Fast forward to 2020 and the quarantine gave me time in spades.
The camera rig is a Raspberry Pi Zero, powered by an small USB battery pack, mounted to a stick.
This is my camera-computer:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3414
With some digging, I found this amazing image to flash onto my Pi:
https://publiclab.org/notes/icarito/10-21-2018/introducing-pi-builder
This particular image creates a local wifi access point that grants me control of my Pi AND (this is the cool part, buckle in) spits out a livestream of the camera.
Everything works as advertised, which is just top notch for an open source project. Seriously. Huge bonus points to the team that created this spectacular image.
I am flying one of these guys as my kite:
https://prismkites.com/product/isotope/
I chose it because they are a local company, and frankly, I really like the design of the kite. Prism based this design on the old kites that used to lift radio antennae, which is fitting.
Here's my little rig:
With some digging, I found this amazing image to flash onto my Pi:
https://publiclab.org/notes/icarito/10-21-2018/introducing-pi-builder
This particular image creates a local wifi access point that grants me control of my Pi AND (this is the cool part, buckle in) spits out a livestream of the camera.
Everything works as advertised, which is just top notch for an open source project. Seriously. Huge bonus points to the team that created this spectacular image.
I am flying one of these guys as my kite:
https://prismkites.com/product/isotope/
I chose it because they are a local company, and frankly, I really like the design of the kite. Prism based this design on the old kites that used to lift radio antennae, which is fitting.
Here's my little rig:
I just wind the main kite line around the baby carabiner and the whole thing acts as a relatively self-stabilizing pendulum.
Here are some of the shots I captured on a camping trip. We camped out on a dry lake bed, serving double-duty to test my rig and catch some good night sky to view the comet, Neowise. We saw the comet! So this trip is 100% successful.
I set the camera on an interval timer and just let it fly. This is good because I actually had some shots come out. 3 seconds is way too short an interval though. I ended up with a lot of garbage.
Will extend to 30 seconds for the next flight.
Here are some of the shots I captured on a camping trip. We camped out on a dry lake bed, serving double-duty to test my rig and catch some good night sky to view the comet, Neowise. We saw the comet! So this trip is 100% successful.
I set the camera on an interval timer and just let it fly. This is good because I actually had some shots come out. 3 seconds is way too short an interval though. I ended up with a lot of garbage.
Will extend to 30 seconds for the next flight.
 |
| Campsite with sun shade, rigged out between our cars. |
 |
| The wind would kick my camera out an an angle and it gives WAY more interesting shots than straight down. |
 |
| Adventure dog. |
Stuff for next time:
- Try to rig my camera out at an angle. It is so much better that way.
- Look into a wider angle lens.
- Get a better Linux machine than my old netbook. The web interface really struggles with compiling a large zip file and the only way I can extract large chunks of photo data is direct from the SD card. But Linux does not play nice with Windows or Mac. Whomp. Need to get a better Linux box. Which probably means I finally need to get a laptop that is not 10 years old. Good times.