All posts by The Fat with the Drone

Drone Flying Tips, flying

4. Vivi-what?

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Previously:  My First Take Off

I realized if I plan on keep running this toy in small areas, I must have a proper propellers guard or I will break many props and many things around me.

Thanks to Amazon, I got my guards after a couple of days and installed them waiting for the weekend to be able to test it again.

To my surprise, I also got the camera I won that week as well! I was so excited to get my Sony Action cam… wait…  but this doesn’t look like the Sony Action cam, coming to think of it, it doesn’t look like any Sony product. I look at the case and realized my memory was playing tricks on me… Did I say I won a Sony Action Cam… I guess that was wishful thinking. What I won was an action cam, no doubt, but it was a Vivitar Action cam. That’s fine, tell me when you are done Googling for Vivitar… I’ll wait…

Welcome back…, and don’t feel bad, I didn’t know it exists either…

Bottom line, Vivitar is a <$50 worth knockoff  of the GoPro. Same size, same packaging, just none of the quality features.

I looked online and people show they could hook the Vivitar Action cam to their dji Phantom, and I was able to mount it perfectly because they even copied the mounting arm. So I mount the Vivitar on my dji Phantom and waited for next day to test it. Planning ahead I also ensured I have a couple of spare batteries so I don’t run out of juice too early.

Speaking of juice, a short comic relief: I saw this recently on Facebook: – Why doesn’t Apple call their power supplies “Apple Juice”?

Back to my drone story. I got all my batteries charged, the Vivitar camera is charged, mounted and loaded with a micro SD card. I went to sleep setting up my clock to wake up early so I can finally have a flight documented by a mounted camera.

I was thinking of the first spot I want to try it in, and came up with a nice place called the “Lost Dog Trail” in my area.

I packed my drone, the extra batteries, some spare propellers, just in case, and went on my merry way…

It seems that many people like to hike, probably too many because I could barely find a parking spot.

To cut a long story short, here I am ready to kick the air-tiers off I found a nice spot and turned on the camera, made sure it is running and off we go…

The results were, well I’ll just say it: disappointing!

The camera was shaking like crazy causing the moving-shutter effect, also known as the Jello effect, the picture quality was really bad, and the shooting was not smooth at all because the camera is mounted directly to the body of the drone.

By the way, the video above was treated for anti-moving shutter, and with color correction to make it somewhat “watchable”.

It was clear to me, for what I’m trying to do I have to upgrade to a GoPro with a proper Gimbal so that I can get the cinematic effects I need.

 

The good news, with a total of 4 take-offs and landings,  I had zero (0, none, nada) crashes!!!!

I think I’m starting to get the idea…

Other lessons learned:

  • What you see from the ground is not what your drone sees from the sky
  • Getting a smooth ride is not easy at all
  • Direct sun at your camera in combination with the propellers will cause some black rolling stripes artifact on your video
  • Picking the correct camera angle is almost impossible
  • When you think you are high enough, you are not. Go higher to get the effect you want

Drone Flying Tips, flying

3. Take off

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Perviously: Young boy falls in love with a hobby he can’t afford, 30 years later, he get’s his first drone, and manages to make almost all the mistakes in the book.

So, my drone is ready for its first flight… Taken back to that same spot in the backyard, I cross my fingers, which make it really hard to operate the remote controller, so I un-cross my fingers and get ready to go.

I plug the battery in, the loudest tones are coming off my drone, all pre-flight-checks passed (lights blinks in right order and colors, no low-battery anywhere…) and I position the remote’s sticks to kick off the engines…. so far all is great.

I push the left stick up as slowly as I can, and then…. TAKE OFF! My Drone is actually flying. I was so excited I just let it hover for a few seconds before I realized I should do something with it…. so I start carefully moving the sticks on my remote… (good thing they are made of this rough surface because the sweat on my fingers would probably cause it to crash at this point)…

I try to figure out what sticks movement cause what drone movement, rotation, elevation, forward, backwards, sideways… I think I’m getting the drift, so I start guiding it around my backyard….

It flies so beautifully in front of me, hovering over the grass, the same grass that is protected by my large tree, the same tree that …. BLOCKS GPS CONTROL! my drone is looking like it’s fear of eights is kicking in again, and yet again the drone ignores my remote and just start going like crazy, and crash into my lawn… giving it some last spins of a great lawn-mower that both puts the engines to a complete stop, and paints my propellers with a nice and fresh shade of natural green…

Grass on a phantom lawn mower propeller

But at least, it made its first flight…

After a relatively quick recharge, I’m ready for my next attempt, still not realizing that my backyard is probably the worst place to practice flying a GPS oriented drone!

This time my daughter was around to document my attempts.

And since a video worth a thousand words:

One of the landings (or should I say crashing) ended up on one of the small rocks in my backyard and broke the camera holder…. good thing I was smart enough to practice without a camera (and of course I didn’t get my camera yet…. but… I promise I wouldn’t have tried it with the camera at this point… trust me… really…. no really….)

 

 

Drone Flying Tips, Uncategorized

2. Gravity

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Previously: A boy learns about flying objects…

I got my package with my new dji Phantom, but my camera was still finding its way to me.

Meanwhile I learned the basics of the drone, it’s feature, the controls, GPS, propellers, etc.

Before my drone will be able to fly for the first time, I was about to make any possible mistake in the book…

First, I plugged the battery pack to the included balanced charger, just to learn a few hours later that I didn’t plug the smaller plug to the charger, so 3 hours wasted already.

Next, I had to update the firmware on it, but it can’t run on a Mac and my Windows 8.1 desktop didn’t allow it to install due to drivers signing issues, so I had to reboot Windows into a special mode that skips the drivers signature check…. Did I mentioned it took me 5 times of install and remove to figure this out.

