Xiaomi Mi 4K drone
 

So I finally decided to spring for a decent quality drone when I saw that video capabilities had reached a reasonable plateau for a reasonable price. Getting a GPS capable drone that can take 4K 30fps video for around $400 was the price point I was waiting for. Just couldn't convince myself that spending $2K on something that could wind up flying away or get stuck up in the top of a tall pine tree was a real wise decision for me to make. Not that I would be too thrilled with this thing biting the dust, mind you, but it certainly wouldn't be quite as painful, I think.

This is the first time I have taken it up into the air. I actually got it on Saturday, but with a brisk breeze taking place the past couple of days, I decided to just hold off on the launch date. Besides, I had a bunch of other stuff to do to get ready anyway. Firmware updates for all the hardware, calibrations for the compass and the video camera gimbal. Stuff like that.

Anyway, this was a flight with REAL modest goals. Just get it up in the air, use basic controller commands, test out the video camera system, and then land it in one piece where I wanted it to land. As long as the drone responded to the controller commands like it was supposed to, and nothing suffered any infant mortality, then this should have been easy to accomplish.

I have been practicing with some smaller drones I bought a few years ago, as well as spending some time on a flight simulator program on my PC. Honestly, this thing feels like a piece of cake to fly compared to the simulator and those smaller drones. With the small drones, if you take your hands off of the controls and your attention wanders for a bit, you might have a devil of a time finding where the blasted thing drifted off to. With this particular drone, because of the GPS capabilities, when you take your hands off of the controls, it just stays PUT where you left it. Which is great, because while taking video, it's almost like having the video camera sitting on an elevated tripod, it seems so stable. And of course the three axis gimbal helps a LOT with that too.

As you can see, very little room for error flying anything on my own property. Except for that little area around the garage, the entire rest of the property is heavily wooded. I'm not even sure I could safely land the thing near to the house, as there are some small clearings, but it would be kind of nerve wracking with all the tree branches all around. Even a small error could put the drone up into the top of a tall pine tree, with me having no way to recover it other than just waiting for it to fall out of the tree some day. Maybe I could hire some squirrels....

This drone also has the capability of recording in 1440p at 60fps, which I may try next time I take it for a flight. I think the 60fps might help a LOT with the obvious visual degradation when moving the camera. I wish this thing had come with 4K 60fps, but alas, not too many drones offering that yet, and those that do are a lot more expensive than this one. But maybe by next year things will change there too. There have been a LOT of improvements with this stuff since 2014 when I first looked into this stuff. Reliability has evidently taking a huge step in the right direction, which was a big influence in my decision to spend even this much money on a drone, modest as it is.

The tarps on the garage apron are because we covered some of the tender citrus trees last night and had the tarps sitting out to dry out before putting them away. Things should be warming up for the next week or so. As it turned out, helped somewhat when I was playing with one of the video adjustments.

Speaking of which, here are some adjustable settings for the video camera that I can play with, and early on in the video while right above the garage looking down at the tarps, I played around with the "saturation" setting on the camera. Might just be my eyes, but I could only really see a change in the blue of the tarps, and not much else. But something I guess I need to play with some other time.

I only have a single battery for the drone, so my flight time is limited to around 20 minutes. This flight was much less because about half of the juice in the battery got used up with all the calibrations and updates I had to do over the weekend. I have more batteries on order, but they are on a slow boat from China. Literally.

Anyway, this is kind of a boring video, but it will give you an idea of how well things have progressed with these flying video platforms lately. I think I am actually a bit excited about the potential of taking video from a completely new perspective for me.

