Develop and fly a KAP Rig
From JimWIKI
The first and most basic tasks are to actually find and fly a kite, getting used to it's behavior. we then start playing around with cameras and build up towards a pan and tilt KAP rig controlled from a ground station.
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Develop and fly a KAP Rig
Determine and Purchase a suitable Kite
The kite I've chosen after a recommendation from a friend is a 270cm Delta Conyne kite. These seem to be well regarded among the KAP community and was pleasingly low cost. The DC style of kite is a cross between a standard delta and a traditional box kite. It is flown with a single string and should be good in winds of between 4-16mph. The kite was bought from Sky High Kites in the UK. It came with a line, but I've no idea what weight the line is rated at. I'm guessing it's relatively cheep but should be good enough for this phase of the project. There was no obvious way to actually connect the kite line to the kite, so I've also got some tiny (~5cm) key ring Carabiners from Ebay, one of which I will use to connect the kite line to the kite. The others will come in useful when I need to attach the rig to the line. I will have to learn a "Carabiner Knot". I've checked all the carabiners, and as expected when you buy cheep things from e-bay, 4 of the 12 have failed airworthiness due to them not closing reliably.
Get out there and fly the kite
No news yet. Despite having the kite already, and seeing some good conditions, there has been no chance to fly it.
Fly with a dummy payload
Fly with a camera
Create and fly a R/C (Xbee) Pan and Tilt Rig
Jim 11:41, 22 January 2009 (GMT)
The Radios have been bought. I will be using Maxstream Xbee 2.5 OEM modules, with a wire aerial. These have come from Farnell in the UK, although it's dubious if this was the cheapest place. I will be running them on Ladyada's Xbee breakout boards, which are also on order from Adafruit Industries in the US. The Rig will be controlled by an Arduino clone and I've begun finding my way around the servo library. Details of the code for this will be in the software section
Jim 12:01, 27 January 2009 (GMT)
I'm still waiting on the Xbee breakout boards from Adafruit to arrive, but in the meantime I've been building the servo system using the Arduino and the SoftwareServo library. I've used Processing to write a java app that receives input from a controller, such as the mouse or xbox 360 game pad and sends it via serial to the arduino board. I rushed the whole serial coms bit of this and it needs to be rewriten to properly buffer the data before processing. I also have the aluminum that I will need to build the KAP rig. Finaly, I have 4 Acoms AS-16 servos on their way over which should have enough power to run the pan/tilt mechanism.
