Gimbal for selfie stick (two degrees of freedom)

prusaprinters

These parts upgrades your simple selfie stick to a two-dimensional gimbal, without adding significant weight to your travel language. I have made it to use my GoPro Hero8 for recording running videos of scenic routes when I am out on vacation. Modern action cameras have excellent electronic image stabilization. At this point in time the Hero8 is among the best in this discipline. So after years of waiting for this technological breakthrough, I can finally take running videos when I am on vacation, which are stable enough to use them on the treadmill on dark and grey winter days at home in my basement. I have found that carrying the camera on a chest mount does not give good results, but carrying the camera on a head strap does (with Hypersmooth Boost enabled). But carrying a relatively heavy camera on your head for over an hour of running is not that fun. More importantly, if the camera does not sit perfectly level, you will have a constantly somewhat rotated horizon on your video (all the stabilization does not fix that). This is where is gimbal comes into play. Simply mount it around your existing selfie stick, attach any kind of GoPro mount handle, put the camera on top, and you are done. The gimbal will help to smooth out the shaking from the running, so that also less sophisticated cameras will work. And most importantly it makes sure that your horizon is always perfectly level and at the right height on your videos, no matter how little care you take when holding it in your hand while running. "Balancing" the gimbal is fairly easy. First of all there are only two degrees of rotational freedom. The left-right shaking is not stabilized, but I realized I rather let the electronic image stabilization of the camera take care for that, than to have it constantly wandering away from the intended direction. While you are running, you simply cannot ever so slightly guide it in the right direction, as you may be able to do when you are walking. So all you need to do is to fit the gimbal joints right below the camera on the stick, and then extend the selfie stick so much that it becomes somewhat bottom heavy, i.e. the handle of the stick swings towards the ground by itself. Don't make it too bottom heavy, otherwise you take away some of the stabilizing effect, but also don't try to balance it perfectly, that will make it swing slowly from one side to the other. This thing is far less tricky than high-end three-axis mechanical gimbals, which sometime takes hours to be perfectly adjusted. Print instructionsI recommend to print all parts from PETG. The .3mf files are included, which take care to have 100% at the places of the parts that are most heavily loaded. All you need in addition are 4 screws M3x10, which are used to form the X and the Y axis. I propose to use a thread cutter for the small wholes in the frames, but the screws can probably be forced in as well if you use PETG (PLA is likely not flexible enough). For the clamping blocks around the stick, you need 2 screws M3x25. Also here I propose to use a thread cutter for the small holes, but forcing the screw in should be possible again here. Make sure not to forget the 2mm thick printed washers between the two frames and between the inner frame and the clamping blocks.