RC Crawler with FPV 3-Axis Head Tracking (video)

[joshpit2003]

What it is:
- A FPV crawler with the ability to lean out the door.

Why we wanted it:
- In 1:1 crawling, you either have a spotter and follow their instructions, or you remove your doors and lean really far out to see for yourself. Without the ability to lean in FPV, it was impossible to see the obstacles we were climbing. So we needed a way to lean, and hence the 3rd axis.

What we learned:
- AFAIK there is no off-the-shelf Pistol Grip controller that can support this project. So we needed to hack one (see Dylan's blog post).
- Turning your head side-to-side 1:1 in FPV sucks, so we used our code to map the range such that a little amount of head-movement equaled a lot of camera movement.
- You only really need a 2-axis head-tracker device, because having to tilt your head sideways to get the camera to "lean" out of the vehicle was painful. We decided instead to simply use the radio's existing button to perform the "lean" action, which proved to be much better.
- Head-tracking is awesome, but I think the ability to "lean" is much more helpful than the ability to "head-track". So if you want to do FPV on a budget, then I would suggest ditching the head-tracking and using a fixed FPV cam on a simple gimbal that can give you the ability to "lean".

[EeePee]

We have video forums.

Pretty neat.

[Zukiiholic]

Does look pretty cool.
Here I am sticking a camera on a steering servo to drive FPV.
Just starting out tho..
Nice Idea..

[jason]

Very awesome I'd like to see some pics of the parts used.