New quad toys

[setishock]

Wednesday night at Wally World I pulled the trigger on my VISA and got this > HERO3 White Edition | Wi-Fi Enabled | Professional Quality HD footage
This is a slick little camera. With a 32GB micro class 10 SD card it can record a little over 4 hours in 1080/30fps mode. Or take 9999 5Mpx snapshots.
It does time lapse with user set-able intervals. Its setup menu having a lot of flexible features along with a small size and weight, making it the go to for RC photography. Well, for smaller machines.
I took some shots with it that night and a walk about video. For low light it does very well. Lit up areas are clear and crisp. In my office it responds nicely under the florescent lighting. I just finished the second battery endurance test. First one last night was 2.5 hours recording in 720/60 mode. The one that just finished 2.75 hours in 1080/30 mode. Not too shabby for a 3.7 volt LiPo battery.
$199.99usd price is set by the maker of the camera. If you pay more than that for the white edition, you got ripped off.

If you think I lost it buying that gizmo you ain't seen nothing yet. Read on.

Yesterday morning before I had the opportunity to change my mind, I ordered this > DJI | Phantom
Mid scale quad copter with all kinds of bells and whistles. Useful stuff, not ooo, ahh crap. Like GPS lock, return to launch point and land on signal loss, attitude hold. And a whole bunch more designed in to make flying this baby a breeze.
And where do you think the GoPro is going? In the supplied mounting bracket under the belly. I finally get to take some in flight movies. YEAH!!!
Now big boy toys cost more. The MQX's I have cost me $169.00 each. I have 2 of them.
The Phantom costs $479.99. It comes with the transmitter, battery, charger, and of course the quad itself. Got to get some extra flight batteries...

Since I burned my bridge with YouTube, I'll have to go with Vimeo (sp?). That runs about $10.00 a month for the middle scale service. Not too bad. I'll think about it after shooting some in flight vids. If they look good enough to share I'll sign up.

 

[Life]

So jelly right now...

 

[setishock]

You talking about the jello effect in the videos? Or that's all I have left to eat?

 

[Life]

-_______________________________- jelly = jealous....

 

[setishock]

Ah I see. Well let me rub it in just a tad. It will be in my hands at 10:00 am Monday. Put the props on and charge the battery and it's ready to fly.
And the capper. I found my old YouTube account I'm going to use to post vids.

 

[Life]

********* I bought new stuff for my camera.. It'll be in the mail any day now...

 

[setishock]

Got here this morning. Charging up the battery and checking the programming in the flight controller.

 

[GhostGT]

Sweet purchases, Seti. I sold my Hero 2 and got the Hero 3 a few months ago. They're quite a treat for such a small package.

Put up some videos when you can.

 

[Life]

And and and and and and and HOW IS IT??

 

[setishock]

I have to admit the first flight was one of those, "Oh S**t!!!" moments. Having gotten used to the MQX preflight ritual, I screwed up.

On the MQX you turn on the transmitter, plug in the flight battery, and set it on the ground. After about 10 seconds or so it has initialized the flight computer. What it has actually done is poll the gyros and determined current readings will be used to reference "level". The blinking blue LED turns solid and you're ready to fly. Goose the throttle to get in the air and for the next 5 to 9 minutes, it's time to play. You can get acrobatically aggressive with the MQX to the point the G forces crack a rotor boom. Makes for a messy landing. Bring a foxtail and a dustpan. When you see the blue LED start blinking again, the battery is running low and play time is over. Time to land. And you have to do that manually.

On the other hand, the Phantom is designed to be "smart". BUT the pilot has to pay attention to what is going on with the bird when getting ready to fly. The very bright LED is signaling you what the flight controller is doing and the status of each step it's going through. If each step is completed successfully you'll get a pattern of blinks in a certain color or series of colors. If not the pattern changes. Warm up as it's put by DJI takes about 3 minutes.
What it is doing is looking for GPS satellites. Hopefully it sees 5 or better. If it doesn't, it will let you know. It's looking at the gyros to determine "level". The accelerometer to determine the baseline for movement in a direction. And the barometer to determine altitude.
It will take a reading, if the transmitter mode switch is in GPS mode, to set and store the GPS coordinates of "home". This is the point the Phantom will return to if the signal is lost from the controller transmitter. Provided you have done one thing. Realign the compass. When the Phantom is shipped to you it crosses many field lines and gets exposed to magnetic influences. It's lost, to put it in simple terms, and needs to be shown where it is. The realign is simple and if you want to know how to do it take a look at the Phantom product page and watch the how to videos. Needless to say first flight out came very close to being a disaster because I didn't RTFM and got in an excited hurry.

