And while it’s true that Little Smart Things have been in existence for about a year, this marks the point where the company finally moved out of the garage, and is now employing six people with more to come.

You might be thinking: Do they want to make a new StratoSnapper every month!?  – No we have other plans, and they are well under way. We are truly exited about our new developments – but right now we will keep it to: It’s made from carbon-fiber and it flies very well Stay tuned!

We have received a lot of global – as well as local support, and this is really what makes all of this tick (which is basically what I am telling people in the pic ) We are truly happy to have this opportunity.

All in all Little Smart Things just got a big boost in talent, and you can expect some exiting new products in the year to come. We look forward to serving our customers and cooperating with our great partners around the globe.

A big thanks from all of us at Little Smart Things! Yep that’s some of us in the pic!

Happy flying!

Best
Esben

We apologize for this inconvenience, but we assure you that we will be back at ludacrous speed starting on Thursday!

UPDATE: 18-JAN-13: SHIPPING IS NOW BACK TO NORMAL

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Esben

The trust and support from customers, partners, investors and distributors has now made it possible to take the project out of the garage. This is an ambitious project with a full time staff, and we will soon be able to speed up the development of the countless prototypes on my bench.

This means that we need to be more people in 2013. We will be moving to a new location and have serious manufacturing capability. But the important thing is: personnel. Talented, good humored, ambitious persons. We are venturing into a very new field and innovative thinking is probably the most important feature of all. If this sparks an interest please swing by the jobs section, where you can read the openings in English as well as Danish.

As always, I am available for questions!

Best

Esben

• Canon Legria and Vixia video cams. Video on/off, Tele, Wide and Photo.
• Pentax Optio zoom is now supported.
• Sony FS-700 and other Sony cams using the RMT-845 remote

The limitation on 10 sec. timelapse sequences has been removed. To get all this, please update the StratoSnapper firmware to 1.3 and download the StratoSnapper utility v. 0.28. See the software section for details.

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Esben

Heli showreel late summer 2012 from Esben Nielsen on Vimeo.

We have had quite a few inquiries about sales of these heli’s, but at the moment we don’t offer complete solutions. LittleSmartThings is very much a garage start-up that is, for the time being, currently developing camera remote solutions. Please visit one of our great distributors if you want to look into a complete heli system.

Enjoy

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Esben

The TinySnappers purpose in life is to be able to trigger a camera on board a RC helicopter or plane. Second: It’s to be as tiny as possible – and we just did something about that. Still at a price of only 21€.

At a total length of 30mm it’s a very lightweight and affordable solution for remote controlling your camera. The operation is simple, when you feed it a servo signal at a little above neutral, it fires a trigger command to your favorite camera. It’s all done via infrared remote control, so you don’t need to wire up your camera.

Just as the first TinySnapper supports: Canon, Sony, Nikon and Pentax cameras for still photography.

The new TinySnapper also got an upgrade on signal filtering, and has a very robust design. The specifications on the new TinySnapper are:

• Accepts all major servo RX/TX systems.
• Works with either: Canon, Sony, Nikon and Pentax cameras.
• Very bright IR LED with a wide beam angle >170 degrees.
• Takes standard 5v servo power. Will safely accept 3v – 6v.
• Standard servo plug (2.54 mm), so you can make you own modifications.
• Environmentally sealed for optimal protection.
• Includes servo cable and re-closeable Dual Lock fasteners.
• 100% lead free and RoHS compliant.

And what happened to the flexible neck from the first TinySnapper you may ask? Well this design got so small that it didn’t make sense. The rationale for the flexible neck on the first, was that it could reach anywhere. Now it does that anyway, and the neck is just heavy and in the way.

The new TinySnapper will replace the the original from this day on. If you for some reason want the old one, please get in touch.

Buy it for 21€

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Esben

Like other commands you can now use the menu button from the remote to check the state of the sony camera. Download the StratoSnapper 27c to get going.

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Esben

In short the problems fixed are:

• Issue with unresponsive second channel
• Hanging servo values
• Servo value suddenly drops to zero

We have also made a small change on the setup: Many have written to ask for more precise control over the “repeat interval” for time-lapse and sequence shots. The “repeat after” option in the setup utility now works in 1/10 second intervals.

Now, this needs a firmware update, and that can be a bit daunting. But fear not! just follow the guide and you’re okay. The firmware updates are needed to include functionality we simply didn’t think of when the StratoSnapper was designed. Where “normal” engineers would probably have made a StratoSnapper v2 a long time ago, we will continue to squeeze in functionality for as long as possible.

If you experience any trouble please let us know, and we’ll fix it.

Best

Esben

• Smooth zoom
• Video start/stop
• Still photo trigger

This update has been a hard one, and besides the new software update (v0.26) a new firmware is needed. The new firmware (v 1.1) allows for smooth zoom, and a lot of future improvements. The update process can be a little hairy, but we had to do it.

We decided to open-source the firmware, and everybody tinkering with Arduinos, can now hack the StratoSnapper to their hearts delight. Everybody else will just have to follow five easy steps to upgrading the firmware.

In the StratoSnapper utility the “repeat after” option will now be very fast when set to zero. Use this for zooming, don’t use it for anything else

Quick demo:

The StratoSnapper supports all Sony cams using remotes: RMT-811, RMT-831, RMT-835. If you would like other functions from the remotes to be included in the StratoSnapper, drop us a line and we’ll add it!

Best
Esben

The CX730 supports the Sony RMT-835 remote, and we have made the StratoSnapper mimic that. But so far testing has been done through very helpful customers, and so far without luck. Now we have ordered the cam, to make sure to speed up the process. And once it’s ready, an update will be out. Free as always.

Please be patient, we are as eager to use this cam in the air as you are

Best
Esben