcopters.

This is a movie I made video footage and stills taken from my MK:

High time for an update on my blog!

I spend time reducing the weight of my FX35 and researching the vibration issues I still have.

Opening the camera is very simple, no hidden screws. I was inspired by this movie by Ygramul: Eliminating the screen is already a huge weight-saver. The buttons remain operational. I will need to use a AV RX/TX and a screen on the ground to have feedback.

The weight of the battery is about 20g. If I can power the camera from the flight-battery, i save weight an I no longer need to worry about charging the camera battery. The DC input is 5V, so you can just solder wires on the connector and power the camera from the servo 5V the MK generates.
The video signal is also simple to find. I use the same connector for my FX35 and my 5V FPV camera.

How can I get rid of the trigger servo? The trigger button has 6 pins. Some are ground, one detects half-press, one detects full-press. Just pulling the full-press to ground seems enough.
In theory, one could connect the full-press button to one of the open-collectors of the MK (the ones to drive leds). Because I suspect that this signal is going directly to the camera processor, I decided to introduce an optocoupler, a small relay will also work.
The weight of the camera is now 90g.

Some vibration sources where already eliminated but there are still too much vibrations in the footage. I compared different damping materials that isolate the...Continue Reading