Actioncam to gimbal adapter (Yi 4k+ to Zhiyun Smooth 4)

thingiverse

I own a Zhiyun Smooth 4 gimbal, which is made to stabilize videos taken with a Smartphone camera. It does a very good job in doing that, but I'd like to use it with my wide angle 4K-resolution Yi 4k+ action camera, to record running videos for winter use on the TV in front of my treadmill. The Yi 4k+ has excellent build in video stabilization, but when running the camera tilting angle changes simply too much for the image sensor to get sufficient picture information. So the combination with a mechanical gimbal seems what it takes. There are metal adapter blades for that purpose, but despite being quite heavy to carry, they do not provide sufficient balance for the gimbal, so it needs to continuously work against the imbalance, which eats up the battery capacity and is not helpful for the resulting video quality. So here is the solution. With this thing and 15g of metal weights (used to balance car tires or in model flying to balance the center of gravity of a plane), the system can be perfectly balanced. A glued on nut of the right weight or any other piece of metal will also do the job. The arm for the counter weights may look a little over-dimensioned, but in fact it is not. The 15g of counter weight could easily be carried by a much weaker arm, but my first tests showed that this can result in control loop resonances with the electronics of the gimbal. Not visible to the human eye, but clearly noticeable for the human ear, these resonances were very annoying. With the uploaded design everything works fine. Not absolutely needed, but as an additional precaution against my camera falling out of the gimbals spring mechanism, I have used this tripod screw from the bottom blade into the camera mounting hole. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4003381 If you find this thing helpful please post a quick make and let us others know how it works for you. I would strongly guess that it fits to other action cameras as well and also to other gimbals, you may just need a little more or a little less counterweight.