Automating the capture of airplane pictures with Raspberry Pi, ADS-B, IoT (2019)
medium.com
medium.com
https://skybot.cam/about is a little more generically interesting as it takes a camera and points it at the aircraft. Then some vision detection to verify that a plane was actually captured, then post it.
It would be neat to have an auto-aiming and tracking camera with a telephoto lens and record a close-up video of the aircraft instead of a wide angle photo.
When I built my own I hit a number of challenges: the 3d printed plastic parts melted in the sun (switched from PLA to PETG, printed in pure white). DSLRs with telephotos are heavy so I ended up using gearing. I should have put more time into balancing the camera to reduce the motor demands. I don't think a DSLR is ideal- I'd much rather use a small, cheap industrial camera, but I've never found the equivalent of an affordable 300mm telephoto that is C-mount and goes on industrial camera. I used stepper motors, not BLDC, without feedback (other than a zero-position limit switch) and a simple realtime algorithm for pointing; it worked, but wasn't really good enough to make the sunspot timelapses I wanted.
I think for this it makes more sense to buy a quality telescope motorized mount, a nice refractor telescope, and then put a DSLR at prime focus. It'd be about $3K but would save a lot of time compared to DIY.
It's a tricky problem to do on the cheap.
I don't think I'm prepared to spend $3K, my idea was rather to spend some fun time on HW work as a diversion from the regular paid SW work - and to put some use to that expensive camera gear I'm not really using.
Thanks for your lessons learned; they have been helpful!
That's what I did. This time around, I'd just buy that.