I have mentioned that I am working on my own project from scratch... but in meantime have had some time to mess around with a few different available brushless controllers as well as converting one of my CS mounts over to brushless with as little reconstruction as possible. Using whatever was spare and around. Total DIY style! Anyways I did some tests with a DSLR and thought I would see how far I could push the Alexmos controllers and some motors that are easily available currently. So I gave one of my heavier cameras a go and I was pretty surprised it actually worked as well as it did. Even follow mode which allows single operator to yaw smoothly worked very nicely. I wouldn't say this is clean or by any means how I am going about my own project but it does show you that there is a pretty quick way to converting your CS gimbal to bushless. If you haven't already! Ill post some more details and pictures of what I did... if anybody is interested Cinestar 360 Alexmos controllers iFlight 5208's
Very nice Brad, Glad to see people are jumping in to the brushless age. Once you refine the PID's no going back to servos. Please share your built. Bill
Holy smokes! That is really impressive, Brad. Wow. It was a little jumpy on Vimeo (pretty common) so thank you for enabling the download of the .MP4 file. That's super smooth. Would love to find out more of what you did. The MōVI is looking really, really pricey right about now.
I don't think the MoVI even does exist for multicopters anyway, Has anyone seen a video from it yet? Many videos of the hand held one but none from the multicopter unit. Build your own people and have fun doing it. Bill
Very nice, nice scenery, and in slow mo which hides alot of the jitters. Is that done with the MoVI MR5 or MR10. Alot of the shots are handheld. Show me the gimbal on the copter, like what Josh did. With a gopro on the boom. Bill
The top video is MR10 and I believe nearly if not all of the footage is flying on a CS. Hood was a combination of handheld, bike, snowboard/ski and copter.
Ya for sure there are more features to the Movi that you can take advantage of... so clearly this isn't an alternative but an option for the folks with a little less cash. BTW I really think FF should offer an upgrade for the folks who got them here... I bought into Red for this type of future proofing and support. Would be nice to see from FF BTW, I only did a short clip of flying at the start of the clip due to fathers day and not want to ruins the neighbors nice afternoons in their back yards with a multirotor buzzing around. I will post some pictures tonight if I get time.
Nice work, very smooth. I'm interested in photos of the setup. what do you brushless gurus think of the V3 alexmos board? Best motor mounting options and motors?
Bill, Don't forget Roam, shot entirely on a prototype MoVI MR. www.vimeo.com/63260643 Just to save on confusion, or add to it.. The multirotor version is the MoVI MR. The handheld is the MoVI M-10 with future handheld versions of MoVI M-5 and MoVI M-20. So far they have not announced any other weight classes for the multirotors, MoVI MR is all and capable of 10lbs.
Any plans on making a MoVI MR that has more than a 10lbs capacity? You throw on a Epic, Zeiss CP.2, Paralinx, Cables, Batteries, Follow Focus, etc and your at 10lbs no problem - I'd hate to pay that amount of cash to be using a product at its limits. Thx!
Well I had to log on to give kudos to you Brad! Such a great test! Very nicely done! and this was done on a slapped together cinestar DD mod and not the gimbal you're actually developing for the heavier cinema cameras...absolutely amazing. You've confirmed for us that for relatively little money you can build a BL DD gimbal that is able to handle the weight of an Epic/Scarlet. Just imagine in a few months the number of higher payload motors that will be available! Incredible.
Freefly have said they're developing '20' and '5' models, with capacities of 2X and .5X that of the '10' model. No other info has been publicly released other than speculation that the '5' model may be about 1/2 the cost of the '10'.
Jason one thing to remember is that all of those extra items like the Paralinx, batteries, cables wouldn't need to be mounted on the gimbal. The weight guidance is for the amount of weight the gimbal itself is carrying. So camera, lens, and follow focus. The other stuff would be mounted to the rest of the CS Gimbal frame and legs as is generally done today. One of the setups I have seen, and it you may have seen it in some of the BTS videos is a Red with the Canon Cinema 24mm lens with a Heden/fStop follow focus. The RX for the follow focus was also on the camera body. Pretty hefty combo. Worked flawlessly.
That's really nice. Do the 5208's drive the gimbal directly, or did you use any gear reduction? What was the actual weight of the scarlet? Please do post more details and pictures! Thanks, Jim.
Sorry it took so long but busy few days. Anyways here are a few snaps of the 30 minute mod. I did use gear reduction on the Yaw and also I used a 5206 there which is plenty with reduction. I used the same belt and structure from the standard gimbal and took the servo holder and reversed it and attached a platform to mount the yaw motor. The 5208 tilt is just direct mounted which probably after time will show the effects on the bearings but so far it seemed to work fine. Probably wise to make a bearing mount for this. The 5208 roll has a real mix of parts but is totally free of horizontal or vertical weight bearing. Only does the roll movements itself. That is pretty much it. A few bits of CF, modeling plywood, some bolts, mounts and other stuffs. I used the side handle here so its a little heavier and the weight is distributed not quite as well as with a lipo, which I used in the first video in the thread. I thought I would give this a go as well and it works but really is getting heavy for this combo and your arms. I ran a small HDMI cable up to a zacuto EVF and its works nicely for viewing. I used a Zeiss 35 F2 here so its hefty as well. Overall a nice hack but not perdy and somewhat simple.
I think the Mövi will sell at its high price as long as the competition is still one step behind, but for how long is that