For as long as I can remember, I've always wanted to mount a camera to a remote controlled helicopter, fly it around and record aerial shots. Cindy told me I've been talking about it for years, and it was a great surprise a couple of weeks ago when she came home with an early Christmas gift!

A Syma 300 Schweizer RC helicopter!


http://www.raidentech.com/sy300elrarec.html

Didn't take us long to find an inexpensive wireless color camera:

http://www.raidentech.com/miwicocaspyc.html

While we waited for the camera, we took a few test flights off the front driveway and barely managed to keep the thing out of the trees!

Finally, the camera arrived and we headed over to Dave and Amy's house to take the first test flight.



I'll post more flights soon..

Lots of lessons learned. This was a great first experiment, but there's lots of work to do if we're going to get good quality aerial video.

1) We're going to need a bigger chopper

The camera plus 9 volt battery were VERY light, but even the small weight gave the schweizer some trouble. We managed to get it up about 5 feet in the air with the camera and battery mounted. (Without, the thing soars to 50+ feet).

2) Better maneuverability

More sophisticated helicopters yield greater maneuverability. We need to be able to reliably hold the chopper in position, strafe, pitch, yaw and roll.

3) Better quality camera

Not going to be worth the hassle if all we get back is garbled or poor quality video signals. Also longer range transmissions will be required if we are going to get shots that are more than 100 feet away.

4) Independently controlled gimble mount for camera

This would allow a second person to operate the camera pitch and yaw independent of the chopper.

5) Longer fly time

Gasoline powered?

6) GPS or other means of finding downed choppers

We almost lost this chopper over the creek near Dave and Amy's.. Especially with longer flight times and higher altitudes, finding a downed chopper will be tough without some means of electronically locating it.