spumoni 0 #1 March 29, 2008 Hi All, I'm not a sky diver (yet) but would like to try it! I am, however, a sportbiker/snowboarder and a techie who likes to put together gear to video my activities. While browsing around, I found this site which had a great deal of posts on GPS, Logger, etc, so I decided to share couple videos of what I am doing. This first one is from a sailplane. In a camelback, I have a 4 hz GPS unit interfaced to a microcontroller which outputs GPS data and bullet cam video to my Sony camcorder. It has an integrated LANC controller and also outputs the GPS text data to an SD card in Google Earth (KML) format. I also have the capabiliy to plot a ground track on the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v3c0ja98-s This second is from a sportbike trackday session. Data is being pulled off the instrument cluster wiring harness and again sent to the camcorder. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0eYmHe6dt8 Sorry for the crappy video quality - haven't figured out all the nuances of uploading to YouTube yet. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
PharmerPhil 0 #2 March 29, 2008 I can almost hear the gears turning in the wing suit flyers' oxygen deprived brains... Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Gadget 0 #3 March 29, 2008 We thought of that a long time ago even with our oxygen deprived brain http://www.skydivingmovies.com/ver2/pafiledb.php?action=file&id=4202&string=empuria If people from Poland are called Poles, why aren't people from Holland called Holes??? My logbook Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
spumoni 0 #4 March 29, 2008 Attached is a sample of a Google Earth (GE) file recorded to the SD card showing the path at altitude with the vertical lines representing the a data point at 1/4 sec interval. If you have GE installed, after copying the file to your machine, you should be able to double-click it and view it in GE. The GPS unit I'm using is an OEM unit made by u-blox and is quite sensitive. I managed to lock on to 5 sats while sitting a seat away from the window on a 767 on a return trip from Canada as saw 509mph at 29,800 ft. It locks with no problem when placed in the passenger seat of my car or from my camel back when on my sportbike. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
LouDiamond 1 #5 March 29, 2008 That looks pretty good. Can you expound on the components you are using together to achieve that? What rate is your GPS receiver logging data points? Check out Paralog.net as it has the ability to do this as well as interface with GE and many other things all in one GUI."It's just skydiving..additional drama is not required" Some people dream about flying, I live my dream SKYMONKEY PUBLISHING Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
spumoni 0 #6 March 30, 2008 This is a custom built box using the following components: u-blox OEM GPS (just a circuit board with a sensitive GPS chip on it) w/ a remote antenna, a PIC 18F452 microcontroller, a SD card writer/reader, a video card, a LANC controller, a massive 4400mah li-ion battery all stuffed into a 1.25" x 8.5" x 7.5" box. It allows input from 2 bullet cameras and 1 microphone. The wired remote allows you to select either camera, start/stop data logging and start/stop plotting and of course LANC record/stop control of the Sony camcorder. This all fits nicely into a camelback pack along with the camcorder. Using the camcorder display the menu system allows you to select log rate (1 or 4hz), two display formats, two log files (kml or plain txt (time,lat,long,alt,speed) as well as set some other configuration options. It can also plot out your ground track on the video in realtime. The data log files are written to a 2GB SD card which when inserted into a USB adaptor on your PC can be seen in GE or printed out or input to other processing apps. I'll try to get a youtube video online showing what this setup looks like. Anyone know what the secret is to get good quality videos on youtube? Here's a lame skiing video with the GPS info http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geS-L4eS0BA Here you can see the time updating every .25 seconds. Now, if I can only convince myself why I should jump out of a perfectly good airplane! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
DSE 5 #7 March 30, 2008 The videos to Youtube are poor for a variety of reasons, bulletcam being the biggest one. You're feeding a DV cam (or so it appears) with a very low resolution image and DV is scaling it. It then appears you're rendering to a low bitrate WMV file, which doesn't help either. Rendering to an iPod format at 640 x 480 is very good for YouTube. Adding a tiny bit of luminance, and shifting the gamma (your bullet cam isn't calibrated) will help darken the darks, provide detail in the whites, and get rid of the washed out look. Very cool technology in that overlay! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
spumoni 0 #8 March 30, 2008 I am using a high res bullet cam - 520 line Sony chip, and it does look quite good when played back from the original DV tape. I'm inputting the .avi file into Quicktime Pro to encode (h.264) it to 320x240 .mov or mp4 file and then uploading it to youtube. I've found that even video directly from the camcorder sometimes is pretty crappy. I think that you are right about the luminance & gamma, tho', that appears to affect the end result. Overcast and hazy days are really bad. What editting software are you people using? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
