Shortly before I started flying my Tipsy, the first of the really small, really cheap digital cameras had been released, and I picked one up. It was called l’espion, and it was smaller than a box of matches.

The picture quality was pretty rubbish; and with only 2Mb of on-board memory you only got 20 low-resolution (352 x 288) pictures, but for my needs it was good enough.

Once I’d got the hang of not crashing my Tipsy too much, I decided to try strapping the espion to my plane doing a little aerial photography. I had a spare servo and a spare channel on my readio receiver which I could us to control it, so I rigged up the following alternative nosecone for my plane, out of a chunk on polystyrene:

The servo is on the top and placed above the shutter release of the camera, held on with rubber bands. To reduce the weight, I removed the AAA battery from the camera and powered it through the USB socket from the plane’s battery.

My friend James and both went to Hyde Park and did a little flying. With the extra drag of the nosecone and the extra weight of the camera it was quite difficult to keep the plane up, but I did succeed eventually in getting some pictures.

It would be interesting now to try something similar again. Nowadays however, I’d probably just strap my camera to the plane – hell, I could even get it to record some video.

October 14th, 2006 at 11:07 am ()