A MOBILE PHONE RIG FOR KITE PHOTOGRAPHY

The phonemenal advance of 'keitai' portable phones with their feature laden cameras makes them makes them potentially useful for kap. My NTT DoCoMo Mova with its 2 mega pixels has a useful manual focus but I'm unable to force a high shutter speed and in the series of photographs shown here averaged 1/300. Not good enough, but mine is a generation behind the new 5 mega pixel phones cameras and there is going to be a lot more after them.

The shutter servo is a Futaba S3108 and the panning servo is a GWS Micro 2BB with metal gears which converts easily to 360 rotation. The frame is made from 1 x 20 mm aluminium which is finger bendable but that's all you really need, unless you have it in your shirt pocket when somebody hugs you.

The rig is controlled by a Tucit-Duo. I could have used a standard Tucit Duo battery+switch+2servo connector if I hadn't already cut the plugs off the servos. The phone needs a full 10 seconds to write each image but it can pack over 200 pictures onto a 128 mb card and still leave room for address lists various documents and a couple ebooks.

This phone has an autosave option though some seem to need two seperate pushes, one for the shutter and a second to save the picture. I tested Tucit's double 'wake-up' setting a workaround for such phones it and it was fine - the servos pushing down twice then turning once for each picture.

As usual I dithered about what kind of battery to use. A rechargable ni-cd 4.8 volt battery could have made it all a bit lighter. But I came down in favour of a 9 volt battery (with 5 volt voltage regulater) because you can buy them anywhere and no weight is saved if you have to pack a chunky battery charger when you travel. But I do admit a ni-cad would have looked better.

This tiny, simple, very reliable rig is my perfect back-up. Meanwhile my eyes on are on those gleaming phone shops.

Weight in grammes: Camera 134, frame and electrics (as top left picture) 128, picavet 44. Total 306.