DSE 5 #9 March 30, 2008 A- it's not 520 lines, that's marketing. B-even if it were, DV accepts a maximum of 240 lines (120 red, 120 blue) C-Camera isn't matched to electronics, so the A to D is fairly poor. Many here edit with Sony Vegas, several edit with Premiere, and a few are FCP users. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
LouDiamond 1 #10 March 30, 2008 Can you provide a picture of your whole set up? It sounds like your camera is the weakest link in the system. We are using DV and HD cameras , some with LANC in skydiving already. If the other pieces of your system are not size weight restrictive to helmet mounting, there may be a way to make your system more efficient, even for non skydiving events."It's just skydiving..additional drama is not required" Some people dream about flying, I live my dream SKYMONKEY PUBLISHING Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
spumoni 0 #11 March 31, 2008 Hi, tried to upload pics but file size too big for that. So here is another video on what this contraption looks like. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMwg6Hz65nk Initially I was planning to do a custom circuit board for this to get it down to 2"x1.5"x4.5" but got sidetracked into doing some autonomous robotics stuff. I don't think this box will feel too good stuck to your helmet! I did try zip-lining with the camelback on my chest and that worked pretty good. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
spumoni 0 #12 April 1, 2008 OK, here's a final video displaying real time plotting on the display. I am going south (downwards on the screen) and then loop back north. In the setup menu I selected a plotting scale factor of about 1.5 miles and a starting origin in the middle of the screen. An SD Google Earth file is being recorded at the same time. Here is the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do3M4j_TPrs with the ground plot and the Google Earth file is attached. Later, I'll try to get a local to test this out for me but in the meantime I'll be trying to integrate a baro sensor to get more accurate altitude data than what GPS provides. Until then, Aloha All. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
LouDiamond 1 #13 April 1, 2008 I see what you mean now that I have seen your set up. Would it be possible to make it smaller? Also does that record and overlay the data on the video in real time and store it, or do you have to do some post work?"It's just skydiving..additional drama is not required" Some people dream about flying, I live my dream SKYMONKEY PUBLISHING Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
spumoni 0 #14 April 2, 2008 With the exception of the LANC controller, everything is OEM, off-the-shelf breadboard stuff which is interfaced together. That is why it is so big. The LANC controller I designed is a custom PCB and has a bit more functionality that a normal one. It has 12v power input which is switched on/off whenever the SONY cam is put in record/stop. It is used to power the bullet cam and mic only when needed to conserve battery life. This whole setup could be made smaller with a custom mother board into which all the other modules plug into. It is possible to scrunch this to about 1/4 the current size plus the battery pack. Everything is realtime - no need to post process anything. Here's the sequence of what happens: Insert SD card on side, turn on system, configure for display type, log rate, plot scale factor, plot origin, log file type, etc. It will retain configuration after powering off. Wait for GPS lock LED to blink, press Plt button (if desired) - its LED starts blinking, press Log (if desired) button - its LED starting blinking. Press the Record button on the LANC controller and bullet cameras & mic powers up and SONY camcorder goes into record mode. Use toggle switch on remote to switch between bullet cameras. When done, stop camcorder, stop Logging, stop Plotting. Remove camcorder from backpack, remove video and LANC connections, turn on camcorder rewind tape and play it back and find that 1) the camera was pointing in the wrong direction, 2) you have a tic you never knew about and you now have Blair Witch Project #2 or 3) you accidentally pressed the stop switch on the LANC near the start of the session! ARRGH! Transfer DV to computer, edit, add music and write out Mpeg4 file. Upload to YouTube and send all your friends the link! Pop the SD card out, insert into your PC and double click the file and you get the track plotted in Google Earth. Double-click the track & see fly the path. Aside from the GE format, you can select a plain text format which contains time, lat, long, speed, altitude which you can open with Notepad or input to other applications. That's it! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
bomb420 1 #15 April 2, 2008 Quote ...turn on camcorder rewind tape and play it back and find that 1) the camera was pointing in the wrong direction, 2) you have a tic you never knew about and you now have Blair Witch Project #2 or 3) you accidentally pressed the stop switch on the LANC near the start of the session! ARRGH! Wow... so how long have you been jumping camera? Sounds like you'll fit right in I like your setup. Too bad new sony camcorders don't have a ADC for video in. The only part of your setup that I think i'm confused about is how you merge the text onto the video during capture. Just a little research... From a geek, I like it, great work! -TrunkHYPOXIC Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
