Heavy Lift Quadcopter and the Return of the Servo Gimbal

I've been putting this together all week. Well, to be honest, my mate Andy dismantled it and put it together again months ago and now I've partially dismantled it to add a Vulcan power distribution board, which is made of very thick copper, weighs almost 50 grams and is a bit overkill really. I had to get a bigger soldering iron just to heat up the board enough to melt the solder.

Anyway, it's an old Droidworx XM frame with a Naza V2 and GPS that I also just added. 14x5 Xoar wooden props on MT2814-11 Torxpower 3536 Pro 710KV Heavy Lift Motors.

The gimbal is an old servo gimbal I dug out of a cupboard, a Gaui Crane III, though I may change this for my old Photohigher  AV130 if we can find it in Andy's garage.

I imagine there's a lot of people like me who, last year, went brushless gimbal mad and cast aside their old, trusty servo gimbals thinking they'd never use them again.

While it's true, brushless gimbals are the future for now and the way to go for video, they are a total pain in the arse to set up and ballance. Servo gimbals pretty much just work, with any camera that happens to fit in the space.

So I've taken on this quadcopter project and decided to keep it with the servo gimbal purely for aerial photography use. Keeping it nice and simple. I'm not sure why but I seem to be doing a lot more aerial photography this year instead of video, where last year was the total opposite. Anyway, I've decided to have a dedicated photography ship and a separate dedicated video ship.

So this is my photography ship, subject to testing tomorrow. Oh yeah, almost forgot, I have a Nikon D5300 to try out on this rig. This camera has built in GPS and, more importantly, a built in intervalometer - so you can set it taking pictures ever second, or 2 seconds or 5 seconds and so on, just like a Gopro only much better quality (fingers crossed).