The video is in 4K if you can view it at that resolution.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79oLT1hhyE8

Pretty neat Rich! Was the video all one flight? Did you cut out any of the footage? Certainly seems to be a very stable video platform, and the camera movements were nice and smooth and slow. Does the controller let you move the camera at varying speeds, or are you limited to one speed? In some of the videos, it seemed like we were in a helicopter looking at the scenery! From the looks of it, you got your moneys worth! Heck, a Go-Pro is right around that price and doesn't have a drone platform to go with it. What's the spec on flight time with a fully charged battery (or batteries)? Keep posting the videos, Rich! They're informative and interesting.
Andy :wavey:

really good video

That was just one flying session and the video was taken continuously. The camera seems to have a 2gb limit on video file size, so it broke the session up into three separate files which I merely stitched back together when I rendered it. I didn't do any sort of corrections or changes to the raw video you see here, and did not edit out anything except at the end when the camera was pointing straight down at that orange and black platform I was using. I forgot to point the camera forward after landing... :face_palm_02:

The camera can move independently from the drone, but only from pointing straight ahead to pointing straight down. Speed is relative to the amount of pressure that you put on a control wheel on the controller, so you can control speed of the movement pretty effectively. And lateral movement has to be done by moving the drone itself. The three axis gimbal seems to be real effective at making those movements seem very smooth and controlled.

The drone is supposed to get 27 minutes flight time from a single battery, but since it is recommended to start thinking about landing with just 30 percent of the battery charge remaining, I think expecting 20 minutes would be more realistic. When it gets to 10 percent (I think) I believe that the drone just starts to descend for a landing, like it or not. So it is probably going to be a good idea for me to heed the 30 percent warning. I think there was something like 55 percent battery charge remaining when I started that flight, as I used up quite a bit doing the calibrations and updates.

I did get two spare batteries delivered today, so that would mean about an hour's worth of flying time, but in three separate sessions, as of course I would need to land the drone to change batteries when needed.

Yeah, so far this thing is pretty impressive, I think. I do need to play around with some of the video settings, however, as there did seem to be some noise in the video when the scene was moving. Of course, this could just be an inherent limitation of using 30 fps video on a moving platform. I've just got more experimentation to do to see what seems to work best, I suppose.

Had to run some errands today, so no flying. Perhaps tomorrow I'll be able to try it out some more. Supposed to be cloudy all day, but as long as it isn't raining or too windy, that should be OK.

Oh, Connie mentioned that this drone is VERY loud, as she could hear it quite well from behind the house while I was out near the garage. So as for people claiming that people are likely to spy on others using these sorts of things, I seriously doubt it. No way you can sneak up on someone with a drone like this. And since the camera is by design wide angled, you would have to get very close to someone to even make out any details. Certainly close enough that the noise would be nearly impossible to ignore.

But I guess this is another one of those hyped up "fake news" things that seem to abound these days.

BTW, I can see what the camera sees on my attached cell phone quite clearly, so it should be interesting when I finally get brave enough to send it off over areas of my own property. And as hinted at in this video I already took, I will be able to easily inspect the gutters on the garage to see when I need to clean them out again of the debris that gets caught in them. Was getting kind of old to have to haul out the 12 foot ladder just to take a look see. This drone seems to be very controllable as long a I take care to ONLY move the drone in the direction the camera is pointing when I am near any sort of obstacle. I've watched a lot of crash videos on YouTube and the greater majority of them were caused when the operator moved the drone into an obstacle that was not visible from the camera. So that is an error I am going to try real hard to avoid.

This drone doesn't have a "follow me" mode, nor does it have a microphone for the camera. Too bad, as something I would like to do someday is to have a drone like this behind the blue vette and have it follow me while I launch. I don't think any drone could keep up with the vette for long, though. But still, would be interesting, I think. I've never really heard the car from outside, and some people claim it is downright awesome sounding. I think the car would even be loud enough to be heard over the noise of the drone itself. :hehehe:

I took the drone out for a flight again today...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp9sjk47H0c

Unfortunately I lost the last third of the video because I forgot to stop the recording before shutting down the battery on the drone. I knew I had screwed up just as soon as the battery beeped. Oh well. And it was such a perfect landing too. That "Return To Home" function works really well. What happens is that when you shut off the power before closing down the video, the file becomes corrupted because something isn't written to the file by the camera that needs to be in an orderly shutdown of the video. I've done this before with the little drones I played with, but seems that there is a lot going on to occupy my mind doing this stuff, and the old gray matter just ain't what it used to be.