Finally I was able to update the firmware and was ready to try my first flight.

Reading on the web how stupid it is to fly it indoors, I decided to start in my backyard. When you live in Arizona, saying backyard is like saying a pool… So my backyard area is very tight… In addition I have this huge tree that is great to block the desert’s sun, here in the valley of the sun… Guess what else will be blocked by my lovely tree? GPS Signal!

Yes, my first flight was in an area that had a tree on one side, a pool on the other side and walls and windows on all the other sides, plus some columns, cause how else will the patio’s roof will stand in place???

But wait, there is more….

I found a nice spot, far enough from the pool, the tree and the house, and was ready to kick off the engines by setting the joysticks into one of the “on” sequences …

The rotors start spinning, I push the left stick up to see some elevation for the first time, and …. Nothing, as if my drone refuse to take off. The farther I push the stick, the louder it gets and it feels like it has fear of heights and it just holds to the ground as hard as it can…

After a few attempts it hit me…. What other mistake could I possibly make? Of course, I reversed the propellers and put the CW on the CCW motors, and the CCW on the CW motors, making sure my drone will try to fly INTO the ground.

As I was back at my desk swapping propellers around, I remembered how surprised I was while installing them for the first time of the amount of force it took to screw them in!!!

Ok, now I think I’m ready to fly it again, but not before I’ll have to recharge the battery! This Time I made sure I didn’t forget to plug the little connector to the charger….

background

1. In the beginning…

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It all started sometime at my freshman year in high school, back in Israel, my home country when I was still young and light (about half my weight today…  ).

One day a couple of IDF (Israeli Defense Force) soldiers came to my school and offered us to participate in a model planes club that includes building balsa planes, some summer programs such as building motor planes, flying an actual full size glider and even flying a piper in your senior year…

Of course I said: “where do I sign?”

We started building small gliders, made of balsa skeletons wrapped in thin rice paper and threw them in the air… yay!

Summer of freshman year, I got to build my first motorized plane. It was a simple single propeller 1.5ft long “cable operated plane”.

If you ask yourself what’s a “Cable Operated Plane”, think of a motorized kite, shaped like a plane that is trying to run away from while you are getting dizzy in the center of a 40 ft circle, much like a horse trainer, and all you can do is change the plane’s altitude by tilting a small handle connected with two strong cables to the plane.

Cable model plane animation

You continue to spin in place following your plane until one of three things happens. You either:

  • Run out of fuel
  • Crash the plane to the ground
  • Throw up from spinning for a few minutes…

Guess which one happened the most? (let’s put it this way, running out of fuel never happened to me…)

I was the happiest dude in the world… until I saw, up close, an RC (Radio-Controller) plane, in a demonstration at the end of the summer camp, I had a new goal, but quickly I learned I can’t afford one any time soon.

I did get to fly a glider on my Jr. year which was an amazing experience, and I almost killed me and my instructor (well not really but it felt like it) because after he let me take control for a few minutes, he  tried to take control of the glider back to his own hands, but I thought it was just a strong wind, so I “fought it” until he slammed my helmet from behind and screamed at me: “Idiot, are you trying to kill us?!?!! LET GOOOOO OF THE STICK!!!!!!!” (In Hebrew it sounds much more dramatic, trust me…)

By the end of Sr. year, I was already 18 years old and instead of getting to do the Piper summer class, I had to join the army, so I missed it. This was the last time I had a chance to play with these planes. I did make a living during my first year of studies teaching kids at school how to build simple model planes, but that’s about it.

Roll the tape forward 30 years, I have developed few other hobbies over these years, eating greasy food is one of them for sure (which is why I’m… how to say it… ‘fat’), but the most dominant hobby has to be my passion for video on all of its aspects, shooting, editing, green screen SFX and post production, sound editing etc.

Among many projects I’ve done, one of the projects that become a tradition, is my company’s annual party video. Each year I tried to keep the simple montage more interesting and funny by filming funny bits with my co-workers…

Videos Samples

I can’t share the actual videos here because they are “private” but you get the picture (pun intended)…

For this year’s video, one of our IT guys (we’ll call him Pretzel) suggested we should use his Parrot AR drone to film parts of the video. This triggered my creative juices, and after days of thinking about it, it hit me!!! The guys at my office LOVE shooting  Nerf gun bullets at each other… so… I was thinking, let’s have a F.N.V (First Nerf View) video shot by the drone with the Nerf bullet superimposed in post to create the illusion that we are flying as a Nerf bullet through our office…

On the day of shooting, Pretzel brought his parrot, and as he started (or should I say attempted) to fly it around the office, I an old feeling started to surf back to my head. Apparently the passion for flying RC planes never left my brain, it just took a deep 30 years bear winter sleep, and the Pretzel woke it up.

Although we ended up using almost none of the drone’s shots in the video (due to the low quality and shakiness of the video) that filming itself woke that beast in me, I felt like now is the time to reunited with my 30-year-old passion, or so I thought…

I started looking at prices and got really scared… so after an intensive Amazon research I gave up.

About a week later, during the same company party were the video was presented, I won an action video cam in a raffle. I was not present at the time my name was drawn, but for some reason I remembered it to be a Sony Action cam. The camera got lost and it would take me about 3 months to get it…

But before we just too far, two months later, I get an e-mail from Amazon, telling me that they noticed I was looking for drones, and it seems that woot.com has a drone on sale, a “dji Phantom 1” at ~50% off its usual price.

I remembered I won the camera (which I didn’t get yet) and I had ~20 minutes to decide, before Woot would be sold-out… I quickly checked if the phantom can carry the Sony action cam, found some proof online, and I made a quick decision to buy it.

About two weeks later a package showed at my door step…

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