Ok transmitter on. Battery connected on the Phantom, battery door shut. I picked it up while it was warming up to turn the camera on and that's where I screwed up. The readings it was getting from the gyros and what not was skewed badly. Lights, camera, action!!! It took off ok. I turned it around so the battery door was facing me mistakenly thinking that was the back. Found out in the next 5 seconds or so that's the front. And the sticks are backwards. New toy excitement was about to reduce my baby to a pile of useless rubble. I don't remember doing any of what I did to recover but obviously I turned it around and got it oriented correctly. Looking at the video I was banking right slightly and headed down. I must have pulled back on the elevator and floored the throttle. Next thing that came in to the camera's view was the top of a van. I was below it. Some how it cleared it. By that time I had come around the end of the van to get a better eyeball on the quad. It was still going like a bat out of hell toward the guest rooms. Some poor sap was about to get an unexpected visit in his open truck door from a flying Cuisinart. Again I don't remember doing what I did but in the video I managed a banking right turn before it got anywhere close to him.
I do recall thinking, "God please let it make it to the grass." No such luck. It zipped over a sand pile and bounced down on the asphalt. Bong, bong. Turned around on one skid and tipped over backwards. Took a second to get the rotors stopped which resulted in one rotor getting scuffed up a tad. Easy to fix.

My heartbeat would have rivaled a mini chain gun emptying it's ammo box. I was glad nothing bad happened to any one around and that my baby was on the ground, albeit a little worse for wear, intact.
I fixed the scrapes on the prop and was back in the air. This time on the other end of the parking lot away from everything. I stayed close to the ground till the battery ran down and the LED signaled "Game over. Please go put on a clean pair of underwear".

LiPo batteries get very warm when discharging. I set the battery on the edge of the steel sink in the kitchen to let it act like a heat sink (no pun intended). When it cooled off I put it on the charger to juice it back up.
Needless to say I had my nose buried in the manual and how to videos at the DJI website. I waited until dark and took it out under the lot lights. Camera on first. Then the transmitter and set it down. Next the quad got set down and the battery connected. I left the wires out and the battery door open till the warm up was completed. Not picking it up but just leaning over it, I put the wires in and button up the battery door.
Next I grabbed the transmitter and cycled the GPS/ATT switch 5 times to force the flight controller in to compass set up mode. When the LED went yellow I pick it up flat and moved it counterclockwise in a circle. If good the LED goes green. Then I rotated the quad battery door down and made the circle again. If good the LED goes out. The realign was successful. I set the quad down with the LED facing me knowing this is the back of it.
To fly after all that you have to arm the ESC's. Those are the motor controllers. You have to move both sticks down and toward the center of the transmitter. The props spin up at idle speed and you're ready to go. I goosed the throttle up and got back in the air. This flight went very well. Tame as a kitten and the vid turned out pretty good.

Next day I got out and tested the return to home. Talk about pucker factor. If it failed to work my 700 dollar investment would fly away out of my control. I took it out about 100 feet from "home" and 50 feet from me. I flipped the transmitter switch off and held my breath.
It sat there for a good 5 seconds. Then it climbed to 20 meters (60 feet) where it stopped. I did see it do a slight CCW/CW look. Not real pronounced but if your eyes are good enough you'll see it. It then ever so slowly made a beeline to the home point still 60 feet up. When it got over it, it sat there for a few seconds then descended. It bounced a couple of times then sat down. The rotors dropped to idle then shut off.
I'm going to give myself a heart attack doing stuff like that but it sure is nice having that feature on tap and knowing it works as advertised.

And after a couple more flights going higher and higher with the camera recording away my confidence is getting better. I'm going down to the cemetery next day off and get some vids worth posting.

In a nutshell...

I LIKE IT!!!