I only used one battery as I just wanted to test a few things out this trip. I imagine that flying around above my property like this is going to get old soon enough, so no sense pushing it.

At first I took it up to 125 feet, but for some reason the tree tops just looked awfully close to me. So I wound up bumping it up to 250 feet which put a lot more air between the drone and the treetops. I really need to check to see what I have the Return to Home altitude set to. I really don't want that to be below the tallest trees it might encounter if it decides to head on back because of a connection failure. I've watched several YouTube videos of crashes that it seemed obvious that this is what happened to them.

I took a look at the roof of the house and can see quite a bit of rust on that sheet metal roof. So much for the contractor telling us that it would be good for 75 years. I think they used some of the pieces that were "seconds", as that seems to be a common practice around here with contractors and subcontractors. I notice the several better looking pieces were ones that they had replaced soon after putting on the roof. I had commented to them that it looked odd having them so different looking from the rest of the roof, but the contractor told me that it would all look the same after a year or two. Well here we are 26 years later..... Liar. Might have to see if we can find someone who can paint the roof with a "paint over rust" paint and sealer someday, I guess. That's not a job I want to do myself. That roof is pretty steep, and I'm sure falling off of it would really ruin my day

Did a little cruise over our property, heading mostly north towards the stream, but didn't go to the edges. It seems the GPS signal indicating the location of the drone on my smart phone wasn't showing up once it got further away from me, so I'm guessing the trees are blocking some of the signals. The view I could see from the camera was holding up OK, though, so it's not like I was flying blind. It was difficult to keep an eye on the drone through the trees sometimes. The drone SHOULD kick into the "Return to home" function automatically if it loses signal completely.

I tried recording this at 2560x1440 60fps, and the raw video looks pretty good. But when I went to process it with my video editing programs, NONE of them wanted to work with that resolution. So I wound up upscaling it to 4K 60fps and that seemed to work OK. I'll have to play around with various combinations of resolution and frame rate, and rendering options, to see what seems to work best.

I actually landed the drone while still having 50 percent charge on the battery. But looking up into the sky for long stretches is really hard on my neck.

Later on today I played around with the various exposure settings on the camera while having it sitting on a table pointed to an old camera color test strip card I have laying around in a bunch of old camera equipment. From looking at the results, I think I can improve on the video quite a bit with some tweaks I will implement next time I take it out.

It was kind of windy above the tree tops today, but the drone didn't seem to mind too much. I could hear the motors changing pitch as it fought against the wind, but I couldn't see any sign of that in the videos. That 3 axis gimbal seems to do a pretty good job keeping the camera steady, I guess.

Looks VERY stable, at least as far as the video portion goes. I don't know what the drone was doing, but the video is nice and smooth and not jerky. Keep practicing and we'll eventually see your name in the credits of movies as "Drone Operator". :thumbsup:
Andy

I was able to fly the drone quite a bit today, and spent some time playing around with the settings for the camera. Honestly, my first test didn't turn out so hot with the video results, as I believe I had the contrast and saturation way too high. I didn't have them at max, but apparently it was still too much. Also set the white balance for the "Sunny" setting, and not sure if the combination was the issue or not, but I could actually see the colors changing on the treetops. It was NOT a good looking effect. And the shadows were just too dark, and the light areas just too bright. So back to the drawing board.

For the next launch I cut both the saturation and the contrast settings in half, and reverted the white balance setting back to the default option. Color seemed MUCH better this time, and I didn't have that odd color shifting. So I think perhaps the white balance setting might be important for a stable image, but perhaps more testing will enlighten me.

I got up to around 340 ft, and was about 800 feet away this time, I flew out to the north and south edges of my property. I'll tell you, at that height and distance, if you take your eyes off of the drone for even an instant, it is VERY VERY difficult to find it again, visually. I was actually surprised at how disorienting it is looking at my property like this from an elevated platform. I thought that if the drone ever lost power and just dropped to the ground, I would be able to locate it fairly easily just by noting where it dropped. But man, I dunno. All the trees look alike when seen from above. Might be a good idea to paint the thing fluorescent orange or bright blue to help in finding the thing if need be.

