the best drone is not a drone

Years ago I learned about kite aerial photography but did not have the patience/time/knowledge/patience to really set up a proper rig and develop this hobby.

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:

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.

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.