Hey HN, thrilled my silly little project was posted here. I had been noodling on this idea for quite some time and ran into a bunch of roadblocks early on that prevented me from getting reliable control over the PTZ camera. Once those were overcome, it came together fairly quickly.
I'm looking forward to doing more experiments including integrating my own payloads (thermal and optical) with an off the shelf motion control system. I also have an automotive radar unit coming which may provide some interesting options for cueing without using ADS-B in some situations (with relatively close targets).
The "We" is short for Westinghouse, or at least it was: Westinghouse Steered Stabilized Camera Mount, thus WESSCAM. Then they dropped an "S".
Granted pronouncing the name is ambiguous, Wes-cam or We-scam. But they're known well enough in the industry at this point that it's not a problem for them.
This is a fun project that combines a cheap PTZ camera + OpenCV, Kalman filtering, PID control, and digital stabilization to not just snap photos of aircraft flying past, but do rock solid, pixel-level tracking as long as they're in sight.
And it can be combined with a source of ADS-B data so it knows what it's looking at, displaying the info on the OSD.
I'm looking forward to doing more experiments including integrating my own payloads (thermal and optical) with an off the shelf motion control system. I also have an automotive radar unit coming which may provide some interesting options for cueing without using ADS-B in some situations (with relatively close targets).
Granted pronouncing the name is ambiguous, Wes-cam or We-scam. But they're known well enough in the industry at this point that it's not a problem for them.
And it can be combined with a source of ADS-B data so it knows what it's looking at, displaying the info on the OSD.