This Arduino-Controlled GoPro Rig Helps Create Amazing Snowboarding Videos

Even if you don’t snowboard yourself, you can probably appreciate a good snowboarding video. Professionally-shot and produced movies like The Art of Flight have proven that gorgeous mountain landscapes combined with amazing feats of athleticism make for very compelling content. But how can you make your own great videos when you don’t have the budget for a film crew? One way is to follow YouTuber Night Inventor’s lead and build this spinning GoPro rig.

Night Inventor started this build just a week before he was set to go on a ski vacation, which means he had to work fast. His idea was to create a wearable rig that would spin a GoPro action camera around him as he snowboarded down a mountain. That would have already been tricky given the time constraints, and was made even more so by the fact that the rig needed to be light enough to carry and modular so that he could break it down to take it on a plane.

The solution Night Inventor came up with was to use an Arduino to control a motor at the end of a rod that sticks out of his backpack. An arm is mounted to that motor, and the GoPro camera is attached to the end of the arm. Night Inventor doesn’t provide much detail on the rest of the hardware he used to power the rig or control the motor speed, but the results speak for themselves. Night Inventor was able to capture some pretty amazing video on his ski vacation that wouldn’t have been possible without the custom camera rig.