Building an Aerial Photography with Radio Control

The project incorporates a Canon Snappy film camera to create an aerial photography from R/C models.

The design uses a BASIC Stamp 2 microcontroller for the interface which consists of some RAM for user code and a PIC with an onboard PBASIC-code interpreter chip. The PBAISC from a PC is used to program the BASIC Stamp microcontroller. It runs on 5V while providing high level commands for reading/writing square waves and communicating through serial RS232.

A servo with a cam pressing on the shutter button is one way of controlling a digital camera. This seems a bit agricultural as it interferes with the normal use of the camera and in the age of fly by wire. The use of Stamp microcontroller was preferred on this project.

In order to determine the effect of a large bluff object sticking above the wing, a cardboard dummy was used in place of the camera for flight tests. With the dummy mounted in different positions, three flights were flown with the camera pointing down, pointing back, and pointing sideways. The first and third configurations were used for the operational flights since the second was tricky.

Rest of the project