What I want to do

Not break my camera when it crashes to earth, especially on a rough landing from a kite mission.

My attempt and results

I've been playing with a couple variations on rigs, as part of designing a pendulum rig kit for the store.

After toying with the soda bottle rig, I wanted to try to make a simple rig that created a postive mechanical lock to the camera, using the tripod mount, but still had the give of rubber bands to protect on impact.

I came up with this basic idea:

Then I had the brainstorm of using stick legs, but asymetrically to allow the camera to "roll" and transfer energy to horizontal motion. So I stuck the dowel legs in, and played around with rigging until it also was tied in to the main suspension to give more rubber resistance and give. (that makes no sense, I know, but you'll see in a second...)

And that's it. The legs spring a bit, the camera slides down a bit, but not enough to cause impact, and the sticks transfer force back to the rubber bands at the top of the sticks. Then the whole thing rolls back and onto its little "butt" piece before rolling over.

This was a free-fall test from ~5':

Questions and next steps

Feedback please! @cfastie @pcoyle @mathew

Why I'm interested

Want to have a good model to demo before shipping the pendulum kits.