Previously: How I learned yet again that too cheap has its price…

So, I decided to go pro and buy a GoPro with a motorized gimbal so I can get the resolution I wanted and the stability I needed.

I love my Amazon mobile app… between the app and the amazing “Amazon Prime” I can review and order things in the best price through my phone and get it at my door within 24-48 hours with free shipping… I LOVE IT!

So, less than 48 hours later I got my new GoPro HERO+ Black edition, which, lucky me, is using the same SD micro card as the Vivitar (I guess there is at least one good thing about Vivitar copying the GoPro so well… actually, not so well… but you get my point…)

A day later the gimbal arrived  (it did all the way from Hong Kong!!!)

I installed it and did a quick test

Although I have both programming and electronics background, still to this day, when I plug something for the first time and it works, I’m always amazed, surprised and excited! I can’t believe how it all integrate so nicely the first time you try it…

This was no exception, but wait… there’s more…

The Phantom comes with an additional lever on the RC’s back that allows sending tilt level signal to the camera. But in order to enable it, I had to disassemble the drone, run wires through the tiny holes, plug it into the “brain” of my Phantom in order to program the tilt channel to properly control the camera so that it can be set to view forward or downwards.

Another thing I learned about myself, I’m getting so excited when I see screws especially when I need to unscrew them… I can’t explain why, but it probably explains why I ended up as an engineer, I just can’t resist unscrewing screws, just so I can screw them back in later on… I should probably see a Dr. about this… but… I won’t let any Dr. screw with my head… 😉

With the new gimbal mounted (which came with shock observers as well to reduce the jello/”moving shutter” effect), I was ready to take it on its next air-trip.

Just like a little boy I counted the hours left until the weekend starts, so I can go fly my more-expensive-by-the-day toy.

Going forward, every time I launch my drone I must forget how much money I’m throwing to the air and hope it will land in one piece…

Saturday morning finally came, and I was ready… so ready…

I quickly decided on my next location for shooting, which was the starting point of another trail in the area. I plugged the battery to the drone (it makes a load 70s video-game sound every time you do this, as if I won the last level of Pacman), and was getting ready to take-off, as a couple with a dog went by me, ready to start their morning walk.

As soon as my drone took off and hovered at about 5′ above the ground their dog freaked out and start barking like crazy! I was apologizing while pushing the throttle’s stick up to make the drone go high enough so the dog could cool down.

It didn’t help, the dog just went crazy and kept barking at my drone. They tried to calm it down for a few moments and realized their morning walk is over. They gave me one of these polite yet discussed angry looks, and went back home with their freaked-out barking dog. I felt bad, but hey, my drone has its need as well…

As always, a video worth a million words… so I give you my first GoPro + motorized gimbal flight results:

As you can tell by the fact I added some music, this time I was much happier with the results.

First, I didn’t need to apply any filters to compensate for the vibrations of the drone, or add any color corrections.

Second, the quality of the video was so high that I could actually crop and zoom the video without losing much of the quality (except for the bird’s shot where I really got into the “digital zoom” range for a short while in the editing).

In addition, I started to feel much more comfortable controlling my drone in the air, and was able to run much more complicated moves like flying through the soccer-goal while flying 2 feet off the ground, or tracking the baseball field while turning the drone and flying sideways…

I came home, reviewed the footage and felt the need to have another run. I decided to practice my maneuvering skills and did two more flights.

The first was an outdoor flight but back in my backyard, trying to control it in a tight space… with and without GPS:

The second was an attempt to fly the drone indoors and see how well can I (not) control it:

I was so excited with the results (relatively speaking…)  but my expenses needed one additional Amazon visit … With the Gimbal, the camera was so close to the edge of the landing gear that the camera would hit the floor on each landing and even during takeoff (which explains the camera jumpy movement you see at some of my bad landings). This camera and the gimbal are too expensive to let them break on each tight landding attempt… so an extended set of landing gears was due to be purchased, with additional camera mounting spacer that will lower the camera ~ 1 inch from the drone to help capture less of the propellers in my view.

I can’t wait for next weekend when I’ll get to play with it again…

Lessons Learned

• With or without GPS, flying in closed or narrow areas will cause your drone to go crazy, no matter how good you can control it, unless you can fly fully manual (which I’m far from ready to…)
• ALWAYS assume that the drone is closer than where you think it is… perspective is so confusing… like this feeling that two planes are about to crash although they are so far from each other…
• Dogs don’t like drones… Just live with it…
• Flight time with the gimbal went down from about 10 minutes to 6.5-7 minutes
• GoPro at 2.7k gives amazing results and allows to crop and “zoom” in editing down to 1080p without losing anything, which allows to hide the propellers
• The original landing gear is too short for the GoPro with a motorized gimbal…