Sunday, 28 September 2008
Yet another dream project: my own TARPS.
I have baggage pods for my Long-EZ. Plenty of room in just one of these, I'm thinking I could make a 'recon package' for the backseater to play with. Think about it... a gimbal mount could be made with some stepper motors, a DSLR camera could be stripped and mounted on it, strap on a decent telephoto lens, and the whole thing be controlled via USB. For a few more.. uh, thousand dollars, a uncooled thermal imager could be on the same platform. Overkill perhaps, but so...very...cool. I could imagine a backseater having great fun snapping 12(20?) megapixel 20x zoom photos of anything remotely interesting on the ground during a flight.
I'm not sure how to get the camera to 'track', might be an image processing problem, or maybe it could guess using current GPS position, airspeed, and gimbal orientation.
It's probably rife with issues, camera shake, targeting, user interface, and so on. Still, seems like it'd be fun to work on.
Ah well, maybe after I've close all my other open projects down...