I did lose the video feed once, but it came back a little later on. I still had the GPS locator signal, so at least I knew where it was supposed to be and what direction it was pointing. I flicked it into Return to Home mode and it headed right on back to me, so at least I still had control over it. But definitely a tense moment. I'm looking for an antenna signal booster right now, as evidently the trees are blocking the signals somewhat. I really can't see me ever wanting to fly any drone that doesn't have a "Return To Home" feature. Having that working for you will make ALL the difference between getting your drone back and it just flying off, never to be seen again.

And I got another corrupted video file too. Again, the last file in the series when I was coming in for a landing during the first time out today. I KNOW I turned off the video that time, so not sure what is going on. The second time out, just as a precaution, I stopped the video right after touchdown, and then started it back up again, just in case the LAST video in a series was getting corrupted somehow. But in this case, ALL of the videos were clean when I took a look at them, and none were corrupted. So, beats me.

I'm not sure which is more boring, looking at someone flying a drone over an open field, or looking at a video of just tree tops. So I doubt you all are going to want to watch basically the same old thing every time I take the drone up for a flight. I may render some of them here and there, but unless there is something noteworthy to look out, I don't see much reason to post all of them up on YouTube.

Oh yeah, I actually used the drone for something I originally thought one might be a good tool for. I used it to inspect the rain spouts on the garage to see if the down spouts are clogged up with pine needles and leaves. Maybe I will render that one later tonight, just to show you all how that worked out. But the short answer is, YES, I need to clean them out. Hopefully tomorrow, as the forecast is calling for rain most of next week. If we get a REAL heavy rain, somehow the installers put those rain spout gutters up in such a way that if they do not drain fast enough, the water will back up in them till water actually starts leaking into the INSIDE wall of the garage. I may have to drill some drain holes at that "leak" level in the gutter sides. I guess that kind of defeats the purpose of those rain gutters being there, but oh well. Much better than having water leaking into the garage. Maybe I need to look into a product that keep the gutters from filling up with crap in the first place. If the pine needles and leaves were dry enough, I think the downdraft of the drone's propellers would probably just blow the junk out of the gutters anyway. That thing does move some air!

I did an inspection of the rain gutters and downspouts on the roof of the garage the other day, figuring this would be a nice PRACTICAL use of a drone. Ordinarily I need to drag out the 12 ft. ladder just to take a peek, so I tend to put if off longer than I should. So maybe now it will be something I do more often rather than waiting for heavy rains to cause the water to back up and leak into the inside of the garage as has happened a few times.

Seemed to work out OK, but I can see where a larger display screen than my smart phone would be a lot handier for something like this. I really couldn't see a lot of detail till I downloaded the video onto my PC and then took a look at it on the big screen. I could generally see what I was looking at, but determining just how packed the pine needles and leaves were there, well, not so much.

It was actually tougher than I would have expected to control the drone that close to the roof of the garage. I think the downdraft from the propellers was playing hell with the positioning, not only because the drone was mostly half over the roof and half not, but with the roof being sloped, that was probably causing some unusual wind patterns that the drone was having to deal with. Luckily it wasn't enough to unbalance the drone, so no mishaps, and it worked rather well, I think.

And yeah, it looked like I needed to clean out around the downspout areas, and with rain having been in the forecast 2 days later, I did that chore the next day. Being up on top of that 12 ft. ladder is not my favorite thing to do. though. The ground just looks so far away up there, and I'm sure my falling off of the ladder would make for a pretty bad day.

Of course, after the "work" part of this flight, I goofed off and did a flight over a small area of our property. Hope you like seeing the tops of tree tops.... :hehehe:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53qV-ZoeYmA

Yeah, I know watching something like this is just about as boring as watching grass grow, but heck, this fascinates the hell out of me just being able to take video like this. But doing it seems to be a whole lot more interesting that actually watching it. It's all I can do to stay awake through the entire clip.... zzzzzz

Oh, this was taken in 2560x1440 60fps and then upscaled to 4K 60fps using Vegas Pro 15. I think the upscaling is introducing a bit of graininess, so I might have to try just uploading in the native resolution to see if that is any better.

