Cheap eBay brushless gimbals?

Posted by Stigern | Posted on 13-04-2014

Category : Electronics, RC

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It’s really exciting how much the prices have dropped on brushless gimbal lately, and there are swarming with 70$ gimbals for gopro on ebay. I’ve seen some videos around youtube about their performance and it seems pretty good!

So I got around and ordered me one for testing, turns out it worked fine out of the box:

Great! I sold that gimbal to a friend and ordred me a new one, why not? They are working out of the box. Only mount your gopro camera onto it and power it on! So I thought.

My second gimbal arrived in a different box, and after closer inspection it has a different layout on the PCB, it also has a micro usb instead of a mini usb. So what, I mounted my gopro and powered it up. Heres my results:

Listen closely, can you hear that cracking noise?

After several rounds of testing, I still get the same results. So I contacted my eBay seller and complained about it. Long story short, he is now sending me a new controller board. He also provided me with some manuals written in chinglish. They might come in handy, especially if you also are having trouble with one of these gimbals:

Dropbox link for manuals.

Review: The three cheapest video cameras found on eBay

Posted by Stigern | Posted on 21-07-2012

Category : Electronics

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First of all this review has nothing to do with my previous blog post about the 808 #16 camera as I haven’t got mine yet.

So, lets introduce our three tiny video cameras.

Mini DV 808 Car Key Chain

Price is typically around 6-8 USD, this little key chain camera has nothing to do with the real #16, except they use the same plastic housing. Video quality isn’t great, it’s blurry and hard to see any details if there are movements. The camera also struggles if the brightness changes, etc going from indoors to outdoors. Or pointing the camera towards a window. The bottom line is, don’t buy it! You will be better off with the real 808, even if it costs a bit more. This camera weighs 13,9 grams with the metal key-hook removed.

Mini DV MD80

Price for this camera generally lays around 8-11 USD, it comes with allot of different mounts. The general quality feel of the housing is good, you get the impression it’s more well built than the other cameras in this test. Video quality is decent, it’s the best from these three cameras I’ve tested so far. Weight of the camera is 19,4 grams.

5MP Smallest Mini DV

This is the most expensive camera in this review, it’s priced from around 11-16 USD, in video quality it’s better than the 808-clone, and not as good as the MD80. Even tho the resolution on the recordings are high, but the compression makes it blurry and not all that good. One thing I noticed this camera cuts the recording into several files, highly annoying! The weight for the camera is 15 grams.

 

There we go, three of the cheapest eBay mini dv`s tested! I’ll add a video soon, showing the quality of each camera.

Cheap arduino nano from DX!

Posted by Stigern | Posted on 15-12-2011

Category : Arduino, Electronics

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Looking for yet another cheap & tiny arduino?

For only 16.90$ you get a Arduino Nano V3 clone from dealextreme!
Ever since modified electronics stopped making the pico I’ve been looking for another arduino in the same price range and size, and now dx got just the right one.

– Digital I/O Pins: 12 (D2~D13)
– Analog Input Pins: 8 (A0~A7)
– TTL serial data receive and transmit pins: RX/TX
– PWM Output Pins: 6 (D3/D5/D6/D9/D10/D11)
– Microcontroller: Atmel Atmega328P-AU
– Small mini-B USB for programming and serial monitor (cable included)
– Supports external 5V~12V DC power supply or 9V battery
– ICSP header for direct program download
– Cable length: 108cm

 

Ultrasonic HC-SR04 Sensor

Posted by Stigern | Posted on 13-12-2011

Category : Arduino, Electronics

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I’ve stumbled by this neat little sonar sensor on eBay a few days ago, I’ve had some bad experiences with other similiar ultrasonic sensors so I was kind of skeptic to this one. But for the low price I couldn’t resist. Anyhow, it turned out to be a great sensor. It’s accurate down to 1 cm, which is perfect and in most cases more than enough. You get it for around 5$ on eBay.

 

Only problem I ran into when using it with arduino was the library, got some nasty compiling errors. So I changed a few lines in the library and made it work with Arduino 1.0 and older arduino IDEs.

Download HC-SR04 Library for Arduino 1.0

Also wrote a little example for using it with a serial display: