The early summertime fog is starting to lift in West Dover and I have started to do aerial photography again using a Multiplex EasyStar model airplane. I'm using a small Canon Powershot SD780 IS camera with CHDK and the Countdown Intervalometer script to take the photos. I capture about 600 photos during a 20 minute flight.
In the past I've taken forward looking and vertical aerial photos. This time, I decided to do sideways looking photographs with a 45° down tilt on the camera. As usual, I continued my experiments using Velcro as it seems to be the fastest way to mount the camera on the plane. I created a Styrofoam wedge block to support the 45° angle tilt for the camera. This is the first aerial photography flight I have done this summer and the plane worked well as usual.
An aerial view of Highway 333 facing towards West Dover.
A view of Canal Lake across from Polly Cove.
A view of the edge of Canal Lake with Peggy's Cove in the background.
It can be a lot of fun creating your own model airplanes from scratch. A handy way to create flying wings out of Styrofoam is by building a foam hot wire bow cutter. The foam bow cutter uses a hot metal wire to cut through a block of Styrofoam. It's a good idea to have a friend help you operate the foam bow so you can cut out more complex wing shapes. I like to start with lots of reference material, and a wing profile. An important consideration is figuring out the most efficient way to cut your wings from your block of foam.
Designing the Wing
I use computer design software to plan my build. I print off the design of the tip and base wing profiles on paper and transfer them onto a piece of thin sheet metal. After cutting out the metal wing profiles I like to use a marker into write corresponding numbers on both wing profiles. This makes it easier when two people are cutting out the foam wing as you can count out the numbers as you go. I like to call this the "Cut-By-Number" technique. This ensures that both people are cutting the same part of the wing profile at once.
I have found that one of my favorite woodworking projects has been the construction of a Bench Table. I built it with my brother over a weekend. It is essentially a 1/2 picnic table. The version we built was 10 feet long. I find it perfect for sitting at when I fly model airplanes as you can use it to hold laptops and gear and is at the perfect height for tinkering with model airplanes between flights. After using the table for a year it was discovered that adding an extra diagonal support running from the table bracket to just in front of the seat post really helped with rigidity.
The design of this table is based upon Hal's plans at Ranch Ramblings.
When setting up the wiring harness for FPV video on my model airplane I developed a handy 0.1" three position bus bar. It is nice in that you can set up a detachable wiring harness that lets you connect 12V DC power from the 3S Lipo battery, the 12V DC video camera and the 12V DC video transmitter to the same bus bar. This also lets you connect the video signal from the camera to the transmitter at the same time as powering them both. As always you have to be careful with making sure all of the cords have the same orientation when you connect them.
A handful of finished bus bars.
A collection of FPV video cords connected to the bus bar.
For the last few days the weather has been excellent for aerial photography. I have been getting up early with my brother and we have been exploring the coastline around West Dover, East Dover and Peggy's Cove with a Multiplex Easystar model airplane. The plane is flown using a tiny analog video camera and a 900 MHz video link. The vertical format aerial photos are recorded using a Canon Powershot SD780IS camera with the CHDK firmware and my Countdown Intervalometer script. Over the course of the average flight the plane will fly for 25 minutes and take about 600 photos.
It is amazing how far into the water you can see from a vertical format aerial photo. In some of the shoreline photos you can see almost 30 feet into the water.
I have had great success stitching the photos using the free program Microsoft ICE to create aerial mosaic images.
Also, it has been a lot of fun creating stereo pairs from the aerial images and viewing them as 3D anaglyph images. The distance the plane moves between taking two photos causes enough parallax for creating real stereoscopic 3D images.
If you want a closer view on any of the images below, click on them for an enlarged version.
I have been looking for ways to make it faster and easier to do aerial photography from my EasyStar model airplane. My latest experiment was using a large piece of velcro to secure my Canon Powershot SD780IS camera to my model airplane for doing vertical format aerial photography. The velcro has plenty of sticking power and leaves all of the camera's controls available. Also, velcro works well in cold temperatures. I used CHDK with a shutter speed override set to take photos with the fastest shutter speed possible with the ND filter set to out during the flight to minimize motion blur. I took 350 photos during the 14 minute flight using my CHDK countdown intervalometer script. This gave plenty of overlap in the photos allowing me to stitch them together into aerial mosaics using Microsoft Ice. I also created several anaglyph stereoscopic 3D images from photos for viewing terrain relief.
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