LouDiamond 1 #16 April 2, 2008 Quote I like it, great work! That's what I am thinking too. Trunk asked the question I was trying to get at. How do you merge the text onto the video?"It's just skydiving..additional drama is not required" Some people dream about flying, I live my dream SKYMONKEY PUBLISHING Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
spumoni 0 #17 April 4, 2008 Video comes from the bullet cam and goes into a video card. This video card can be written to by the microcontroller to create the text overlay. The microcontroller is continuously reading the GPS unit, doing some simple calcs and then writing the results to the video card. The output of the video card is standard NTSC video which plugs into the A/V port of the SONY camcorder. This is the usual way to do things with bullets and all the camcorder is really being used for is a recording deck. So it really doesn't matter the kind of lens or image stabilization, etc the camcorder has, it is being bypassed. Being that you are wanting the highest quality video using HD camcorder, then this may not be what you want. From reading some of the posts, is it common to have the risers get tangled onto the helmet mounted cameras? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
spumoni 0 #18 May 29, 2008 Been looking at how GPS is being used by jumpers and specifically ground tracks (track map) and L/D glide ratio. So, I dug into the documentation on my GPS unit and managed to modify the code to incorporate in realtime, the ground track map and L/D info. On the video side, the following link shows the capability of this unit (sorry, its from a bike, but I did ride how hilly streets to display some reasonable L/D numbers). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaQLmsbwpjE As seen in the video, the system has a simple menu to allow you to configure different settings and adjust the origin and scaling of the ground track map. On the data side, while doing this video realtime, it can also write a Google Earth KML format file, or data text files in either Latitude & Longitude or Universal Transverse Mercator units for later post processing. Attached are files for each of these. Well, that's it for now. Later, when time permits, I'll try to get a local wing suiter to try it out or maybe try a tandem myself. Aloha all! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Chrisky 0 #19 May 29, 2008 Just stumbled on this thread. Very cool stuff! What GPS chip is in there? I have a Logger arriving today using an Antaris 4 chipset which is an Amtel/ublox cooperation iirc. Cant wait to check it out on the weekend. > From reading some of the posts, is it common to have the risers get tangled onto the helmet mounted cameras? Risers getting tangled is not common, but if it happens it's a very dangerous situation. Most of the times a situation of that sort arises, lines get caught under parts of the camera equipment, ripping them off (like lenses including their mounts). Riser strike is much more common and refers to the risers hitting the helmet setup quite fiercely upon canopy deployment, which is why many people prefer putting their cameras in extra boxes.The mind is like a parachute - it only works once it's open. From the edge you just see more. ... Not every Swooper hooks & not every Hooker swoops ... Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
spumoni 0 #20 May 29, 2008 I am using a UBLOX OEM receiver using the Antaris 4 chipset (Supersense version) and it seems to perform very well. I think I mentioned that I obtained GPS lock while sitting on the aisle seat (767) next to a window with the antenna on the food tray. Several weeks ago, after the unit had obtained lock, I threw in the trunk of my car to pickup something from the grocery store and when I returned, it still had lock! I'm not aware of many loggers that use this chipset. What brand is the one you purchased? After looking at some of the helmet/camera configurations that you guys fly with, I am simply amazed that your necks survive the chute opening jolt and the impact on landing. I couldn't imagine having all that on my head while riding at the track at 120+ mph! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Icon134 0 #21 May 29, 2008 Quote After looking at some of the helmet/camera configurations that you guys fly with, I am simply amazed that your necks survive the chute opening jolt and the impact on landing. Most of the time the my openings are relatively smooth... and I don't impact the ground when I land if it can be helped... I prefer a nice tippy-toe landing where I actually stop my canopies vertical decent and even better is to stop much of it's horizontal movement as well... although it can be fun to land with the wind instead of against it... basically what I'm saying is that we're not using your grandfathers canopies anymore and we have at least some control over the forces our body is subjected to which is why we are able to do it...Livin' on the Edge... sleeping with my rigger's wife... Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
