Flying my Delta Conyne kite on Crosby beach in Lancashire.

Along the path to a larger project, I’ve been playing around with Kite Aerial Photography. Put simply, its about strapping a camera to a kite and  taking pictures of whatever is around.

Kap Rig-in-Progress (move along please, this is not the duct tape you are looking for)

To do it a bit more justice in the engineering department, its more about creating a KAP rig (which seems to be largely a matter of
aesthetics) that will support the camera in a controlled way that minimises the swinging and pendulum action, while providing remote pan and tilt ability with remote shutter release.  It’s a hugely interesting field of design and engineering, there are as many solutions and different approaches as there are KAP’pers and KAP rigs.

Cornwall from the sky

I built a KAP rig last year, but have yet (groan… no surprise) to finish it.  The Pan servo is not in place and I’ve not built a picavet. despite this, I did fly a camera under the kite and got some great pictures.

The rig I’ve designed uses an Arduino to control the servos, it communicates to the ground via xbee modems. The camera (although it’s an olympus in the prototype shots above) is a Canon Ixus 50, running CHDK.  the Arduino controls (will control)  the shutter using CHDK’s USB shutter release hack.  Using an Arduino allows us to capture other metadata around the photo.  I planned to fly a GPS unit up there too to get lat, long and altitude (as good as GPS altitude gets). We could even put temperature and humidity sensors on there, although at this point we are running out of good reasons why.  More notes can be found in the (needing to be updated!) wiki page