EagleEi Runcam 2 gimbal

This is for the benefit for anyone else who may be searching or reading these forums and planning to build the gimbals.

1. The hot motors was due to vmax being too high. I think it defaulted to 150 and I am using anywhere between 60-80 on any of the motors. It’s important to read about this. Too high vmax will cause vibrations, too little will not provide enough voltage to move the motors and/or keep the gimbal level or working as it should be.
2. The gimbal needs to be balanced after being built. Some weight needs to be added to the side opposite the pitch motor and some weight to the back of the camera. You can see from the photos how the camera tends to tilt forward and to the left (from a front perspective) but I’m not sure the best way to do this – Benny, any ideas on this mate?
3. I’m getting some really strange issues with the storm32 controller. I am using a storm32 v1.31 board with an I2C IMU under the camera. The gimbal seems to ‚lock up‘ and ‚crash‘. It becomes unresponsive and I can’t connect to it using USB to diagnose it. I think these issues may have something to do with I2C errors from the I2C IMU I’m using. I’ve since purchased a new storm32 controller from Banggood with NT IMU’s (http://www.banggood.com/Storm32BGC-NT-V1_3_F103RC-32-bit-Brushless-Gimbal-Control-Board-p-1105106.html). Apparently I2C is prone to interference and errors, NT IMU’s are more robust. The fact that the wires on the EagleEi gimbal are:

a) packed very tightly, especially through the yaw motor
b) very thin and have very little insulation

probably contribute to interference. I highly suggest using NT IMU’s with this build. You can also replace the I2C IMU with a CC3D Atom Nano (~12USD) and reprogram/flash it as an NT IMU, instructions here: http://www.olliw.eu/storm32bgc-wiki/Flashing_the_Mini_CC3D_Atom

You can see a video and my issues on the rcgroups forum here https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?p=37030453&postcount=9503 and read on from there.

Benny, I’d suggest that you recommend to anyone building this to buy the aforementioned Storm32 controller from Banggood with the NT IMU’s to save them any potential issues 🙂