General BS forumI guess this will be for anything that would seem to be off topic in any other forum here. Just general shootin' the breeze kind of topics.
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.
Xiaomi Mi 4K drone
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