WOW, more prop wash than I would have imagined.
Neat video.
Andy
Can't believe the stability of the platform! That gimbal really does
give the video a professional quality. Is there any way to turn off the
gimbal so we can see just how much it smooths the video out?

Jeez, you watched the WHOLE thing? I'm impressed!

As far as I can tell, there is no way to turn off the gimbal. But the video from my smaller drones probably gives a pretty good idea of what you could expect without a 3 axis gimbal. And it ain't pretty! Those drones really move around a lot, not only from their own steam, but by being buffeted by even modest winds. The smaller and lighter the drone, the worse it is.

It is actually kind of amazing that the cost of this drone is less than what just a decent 3 axis gimbal was going for when I first looked into this "flying video camera" stuff back in 2014. Practically no one was offering these gimbals in the drone products back then, at least nothing you could buy for less than about $2K. After playing with the small drones with any gimbal, I knew for a fact that I had no use trying to take decent video from any drone that didn't have this capability.

I went and found one of the videos I took with one of those little drones with NO gimbal capability at all. The video camera is just solidly fixed to the frame of the drone, so every little movement is transmitted directly into the resultant video. And without the GPS stabilization, I was constantly working the controls trying to even keep this little drone hovering where I wanted it to be. Believe me, it wore you out pretty quickly just fighting against the drone wanting to move where it wanted to go.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Oj9qOZfFw

World of difference, in my opinion.

Oh, here is the very first video I did with my very first drone. Video is just awful! Not to mention that little drone was just very hard to control. But you'll see what I mean...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxcGm_vpBY4

BTW, even the video itself was all screwed up with resolution, as you can see from the squatty look of my garage. It was a bear even getting this video to a point where I could render it for publication on YouTube.

I actually just completely dropped interest in this stuff for about three years, because I knew that what I wanted out of taking video from drones was a long way to reaching a point where I wanted to buy into them. Not to mention that even the more expensive ones were unreliable as hell and people were constantly having them fly away or just dropping out of the sky to crash into pieces. I just couldn't see the sense of even considering one of those things at that time.

Things are a whole lot better now, but of course, nothing is perfect. I have a slight squeal coming from what I think is the front right propeller motor. Not sure how significant it is, though. But things do break, and when it is something that weighs 3 pounds and is 300 ft up in the air, it is not going to fare well when it impacts the ground.

WOW! Watta difference between the first one and the current one!
All herky-jerky in the first one, and you're right about the squatty garage.
looks kinda like a model garage for matchbox cars! LOL
You need to find someone with a Vette that will let you ride shotgun and
control the drone while they do a "performance start" and run up through
the gears. That might make a neat video! And have you seen all of the you tube
videos about people crashing their drones? I mean some of them cost multiple
thousands of dollars, and the owners appear to be happy to post a video about
it. If it was me, I wouldn't want ANYONE seeing some asinine stunt I pulled
to trash my drone... SHEESH!
Andy :wavey:
:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

Actually I am glad that people are having the courage to post their videos of their crashing their drones. I think I'm learning a lot by watching their mistakes and trying to figure out what they did wrong. There appear to be several causes:

1. Being distracted by someone else nearby
2. Flying via FPV in a direction other than where the camera is pointing
3. Misjudging how far the drone is from some obstruction or it not being visible at a distance when flying via line of sight
4. A hardware or software failure in the drone or controller

From what I have seen in the available videos, the first three are much more common that #4. And since, as you inferred, people might be a whole lot less likely to post videos showing their mistakes than they would of actual failures of the drone/controller, I suspect that "pilot error" is the cause of a vast number of crashes.

Before doing this latest flight yesterday, I recalibrated the gimbal and the compass, and had to do a firmware update too, so I was running slim on battery life for the flight afterwards. These firmware updates are mandatory, evidently, and you just cannot fly the drone until the update has completely successfuly.

The gimbal seemed more level than before, and I didn't get any of the compass errors I seemed to get every flight. The horizon still goes skewed sometimes, but it seems to correct itself eventually.