tunnelfly 0 #22 May 29, 2008 Quote This is a custom built box using the following components: u-blox OEM GPS (just a circuit board with a sensitive GPS chip on it) w/ a remote antenna, a PIC 18F452 microcontroller, a SD card writer/reader, a video card, a LANC controller, a massive 4400mah li-ion battery all stuffed into a 1.25" x 8.5" x 7.5" box. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be a smart ass, since I really respect people like you who have an idea and actually realize it, but ... why does it have to be real-time superimposing??? I have done the same kind of thing with the logged data (time, altitude and speed) of my pro-track. but I did it at home using a subtitle program. It does need more time for post-processing (converting the data files into the right format, synchronizing, rendering...) but, on the hardware side, you only need a camcorder, a (separate) logger and a PC. And the output can look much better, since you can select font and color of the "subtitled" data. If you're into computer animations, you could even create some "analog style instruments" and overlay them onto the original video, kind a like the in-car view we (europeans...) know from the Formula1 races. Honestly, I don't know of too many skydivers who would strap on that much of hardware, just to cut down on post-processing time. If it would be a live broadcast, that's a different story, but I haven't seen much of that in skydiving, either... No.1 reason NOT to be an astronaut: ...You can't drink beer at zero gravity... Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
siddacious 0 #23 May 30, 2008 QuoteBeen looking at how GPS is being used by jumpers and specifically ground tracks (track map) and L/D glide ratio. So, I dug into the documentation on my GPS unit and managed to modify the code to incorporate in realtime, the ground track map and L/D info. On the video side, the following link shows the capability of this unit (sorry, its from a bike, but I did ride how hilly streets to display some reasonable L/D numbers). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaQLmsbwpjE As seen in the video, the system has a simple menu to allow you to configure different settings and adjust the origin and scaling of the ground track map. On the data side, while doing this video realtime, it can also write a Google Earth KML format file, or data text files in either Latitude & Longitude or Universal Transverse Mercator units for later post processing. Attached are files for each of these. Well, that's it for now. Later, when time permits, I'll try to get a local wing suiter to try it out or maybe try a tandem myself. Aloha all! at first I was all "wow, he sure is pedaling that bike fast!". Then I pulled my head out of my ass.A dolor netus non dui aliquet, sagittis felis sodales, dolor sociis mauris, vel eu libero cras. Interdum at. Eget habitasse elementum est. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Costyn 1 #24 June 2, 2008 Quote Well, that's it for now. Later, when time permits, I'll try to get a local wing suiter to try it out or maybe try a tandem myself. Aloha all! Cool, I've done the same a couple years back, integrating analysed GPS data into the video stream. These are the 2 videos I made with my wingsuit data: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3064457191516583219 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2898986108865105239 I wrote the software myself to convert from the lat, lon, alti data to the statistics shown. Cheers, Costyn edit: I see I'm a late comer to the thread, and Gadget has already posted my video. Costyn van Dongen - http://www.flylikebrick.com/ - World Wide Wingsuit News Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Chrisky 0 #25 June 2, 2008 My unit has a Ublox/Antaris4 chip, the device is a WSG-1000 and i did some jumps over the past weekend. I was sitting on a Skyvan, and on the last 2 (out of 5) jumps I kept close to the window prior to exit and got a lock. I did some logs (first three jumps logging with 2Hz, then did the last 2 jumps with 1Hz. The 2 Hz tracks are quite jittery. also my bicycle ride the day before logging at 4 Hz was very jittery, it seemed the unit was not writing the log entries in proper sequence. Spumoni - in u-center under the RATE settings there are three options, 0-UTC time, 1 - GPS time and 2 - local time. Could these maybe be used to get the log points in proper sequence @ 4 Hz? Camera guys usually jump canopies that open a bit softer and are proficient enough at landing to not "impact", so the only thing to fear is the opening, which depends largely on the canopy. I just got a new canopy reknown for its soft openings, because my old one used to give me an occasional opening shock and I want to start shooting stills in the air, which adds about 1 kg of gear to my head. Funny side result showed that the Skyvan pilot sucked at GPS approaches for jumprun - he unloaded us right over the landing area without considering drift. result was us hanging under canopy 1500m downwind of the landing area... Visual approaches were spot-on... Edited to add my jump #807, logging @ 1Hz, losing Fix upon boarding and reaquiring it on jumprun.The mind is like a parachute - it only works once it's open. From the edge you just see more. ... Not every Swooper hooks & not every Hooker swoops ... Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
