Swinglet CAM: DIY Drone Aerial Photography

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If anyone is sorting out a Digital Urban Christmas List, then please add the Swinglet CAM and mark it with a little star for high priority.

With a 30 minute flying time, 12 mile range, 12Mp camera and ability to follow preprogrammed GPS tracks this is one of the best local air photography tools we have seen.

The Swinglet omes with all necessary components for operation: rechargeable battery, charger, radio modem, remote control (for experts of remote flying only), and software for flight planning and monitoring.

Head over to http://www.sensefly.com/products/swinglet-cam/ for full details.

Thanks go to Marek for sending us the link.

MikroKopter: Aerial Panoramas and Remote Surveys

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The MikroKopter was developed by German pioneers Holger Buss and Ingo Busker which according to Next Gen RC -the UK suppliers- is fun and educational to build, has outstanding flying performance and will very likely to be the most stable VTOL aircraft you have ever flown! To be honest we don't know a lot about VTOL (vertical take off and landing) aircraft but with the addition of HD video, GPS navigation and the ability to hover make it the perfect tool for aerial panoramas and remote surveying.

The video below provides an insight into the unit:


First outside flight MK8 from wep800 on Vimeo.

Captured by wep800, the next movie shows his first attempts are using the Mikrokopter to capture an aerial panorama:


First HD video and panorama test from wep800 on Vimeo.

It is well worth checking out wep800's channel on Vimeo for more movies, the possibilities for remote surveys, mapping, 3d modelling and image capture are really quite exciting...

The Balloon Project: Amsterdam and Berlin Aerial Imagery

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The Balloon Project is charming in its simplicity - Luca and Ira send a video camera up into the sky hanging from helium balloons chasing it from below on bikes - and the results are fantastic.

The project has covered various cities around the world, below is the capture of Amsterdam from July 2008:



Carrying on the theme is Berlin, in their own words:

It was a rainy afternoon in Berlin and our last chance to do The Berlin Balloon Project since Luca (one of the co-founders of The Balloon Project) was leaving the next day. We strapped more than 30 helium balloons to a video camera and sent it up all by itself over the city some few hundred meters. We then proceeded to chase it down with bikes as the rain slowly brought it back to earth. Watch "The Chase" to see how it looked from the ground:



You can view the balloons route mapped out: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1710353

It is well worth taking a look at http://theballoonproject.org/

Nokia N95 Kite Aerial Photography

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Looking at the kite in the corner of the office we started thinking about using it to grab some geotagged images from our N95. A quick google search later however shows that we have been well and truly beaten to it - there are a number of examples out there ranging from attaching a N95 to a remote control plane to the more traditional kite aerial photography.

Scott Janousek has posted a video online of his attempts to attach his N95 to a kite using duct tape:



The N95 has built in GPS - if you then link the GPS with its 5 mega pixel camera in timelapse mode it holds the possibility of good quality aerial imagery.

See Scotts site for more info on his kite flying and Pictearth for advanced image acquisition using lightweight, easy to use UAV, GPS, high resolution sensor, live communication and Pict'Earth software.

Sometime during the week we may try flying a kite in Regents Park, London so if you see someone duct taping their phone to a kite it'll be us...