Anyone managed to fit 3rd party gimbal/camera to a Phantom???

[Chas Har]

Hi, with all the clever tech minds on here has anyone successfully fitted a 3rd party gimbal/camera onto a Phantom? It would appear after a quick search that the gimbal/camera is the most sought after part that often costs the same as a used drone complete. Anyone that can afford to send a drone to DJI for repair can surely afford a new Mavic. DJI have dropped the Phantom range with total disregard to its fan base. I have a P3A that has a simple broken clip where the ribbon cable plugs into the gimbal camera board. I am capable of changing parts myself so grudge spending big bucks sending to someone that will charge a fortune to connect a used board in.
I know the gimbal and camera are heavily embedded into the workings of the Phantom, but someone must have attempted to hack into the problem.
Cheers
Charlie.

 

[KachemakDiver]

Where are you located?

 

[Chas Har]

Aberdeen in Scotland. Aberdeen people are famous for being tight with money, hence the comment about not sending drone to DJI.

 

[wiganer anthony]

Aberdeen in Scotland. Aberdeen people are famous for being tight with money, hence the comment about not sending drone to DJI.

Get on the phantom page on facebook theres a bloke called peter he fixes everyones drones all the traders send therevstuff to him also hes guru of them
pal

 

[KachemakDiver]

I’ve got a good P3A gimbal board, but it would probably cost to much to mail to Scotland ?

 

[David_Cambridge]

It is not just the physical mounting. There is a lot of communications required between the drone controller and the gimbal motion controller. This is all undocumented and proprietary to DJI.

 

[Digley]

This is maybe not exactly what you want to do,but on my old P2 I have a Runcam 2 HD. I use a simple servo controlled gimbal screwed to the base of the frame.It's an old "hack" machine,so not too worried about drilling holes and screws/non standard fittings etc.

 

[quaddamage]

Video signal is transferred to OFDM board over USB.
The DaVinci firmware could be reverse-engineered to figure out the protocol, then any device can be placed there, as long as it has the capability to run the software.
It actually isn't as hard as it sounds, as the firmware has symbols - meaning there are far more people skilled enough to reverse engineer this, kind of beginner level task in the field. Still requires time though.
I looked at it a bit when I was figuring out how to fix that thing.

For example, the reverse-engineered code could be recompiled for Rapsberry Pi Zero, if only there's a way to feed video signal to it while keeping the the USB unused.

So this is not zero effort, but definitely doable.

 

[David_Cambridge]

The difficult part is feeding the flight controller information to the added gimbal in real time so that the gimbal makes the right moves to stabilize the image. If you can live with a non-stabilized gimbal, it can be done quite easily.

 

[quaddamage]

The difficult part is feeding the flight controller information to the added gimbal in real time so that the gimbal makes the right moves to stabilize the image.

I assume you know that every gimbal (including the stock ones from Ph3) has its own IMU, and doesn't require any additional signals to stabilize. Gimbals from DJI do use the control signal though, to predict movements of the drone base and react on them faster.

Are generic gimbals able to accept such signal as well? I assumed they don't need FC connection at all?

 

[Chas Har]

I assume you know that every gimbal (including the stock ones from Ph3) has its own IMU, and doesn't require any additional signals to stabilize. Gimbals from DJI do use the control signal though, to predict movements of the drone base and react on them faster.

Are generic gimbals able to accept such signal as well? I assumed they don't need FC connection at all?

That was my line of thinking, there are only two multi connectors that go between gimbal and drone, each with 4 wires if I remember, which would mean most of the brains for gimbal movement must be on the gimbal board and not the main board. I am not skilled enough to pretend how to graft a 3rd party gimbal onto P3, but I would think there are some clever people that could do it with the view to selling kits to make it worth there while. Wonder how many P3 type drones are sitting idle because of gimbal issues. I maybe should have bought a P2 as it looks like you can tinker more with them and mod them a lot easier. Some time in the future, I may buy a crash damaged P3 so I can mess about with it and try some things without fear of damaging my expensive drone. Too many other projects on the go just now that require £££s of the budget. Ah well, I'll keep searching and watching videos for now.