I have some friends with some radio controlled aircraft that were thinking about using this gimbal design or a derivative to mount a camera on their flying machines, so I downloaded the .pdf (linked to from the page listed above) that crezzee posted with the gimbal plate design, opened it and made a screen capture, saved the screen capture as a .jpg, imported the .jpg into SektchUp, scaled it based on the 50mm x 50mm reference square in crezzee's .pdf (very nice touch, crezzee!), and then drew a solid model of the plate on top of the imported .jpg.
Screen Grab of PDF Imported Into SketchUp, Model Above
Model Created by Drawing Over Scaled Screen Grab Image
Printed Model with Calipers for Scale
Closeup of Printed SSG Gimbal Plate
The density of the material I'm using (PLA) is around 1.25 g/cm^3, and the model from SketchUp that I created from the .pdf that crezzee posted has a volume of 5.05 cm^3, so the weight of the piece is roughly 6.25g. Feels stiff enough for a camera and some servo's, but only the full assembly would prove it out. Oh, I printed it 3.0 mm thick also, with 90% fill density, so it's basically a solid piece of plastic.
Maybe soon we will get some servo's and the other pieces and put the entire gimbal assembly together. Please take a look at the post above by crezzee--it is an awesome example of a project you can build with very little knowledge and (judging by his videos on youtube) end up with a device that makes your RC drone videos as smooth and clear as the ones put out by the CIA.
Next up for printing is switching to a new roll of PLA. I've been through 2 full 1kg spools of 3mm PLA on my MendelMax 1.5, and have to say that the machine has been great. Of course massive thanks to everyone who worked on designing this particular machine, and to those that pushed open source 3D printing to the point it is today.
The new spool of PLA is green, and I'm not worried about the printing quality as much as just getting it to adhere well to the build plate. When I moved from gold to blue PLA I had major problems getting the blue to stick (see earlier blog posts), but I've been using a watered down PLA glue mixture on top of my glass build surface lately and it seems to really work well. I hope the green PLA likes it.
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Such machines come handy when you are in need of printing a bulk amount of materials within a specified time. Commercial printers are heavy duty machines which are capable of producing better quality prints compared to that of ordinary printers.
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