Good Changes

A bunch of good stuff is coming down the pike. I posted earlier that my KAP backpack finally bit the big one. My new one came in today, a Jansport Odyssey 38 in Bok Choi Green. (Egads, gotta love that color.) It's not too much larger than my present pack, but it's much much better designed and made. The suspension is outstanding. I'm looking forward to hauling gear in it! My wishes for a pack that would swallow one of my extension cord winders died when I opened the box and saw how small the pack was, but that's ok. For everything else the pack offers, I'm willing to give that one point a miss. I love the new pack! Can't wait to move my gear over tonight.

Which brings me to my next backpack story: My 4x5 bag died a long long time ago, but I never stopped using it. I should've. The waterproofing on the cloth is now depositing gooey residue all over the camera, which is a really nice wooden monorail. Not the kind of thing you want to have to remove goo from! So I'm bound and determined to repair my old KAP backpack, and reinforce the wear points with the sewing machine tonight. My dragon backpack will live! And it'll be the new home for my 4x5. All good.

I had another talk with Henry about the 4x5 KAP camera, and he brought up a lot of really good points. One of them was a discussion of my George Lawrence stabilization system, and how I was paranoid about stuff falling off my rig and hitting someone on the ground. Henry asked about my digital KAP system, and I had to admit that I had a really nasty multiple single point of failure in the pan servo. The whole rig hangs from a servo. Hangs FROM a servo. Hangs. From a servo. (Did I get that point across?) If any of several parts go, the whole rig comes down in free-fall mode.

I've been meaning to fix this for a long time, but I haven't. Henry had lots of good ideas, and I wound up pulling out my gear assortment. In the end, though, I ordered a pan gear reduction from Brooks. It's the right answer since it solves more than just the pan servo failure mode: With the gear reduction the rig hangs from a bolt with a shoulder on it, so there's a metal-to-metal contact in case of failure. It also lets me switch to a lighter servo, a Futaba S3003. It also slows down pan rotation, giving me finer control over camera pointing. All in all a super good move. And a good precautionary change for something else that's coming up soon. (More on that later.)

I also picked up a pair of Brooxes KAP Klips while I was at it. This isn't for the digital rig, it's for the 4x5 KAP camera. Now all I have to do is make a new Picavet suspension, and I'm ready to launch it somewhere more photogenic than the soccer fields here in town.

This morning I posted about a problem I was having with the AuRiCo rig controller I used to take pictures on top of Mauna Kea. Occasionally my tilt servo would jitter, then point the camera straight up. It happened several times when I flew in Pololu Valley, and wound up ruining several panorama sequences. Turns out the AuRiCo has problems with noisy S3003 servos, and Peter issued a new rev of the AuRiCo firmware. Brooks had the 1.31b firmware chips in-hand, so he's including one in my order. Yaaaay!

So all in all: I got a new KAP bag, a gear reduction for the pan axis, I've got an S3003 lined up as a pan servo replacement, I got clips for my KAP 4x5, Henry gave me all sorts of good pointers on re-doing the George Lawrence stabilizer for that camera, and my Bender 4x5 is about to inherit a heavily over-stitched dragon backpack. Wheeee!

It feels like it's my birthday or something, only better. I don't tend to get presents for my birthday. This is cool! Best part is that it didn't really cost that much, which is good for someone on a budget. And it's good for one more thing:

I've had my eye on a Canon A650IS camera for many months now. It looks like I might be able to afford one at the end of April. It'll let me run CHDK, so my shutter servo ceases to be a part of the rig. It's a 12.1MP camera, but more important it has a physically large CCD, so it doesn't suffer from the noise issues and low-light limitations most high-count pixel CCD cameras have. It really is a good camera for KAP, and will let me start printing 40" wide prints without noticeable pixelation. I'm stoked! And with the gear reduction installed on the rig, I don't have to worry about the thing plummeting to the ground because of a failure in the pan servo.

My only problem now is to figure out how to get some sleep. It's been a really good day.

Tom