Gimbal Calibration Doesn't Do Whole Range of Motion

Joined
Aug 30, 2017
Messages
13
Reaction score
3
Age
39
My gimbal is constantly pointing slightly to the left. I was digging around a bit and found a post talking about it possibly being the potentiometer on the gimbal, but I'm not sure about this. An odd thing I noticed about my P3P's particular behavior is that when doing a calibration it does not actually move all the way to the right. It is centering relative to the motion it covers during calibration but is not actually properly covering the entire range of motion. Any thoughts as to what could cause this and how to fix?
 
  • Like
Reactions: swoserin
My gimbal is constantly pointing slightly to the left. I was digging around a bit and found a post talking about it possibly being the potentiometer on the gimbal, but I'm not sure about this. An odd thing I noticed about my P3P's particular behavior is that when doing a calibration it does not actually move all the way to the right. It is centering relative to the motion it covers during calibration but is not actually properly covering the entire range of motion. Any thoughts as to what could cause this and how to fix?

My first thought is the gimbal yaw arm is not attached to the yaw motor shaft properly. The tip of the set-screw which attaches the arm to the motor shaft is suppose to contact the flat spot which has been machined along the side of the shaft ("snuggly" but not over-tight). In addition, that "flat spot" must be aligned parallel to a specific seam or joint line of the gimbal assembly at the time the set-screw is installed. There are many You Tube videos on the i-net which show how this is to be done - just Google "Phantom Standard Gimbal Repair" and you can find one which will show how this is done. (it's 1:30 in the morning where I am and I'm too tired to go look them up for you right now!)
 
The set screw is correct and it appears to be aligned properly, but perhaps it is the potentiometer after all now that I've seen videos of it taken apart and how they have the potentiometer setup. It seems that the poentiometer itself is reading too far to the left, but moving the shaft off axis should correct it in theory. Now I just need to figure out a good way to actually hold the motor in place while I rotate the shaft within it.
 
It seems that the shaft rotation idea did not work (it just rotated within the cover, not rotating the actual shaft relative to the camera and the set screw self levels too much to be able to secure it to the shaft off axis). I can't see any way to get at the poentiometer to actually change the position of the shaft within the poentiometer. At this point I'm running out of alternatives and may end up just buying a new camera assembly since it's also started to have an occasional random tilt down and then snap back to place which is ruining some shots.
 

Recent Posts

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
143,086
Messages
1,467,528
Members
104,965
Latest member
Fimaj