Raspberry pi kite photography: take 1

We made a first – somewhat crap – attempt at doing kite photography from the raspberry Pi today

The basic setup involved a pi, a pi camera board, and one of those mobile phone charging things. The pi contained a script, which waits 2 minutes, then takes a photo every couple of seconds, set to begin when the pi boots up. All encased in the clear plastic box that some nectarines came in, padded out by some left over insulating foam from a lamiate floor. Not very hi tec or over engineered…

The camera fits nicely inside, poking out of the hole.

We first attached it to a stunt kite, made a quick test flight outside the house, and then drove to Borth to try it out on the beach.

The stunt kite was perhaps a bad idea – it went round and round, faster and faster, then slammed into the ground. Twice.

The result of this was a pi which now… is missing quite a key part. Ah well.

Thankfully we’d used one of my old raspberry pis which had already had a few bits snapped off it, rather than Joe’s new one. The next thing we tried was a different kite – thinking that we might be better with an easier to control kite, but by then we’d no pi left so there are no photos of that flight. Which is lucky, as the flight lasted about 2 seconds – we got the kite up then the string snapped.

Here’s a quick animated gif of the things we did get off the pi – you can see the first test, involving chucking the contraption our of a 2nd floor window, some shots from the beach at Borth, and some tests from outside the house.

By the way these pictures are actually 15% of actual size – the pi camera is actually really good. Here’s a bigger version of one – click for full size:

Maybe we’re just crap at kite flying? Who knows. We’ll try again tomorrow, if we can fix the pi – or maybe we’ll just risk another one.