Having built it, and checked the balance, I found that I needed to move the battery pack slightly in order to achieve good balance with the camera.
Anyway. So off to Hythe I trotted on Sunday afternoon to meet up with some kite flyers. I wasn't too hopeful as there was no breeze at home. But when I got to Hythe I was pleasantly surprised. Very cold but gloriously sunny day with a light breeze that grew a bit once you'd got out of the turbulence.
So with a 78" rokkaku in the air, I attached the rig and did all the sensible gorund checks. Then let it gain height. Certainly the rig was turning, but there was no indication of the shutter firing. So I left it flying for about 10 minutes. Given that the shutter should fire every 10-15 seconds, I should get between 40 and 60 photographs. By now the rig had stopped roatating. So I brought it down to earth and checked a few things. Well the rig batteries seemed to be flat. Disappointing. I know they are not knew, but I would hope they managed a bit better than that. I'll have to check the current draw of the motor. OK. What about the photos. 13! Only 13! what had gone wrong. Well it looks as though the shutter doesn't trigger on every release of the GentLED. I need to check this out. It could be the position of the GentLED or it could be the time it takes the camera to recycle after storing a shot. I will need to do some experiments on this. But out of the 13 shots, I had three that weren't blurred. This one is the Dukes Head pub, just across the road from the field we were flying on.
OK so having given up on AutoKAP for now, time to try R/C KAP again. Again I've been a busy boy, having converted my rig to use 2.4GHz from 35 MHz. I've also swithed my camera (a Canon G9) from plain vanilla CHDK to SDM. So here lies a problem. With CHDK, I could start up my USB script and every time I signalled the shutter it would fire. With SDM the same script seems to only fire on the third trigger, and then only if the triggers are in quick succession. It seems as though the first trigger wakes the camera, but it isn't sleeping, the second trigger operates focus, like a half press, and the third operates the shutter. Again I need to check this out. Unfortunately the documentation is a bit out of date as I am using the 1.82 release. But it looks as if I may need to change the focus setting to a digiscope setting and also switch off camera sync. but it looks like switching off the sync needs to be done before every shot, so must be managed in the script. Anyway, having figured out what was heppening, I happily clicked away and got a much higher success rate. This one is of Hythe town centre viewed across the Royal Military Canal.
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