so ive been running a fairly heavy custom hex for about a year now and the whole camera situation has been kind of a mess honestly. started with a cheap 2-axis knockoff gimbal which was fine for casual stuff but anything with any kind of wind and you can see the rolling in the footage, drives me crazy when i play it back on a big screen.

anyway im looking at retrofitting a Ronin-MX onto this thing. the weight budget is tight, around 400g of margin left after everything else, and the MX is pushing right up against that. the 3-axis stabilization is obviously what im after but im wondering if anyone has actually done this on a non-DJI frame and what the integration looked like. specifically the CAN bus stuff and whether the stabilization modes actually work properly without DJI's own FC in the loop.

alternative is just biting the bullet and getting something like the Gremsy H3 which seems more agnostic about what its mounted on. less brand lock-in basically. has anyone compared footage quality between these two at similar bitrates? like is there actually a visible difference in the smoothness or is it more about the camera you hang underneath

ran a Ronin-MX on a Tarot 680 a while back and yeah the CAN bus integration is pretty much useless unless youre on DJI end to end. what you can do is just run it in standard mode and tune the PID settings manually through the assistant software, takes a bit but once its dialed in the stabilization is genuinely excellent. the IMU on the MX is really good, better than most of the alternatives in that price range in my opinion.

that said if your weight margins are that tight id be more worried about your flight time than the gimbal brand. 400g sounds like enough but once you factor in vibration dampening mount and any camera heavier than a GoPro youre cutting it close. ive seen builds where the gimbal technically fit the weight budget but the whole thing flew like a brick in anything above 10mph wind.

dont sleep on the Gremsy honestly, ive got an H16 on my mapping rig and the thing just works, never had to babysit it the way i did with some other options. not sure about direct footage comparisons with the Ronin though, different cameras make it hard to really isolate what the gimbal is contributing versus the sensor and lens