Camera Pan and Tilt
The ability of your camera to Pan and Tilt is a great feature for the more experienced FPV pilot. The ability to look down the wing while you make a loop or have a good look around your flying environment is a very welcome feature.
To do this is pretty simple. How effectively you do it is based on a few factors.
How to do it ?
You need a system that the camera is mounted to that rotates on 2 axis, horizontally and vertically.
You need two channels available on your transmitter to control the axis, pan and tilt.
You need two servos, although more crude pan and tilts can use just the one servo. With using one servo you have little control over the tilt function so we will concentrate on the two servo total control only.
Camera mount systems :
There are lots of different systems available on the market, some are better than others, some are very light weight others more robust but weigh more
Here are two examples of such a system :
A fibreglass bearing mount from companies such as hobbyking
A metal version, very simple but effective
As you can see the mounting of the camera in both systems are different and for different types of cameras.
The camera is mounted on the base of by the lens and pivots on their axis by the servos
As the servo horn moves through its travel the camera is pivoted up and down, left or right.
The amount of travel can be limited by the endpoints of your transmitter. On the pan, generally you want as much as possible, but on the tilt limits can be set so the camera doesn’t come into contact with anything, jamming or burning out the servo.
Most servos even at 100% travel dont go much further that 90 – 120 degrees of travel.
On the tilt this is not a problem but on the pan sometimes users want more travel. Up to 180 normally.
To get the required travel a servo stretcher is used, this plugs into the servo lead, then the endpoints are adjusted on the transmitter to achieve 180 degrees.
You can mount the pan and tilt wherever you want on the plane to get which ever perspective you like.