Gaui 330X Quadcopter at Abbey in York and new camera mount

I received a new three axis camera mount from quadcopters.co.uk yesterday. One of the things I like about ordering from there is you can talk to the owner, who is very helpful, and he gets your purchases in the post very quickly so that you receive them the next day.

The camera mount is made from high quality materials and nicely put together. It arrives fully assembled but I would recommend adding some thread lock and tightening all the bolts around the frame.

One thing I didn't realise, due to an oversight on my part, is that the camera mount does not come with servos. Because of this I had to salvage some random servos I had lying around and sort of jerry-rig them into place. In the video below there is a little bit of juddering, which is caused by a loose-fitting servo arm on the roll axis of the camera mount. I will fit a better servo and arm to the mount today, but I was eager to test it yesterday and didn't have time to go to the model shop and buy appropriate servos.

The other thing I bought to go with the mount was a Fyetech FY-20A flight stabilizer. These little boxes are normally used in RC planes to help you fly level, hands off. You can flip a switch on your radio and the FY-20A with level out our plane and fly it perfectly straight.

One of the other uses, however, is to attach the 'aileron out' and 'elevator out' connections to a camera mount to make it self-stabilizing. I have to say the FY-20A does the job perfectly.

If you've every wasted time messing around with standard helicopter gyros to try and stabilize a camera mount you'll doubly appreciate how cool the FY-20A is for this job.

I simply placed the FY-20A on top of my Gaui 330x quadcopter and plugged in the camera mount and it just worked, easy as pie. If only all things in RC Flying were this easy.

I was amazed by the results, even with my hastily put together setup and motley collection of servos I managed to produce something that is very stable and sharp. If you ignore the jittery bits from my dodgy servo arm, the footage looks as if it's been stabilized using software but it's all down to the camera mount and the FY20-A.

The aerial video is shot around the ruins of St Mary's Abbey, which lies at the back of the Museum Gardens in the centre of town in York.