Raspi Cam V2 gimbal

I made a small and compact 2 axis gimbal for the raspberry pi camera v2 for anyone who is interested:

The third axis can easily be added if anyone needs it as the controller supports it.
STL files are available for anyone interested.

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Very nice. At first I shrugged it off as I come from flying drones while pushing for higher res and bigger gimbals. Wow, this has tremendous applications on or off the ground. Do you know of or are you working on tracking or mapping code and will work with your gimbal design?

Thanks! One of the initial goals I had for my quad project was tracking my friends car in a rally race. I didn’t work at all on this so far, but I imagine that with OpenCV and raspberry pi 3 it should be very doable.

I’m searching for smaller and lighter gimbal motors now as the 2204 I’m using now are very overkill for the raspicam. I think a 17-1804 would be more appropriate and ~20 grams lighter in total or same weight but with a yaw motor as well.

It is doable. Open CV has a lot to offer. I really would see/tinker with this for autonomous vegetation inspection and auto weeder. One more thing on the never ending list. The stability would be great however directional control on the vision would really push it. What is the accuracy/repeatability of the gyros feedback? Keep it up and please update.

Best wishes
Burke

The gyros are very accurate. I didn’t measure anything yet but it seems rock solid. Probably way less than 1 degree of movement, but it depends a lot on the PID setup.
I do expect yaw drift though since the controller doesn’t have a magnetometer.
I found these motors that can be rewound for the gimbal and they are very light at 5.6 grams. 3 of them will be lighter that one 2204 I’m using right now and they should provide enough torque for the raspicam. Because they are way smaller the gimbal will also be more compact, with the size dominated by the camera and the IMU sensor.

I’m testing now the camera flat flex cable setup and I think I found a very nice solution for it, that doesn’t require a custom, round, hand-made replacement.
I’ll post a video when I have it.