I also mounted a modified antenna booster too, just to see if that would help. But I didn't send the drone out far enough to really test it any. I will sometimes get video distortion on the display of the cell phone, so I want to see if the antenna booster will help with that.

As mentioned above about "pilot error" I almost made a mistake when Connie was out there with me. Not paying close attention and when I was bringing the drone back down, it had drifted away from the garage more than I had realized. When I noticed the drift, I got disoriented when I tried to move it away from the tree, not immediately realizing what direction the drone was pointing, but luckily caught it in time. I wasn't as close to the tree as it appeared in the video, but close enough. Not a good idea getting distracted when flying these things, I suppose.

Anyway tried a little manual "follow her" when Connie walked down the driveway to fetch the trash cans.

I'm still very impressed with how stable this flying video platform is.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNqQqbx4QHY

Took the drone out the other day to try to figure out where that high pitched squeaking noise is coming from that I am hearing. First I took the props off and then used a microphone attached to my camera to try to see if I could identify which motor was making the noise by checking one motor after another. But I really couldn't hear the noise that way, so perhaps the lifting force of the propellers is necessary.

So I put the props back on and then did a short flight and brought the drone as close to the camera as I could to see if that would register audibly what I have been hearing. I guess I should have moved the work table out of the way, as this drone just does not like an uneven surface that gets in the way of the prop wash. I found it tough to control even under GPS mode and had to fight with it when it kept trying to drift close to me and the camera.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A4OYaY_yvs

But I can plainly hear the squeaky noise starting around 2:54, but not too much luck trying to determine if it is just one motor making the noise and if so, which one. I think it got slightly louder as the left front motor of the drone faced the camera, and I kind of leaning towards that motor being the culprit, if I had to make a choice.

If it would hold still, I could try the same thing using the microphone, but that would mean having to set the controller on a table and walk around the drone closely without having any hands on the controls. I am not too keen on that idea.

Not sure how much this is something to be worrying about, though. Maybe a little spot of lubricant applied to the motors would help? Hopefully if it gets worse, it will do so gradually instead of a sudden motor failure while 200 ft up in the air and over a pine tree.

I contacted the company about the slight gimbal tilt I (and others) have had with this drone, and they set it up such that a new firmware update would be sent to my controller the next time I logged in to fly the drone. So the other day I set things up to get the firmware update and then go through the recommended calibrations. One thing that struck me as odd was that the procedure indicated that the drone should be pointed due North for the calibration. I could see that for a compass calibration, but no idea why that would be important for the gimbal to be able to "dead reckon" a flat horizon. But I did it their way, anyway.

I then took a short flight, straight up, and then spun the drone around to check it out. Still seems like a very slight tilt, but definitely looks like an improvement. Even if I can't iron out the slight tilt, this would be livable.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlrcojiD2uQ

Finally had a day yesterday where it wasn't raining, windy, or I was under the weather from that cold or bug I picked up last week. So I took the drone out to try out some stuff with it. Actually felt a bit rusty at the controls, so this is something you really need to practice quite a bit, I guess.

Anyway, this drone comes with some automated flight features in the controller app that I wanted to play around with. The first one is the capability to set way points that will direct the drone to automatically fly from one to the other point in sequence. What you do is to go into the menu to select it, set up the parameters you want (drone height, speed, etc.) and then select the points you want on the map screen by simply tapping points on your cell phone display running the controller app. My goal had been to send the drone out the driveway at 125 ft elevation, down the road, then when reaching the edge of our property, move from one corner to the next, circumnavigating the four corners and head on back to "home". But I think there is a limit of 6 way points, which would have been OK, since I could have triggered the Return To Home feature when the drone had finally reached the end of the way point run.

BTW, what is interesting to me about this function is that I think it would be handy to set way points to command the drone to fly a pre-determined path, which would allow me the freedom to then just worry about manning the direction that the camera is pointing without also having to worry about where the drone was actually going to be flying. Theoretically, of course. At this point, I don't know what the drone actually does if you, for instance, yaw the drone to chance the lateral position the camera is pointing. The only movement you can make with the camera itself, is from pointing directly forward to pointing directly down, and any point in between. Any time you want to video something off center from being directly in front or directly under the drone, you have to move the drone itself to do so.

