An aerial view of the old foundations at Polly Cove in the West Dover Barrens.
The weather has been nice enough the last few days to get out and take some aerial photos using my trusty Multiplex EasyStar model airplane. The photos were taken at noon on Feb 14th, 2012 around the old ruins at Polly Cove, West Dover, Nova Scotia. To take the photos I used CHDK + the UBASIC Countdown Intervalometer script on my Canon Powershot SD780IS camera with the shutter speed set to 1/1500th second.
Continue reading 'Winter Aerial Photography Around Polly Cove'»
Here is a photo of Andrew Hazelden flying model airplanes in -15°C weather.
This morning my brother, Russell, & I decided it would be fun to get out to the flying hill and fly some model airplanes during the winter season. For the last few days the coastal winds around West Dover, Nova Scotia have been calm at sunrise.
This morning the road was a bit icy and the temperature was around -15°C but it didn't stop us from having a great time. We got to the top of the flying hill just as the sun was breaking through a few clouds on the horizon. I snapped a few photos with my Canon Powershot as we were getting set up for flying. We flew a Multiplex EasyStar this morning for half and hour until our fingers and toes started to get a bit numb. The FMA co-pilot flight stabilizer worked well and leveled out the wings from the occasional gust of wind.
Sunrise in the West Dover Barrens
Here is a photo of the barrens with a light covering of snow and ice.
Continue reading 'Flying Model Airplanes in January'»
I have been working on an ambitious long-term hobby project of developing my own Mac OS X based UAV ground control station system. I have been tinkering away at it slowly since February 2008. I've done all the programming and my brother and I together have built a lot of the custom hardware and done the model airplane flying. The project is still very much in the "Alpha" stages and no source code or binaries are available to the public.
I have learned so much over the last 3 years about model making, model aviation, electronics, programming, telemetry, networking, mapping, navigation, aerial photography, digital image processing, stereoscopic 3D imaging, meteorology, and many other topics. I have had a chance to experiment with all sorts of different hardware and software tools and equipment.
The main output from this project has been the ongoing improvement to my Mission Control program. Mission Control is a suite of modules that work together to form a low cost ground control station. The software runs on an Apple MacBook Pro laptop. The project started early on with a SDL based user interface and has evolved into a more robust Mac OS X based system with an Objective-C based user interface that uses Quartz Composer based gauges. Live telemetry data can be loaded into the Mission Control program from either a serial port connection, a video OCR engine, or via TCP or UDP protocols.
Mission Control Gauges
The Mission Control ground station gauges are run from a program appropriately called "Gauges". The gauge graphics are driven using Apple's node based Quartz Composer software. The gauges are updated based upon GPS data that is received either though a USB serial port interface using Termios or over a network TCP or UDP connection using BSD sockets.
This is the Gauges app using the horizontal display layout.
This is the Gauges app using the vertical display layout.
Continue reading 'The Story of Andrew’s UAV Ground Control Station'»
I recently created several stereoscopic 3D anaglyph images from aerial image pairs taken by my model airplane on Aug 6, 2011. It took some effort to process the images because the plane was combating wind shear while the photographs were being captured. I used Adobe Photoshop and Apple Shake to prepare the stereoscopic images.
Red / Cyan anaglyph 3D glasses are required to view the photos in 3D. Since the images are Phantograms they look the best viewed with a 45 degree downward angle. If you click on a photo on this blog post it will be loaded in the "Lightbox 2" pop-up image viewer and you can watch a slideshow by pressing the right / left keyboard keys or by clicking on the buttons that appear when you are in the viewer.
Enjoy!
This is an enlarged view of the houses on the edge of West Dover.
This is a view looking at one of the churches in West Dover. The buildings seem to jump off the screen due to the phantogram image processing.
This is an image of a stand of coniferous trees located in a bog near Long Lake in West Dover.
This is an enlarged view of the hills at Polly Cove.
Continue reading 'Aerial Photos in Stereoscopic Anaglyph Phantogram Format'»
Today was a great summer's day in West Dover! My brother, Russell & I had a great time flying model airplanes. I'm really happy with the results from this round of aerial photography above West Dover, Nova Scotia. The sun was nice and bright and I was able to shoot with a shutter speed of 1/1000 second at 100 ISO which greatly reduces the effect of motion blur when taking aerial photographs. I used my Countdown Intervalometer script running on a Canon Powershot SD780IS with CHDK to take the photos. I took a total of approx. 450 photos during the flight. The photos were taken with the camera looking sideways mounted under the wing of my EasyStar. The camera had a 45 degree down-tilt.
If you click on a photo to enlarge it you can also view a slideshow. You can control the slideshow by either pressing the right and left cursor keys or by clicking the arrows at the edge of the photos.
An Aerial View of St. Margaret's Bay
Polly Cove is on the left of the photo and Peggy's Cove is at the top.
Polly Cove is located off Highway 333 between West Dover and Peggy's Cove. The Polly Cove trail is a graveled path that starts at a small pull off beside the highway and runs for about 500 meters before arriving at a lookout. There are two pathways that start at the lookout and meander along the shoreline.
A view looking out towards Polly Cove.
Continue reading 'An Aerial Photo Tour of West Dover'»
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.
Continue reading 'July 2011 Aerial Photography Above West Dover, Nova Scotia'»
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