I've had a wee project going on over the last little while, to create some neato FPV hoops for the micro quads to fly through.
The initial prototype for these came from an article on how to control RGB LED strip (non-indexable) from an Arduino. Not only did I have the RGB strip laying around after an impulse AliExpress purchase, but I also somehow, miraculously, managed to salvage the MOSFETs I needed from an old computer power supply that I had stuffed under my desk.
A bit of fiddling, some code copying, a few tweaks, and voila! I had a working led strip, and a few minutes later I'd made a circle out of some garden hose and I had a hoop to fly through.
I played with the idea for a while, pricing things up on AliExpress to see how I could make more, and in the end settled for some pre-build LED strip controllers, plus some other bits and bobs, and managed to price these hoops up at a fairly reasonable rate.
So I purchased the parts for 10 of them.
Mark and I spend an evening putting together the first one - ironing out the assembly process and figuring out what works and what doesn't. We managed to get one done, so along with the prototype had two hoops.
We had grand aspirations of assembling many, but we didn't get much further than that - with the Mobius Mini recording in the corner of the room we went off to see what we had created, and it was absolute madness.
The hoops are awesome - in a dark room where they are the only source of light they provide a decent amount of illumination, or if turned down they provide a good night challenge (the stock cameras on the QX95 is really good in low light conditions - grainy, but good). We weren't so sure about the insane flashing modes - when one of the rings was set to insane-speed-flashing it was actually causing problems with our VTX. Not sure if this was to do with the frequency of the switching in the LED controller or something else, but interesting to note at least.
We had too much fun.
All in the name of product research of course. We could have stopped any time.
Honest.
A few days later we now have 9 of them in various sizes between 80cm and 60cm, and they are the best thing ever. One rainy day we did a little indoor flying, and have plans to get these out in the Playground as soon as the weather starts behaving itself.
~~ ~~
You're so cool! This looks like so much fun! I am going to miss you.
ReplyDelete