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Unread 12-23-2017, 05:17 PM   #13
Rich Z
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Crawfordville, FL
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Name : Rich Zuchowski
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Quote:
Originally Posted by navy2kcoupe View Post
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
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
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