this is probably a dumb question but I cant find a straight answer anywhere. we do a lot of industrial inspection work and theres a specific multispectral sensor our client wants us to fly that isnt one of the DJI Zenmuse options. its not crazy heavy, probably around 800 grams with the mounting bracket, but obviously its not going to fit the Zenmuse interface.

I know the Inspire 2 has that payload capacity headroom and some people run it with third party stuff but every time I google it I just get either old forum posts from like 2018 or people trying to sell me enterprise solutions that are way overkill for what we need. the client doesnt want to switch to a Matrice platform because they already have a workflow built around our Inspire setup and honestly so do we.

has anyone rigged a custom mount on the I2 underside that bypasses the Zenmuse bay entirely or are we looking at fabricating something from scratch. any tips on how to handle the CG shift too because 800g offset forward or back is gonna do something to the flight dynamics for sure.

yeah we did something similar a while back for a thermal inspection job where the client's sensor wasn't Zenmuse compatible. ended up fabricating an aluminum plate that bolted to the landing gear crossmembers rather than touching the gimbal bay at all. its not elegant and you lose the active stabilization obviously but for slow methodical inspection passes it worked fine. CG was the main thing we had to mess with, ended up adding counterweight to the rear arm area which felt sketchy but the I2 handled it ok as long as we kept speeds reasonable and avoided aggressive maneuvers.

one thing worth knowing ? the I2 flight controller does not love asymmetric payloads, even small ones. keep it balanced on the lateral axis especially or youll notice the attitude hold doing weird things in wind.

honestly at 800g on an I2 you're getting pretty close to where I'd start getting nervous especially if theres any wind on site. the Matrice comment from your client is annoying because they're right that the M300 or even the older M200 series is just a much saner platform for this kind of thing ? the payload interface is actually designed for it. but I get it, people dont want to change workflows. just make sure youve done a bunch of hover tests before flying over anything important with that setup because custom mounting on an I2 is one of those things where it works until it suddenly very much doesnt.