Is it possible to damage a gimbal by...

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Dave Draper

Well-known member
Can you damage a gimbal if you power it on without a camera being attached?

We’ve done this a few times — by accident — with our CAME-TV Prophet, causing the motor that the grip attaches to, to vibrate very heavily, and very loudly, for around 2-3 seconds, before it stops.
 
Yeah, my guess is it is tuned with a load on-board. Without the load, it freaks-out. It should not cause damage if the loop gains control of the motor in short order. Best to avoid this don't you think?
 
For a short term event like that, it should be ok. It is possible to do damage if the gimbal is not designed/provisioned to protect itself. If the manufacturer did not design self-protection in, some events can cause it to use too much power, which will either burn up the motor driver chip or the motor.

If your gimbal uses Basecam's Simple BGC (most do), it has a power setting to prevent this. Their instructions for setting the power limit are:

"Configure a value of Power when motor does not overheat (check this at least for 5 minutes) and gives sufficient torque to hold a camera. The lower is the value of Power, the better is the stabilization, but resistance to external influences is worse (such as bad balance, friction, air flows, etc.)"

Since everyone has a degree in engineering, its obvious how to detect motor overheating (well, smoke or fire may be an indicator). Good luck figuring out how to set that value.

This is why Zhiyun is ahead of the game.
 
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