This is Falcon
Our Project
Falcon is a high precision cable-suspended camera motion control system. It offers the room-spanning motion of a drone-mounted camera, without the inherent danger and noise. Carrying a Ronin gimbal and Panasonic GH4 camera, this mechatronic system allows the user to capture stunning footage.
Pictured here is one of three nodes in the Falcon cable-suspended system.
Our Subsystems
Click below for more information
Mechanical
We designed and fabricated our mechanical system from scratch. We used ClearPath servo motors and a unique spooling system to achieve smooth camera motion.
Electrical
We used three RN-41 Bluetooth modules, Arduino Uno's and handmade protoshields to communicate wirelessly and recieve motion commands from the computer.
Software
We wrote Arduino C code as well as Python scripts to control our motors, generate flightpaths, and connect to our bluetooth modules.
Our Team
Brennan
Brennan is a second year at Olin college of Engineering studying to be a Mechanical Design engineer. A seasoned maker, Brennan was one of the masterminds behind the mechanical system. He contributed through many hours designing on the whiteboard, CADing in Onshape and making chips in the machine shop. Brennan can often be found by following the noise of construction or the smell of cutting fluid and car oil.
Keenan
Keenan is a second-year studying Software Product Design, a major he self-designed. He specializes in user-facing development and software, graphic design, and making people laugh. Keenan worked mostly on wireless communication as well as the website development and managing the blog. While slowly growing his knee back, Keenan also is a champion power-napper and free candy distributor.
Nur
After he spent a year visiting every Port-A-Potty in the greater Los Angeles area, Nur Shlapobersky decided to come to Olin College to be an engineer. Now he's in his second year, studying something that looks like a software degree gave life to a child with a sociology minor. It works. He spent most of his time on this project drawing triangles and developing the positioning and control software for accurate and smooth camera movement. In his free time, he tends to remember that he doesn't live in an anti-allegorical piece of surrealist cinema.
Patrick
Hailing from the Bay Area, Patrick is a second-year Electrical and Computer Engineering major at Olin College of Engineering. He has experience in software, electronics, and embedded systems. Patrick’s largest contributions to Falcon have been in the areas of motor control and wireless communications. In his spare time, Patrick assumes the identity of ice-cream vigilante The Fudge Nippler.
Walker
Walker is proud to present himself in the new cordless version. Basically a drone at this point, he spends most of his time pressing buttons and pulling levers in the machine shop, hunting for things inside solid blocks of metal. Before this he spent much of his time thinking of these things to hunt for, and drawing them in a fancy pants computer thingy (how do those work anyways?). He hopes to one day be a professional at thinking of things and then finding them inside of other things, and only broke a 6-32 roll form tap and ¼” drill bit during the course of this project.