But the flight plan didn't work out as planned, however. When the drone flew out over the driveway, and then headed north up the road to the north edge of the property, it got to the point where I had it set to turn west to that NW corner of the property. Instead, it announced that it had lost signal, and that automatically triggered the Return To Home safety function, so it just turned to point directly "home" and came on back to the launch point and landed. Perhaps I could have regained control at that point, but I didn't try that quite yet.

Hmm, flight data was showing that it got out to about 1100 or so ft, and I think I've flown it slightly further than that before. But I was running a screen capture program on the smart phone this time, so perhaps that is interfering with the control app somewhat. I then tried a simpler way point set, just heading straight out to that northwest corner of the property, then turning south to the next corner. BTW, it seems that you MUST put the drone up high enough to clear any obstructions BEFORE triggering the way point routine, because when you trigger that function, it immediately heads towards that point, gaining altitude along the way. In my case, that would have meant flying directly into a pine tree before it got high enough to clear it. Fortunately I put the drone at height before triggering the way point command, otherwise this could have turned out ugly. Anyway, the drone again only got about 1100 feet or so out there, and then lost signal and did the RTH thing again. I may have to try this again sometime without that screen capture program running to see if that is causing this problem. The drone SHOULD be able to go much further out than that. Some people have logged a couple of miles with their drones (this model). Of course, I don't expect to get it that far with all the trees causing interference, but still, I think it should go somewhat further than 1100 feet out from me.

Anyway, so much for the way point test. So I then decided to try another function called "Orbit Mode". With this one, you have to position the drone above the Point Of Interest (POI), then set up the parameters you want. There was one parameter called "angle" that I'm not sure about, since the display didn't mean much to me. It could mean the direction the drone is pointing, but that is apparently covered in another selection. Maybe position of the camera, but the display didn't seem to be associated with the possible directions you can actually set the camera, which is just up and down at various degrees. So I guess I'll have to play around with that sometime just to see what it does. Again, you need to put the drone at height to clear obstructions BEFORE triggering this function. It doesn't go UP then out, it goes up gradually at an angle while heading to the start point on the circumference line of the circle you have set.

This one seemed to run without issues, but I was only about 215 or so feet from the controller.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz6Q2hUT7dc


I can see where people could get into trouble with some of these modes by not knowing how it actually operates and allowing the drone to run into something as a result. There is no sort of obstruction avoidance on this drone, so if you tell it to run into a wall or tree, it will certainly oblige your wishes. I'm guessing you can cancel these automated functions on the fly, but things could happen quickly and you just might not have time enough to figure out what to do before the crash. Probably would be a good thing for me to figure out experimentally under controlled conditions.

Also I had quite a few instances of trying the RTH (Return To Home) function, either because the drone lost the control signal, or I just used it as a fast and easy way to bring it back home, and noticed that the drone just didn't seem to get as close to the launch point as it had in the past. Sometimes came down as much as 8 ft. away. That's not too bad, I guess, but you still have to keep that in mind in case you are launching it from a narrow area with obstructions all around you.

But all in all, a good day of flying. Any day you don't crash or lose your drone flying it is a GOOD day.

Oh, just out of curiosity, I took my temperature gun outside because I wanted to check the temps of the propeller motors after flying to see how that looked. I'm guessing that a motor going bad would tend to be hotter than the rest of them, so I wanted to get a feel for what the temperatures should be. All four of them were registering between 100 and 103 degrees F, which doesn't seem TOO hot to me. So all is good with the motors, so far.

This video is taken by someone using a DJI Phantom 4 drone, and not the Xiaomi Mi, but it gives an interesting application of using a drone to actually find snakes out in the wild. For those of you interested in that kind of pursuit.... :hehehe:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v97KrZTzYWU

Don't think I would like it if my drone went down on top of one of those dens! I might just have to write off that drone as a bad experiment. I kept waiting for one of the snakes that was out of view, to pop up in front of the camera while striking at the drone. All in all...........very interesting video!
Andy