July 5th, 2014
Moreno Valley, CA
The story of me and quadcopters begins last Fall. Earlier if you count the year-long effort of Tom Mahood (with an able assist from Jack Freer) to get me involved in drones. I finally broke down and bought a QAV500 with a Naza controller. Some number of crashes later I was highly impressed with the survivability of the QAV500, somewhat less impressed with the Naza. So I made the move to an open-source, open-hardware, flight controller called the APM. Very impressive in functionality and much cheaper than the Naza, though more complex to set up and operate. I already had a couple old GoPro Hero’s (the original HD version), so that was a no-brainer, although many people (including Tom) seem to get excellent results with the Mobius Action Cam, which is 75% cheaper than a new GoPro Hero 3 Black.
I’ve since added a flight camera and video transmitter, ground station with video monitor, and video googles for “first person view” or FPV flying.
Ground station (can monitor video transmitted from quad) on tripod:
Mike wearing FPV goggles:
If you want to see some truly impressive aerial video, check out the stuff by Juz in the land of Oz, or this Fisher Towers video by T.J. Sheridan. For an example of mixing aerial video into other productions, check out this video by a friend of my brother Tim.
Today Mike Wells was visiting from out of town so we played around at the “Moreno Valley Aerodrome” (MVA) where Tom Mahood and I often fly.
Though the GoPro takes HD video, I’ve so far been too chicken to fly in picturesque (and therefore potentially dangerous) locations like Juz and T.J. Sheridan, preferring the soft dirt fields of the MVA, so I’ve yet to take any particularly interesting video. Here is a link, however, to Tom Mahood’s video from his QAV500, filming my QAV500 in a daring (for us) display of proximity flying. Tom has a lot of drone info, including a chronicle of his descent into drone obsession, on his website. And mutual friend Jack Freer has done some very nice still photography which is viewable here.
The video goggles and ground station display data collected from the flight controller. This can be invaluable if you loose visual line of sight on the quad while flying.
And, even though I tend to crash a lot, crash video is always entertaining. To others, anyway. Here is video of my latest crash, where the quad went into automatic “Return to Launch” mode when it lost my radio control signal and flew itself into a large rock ridge. I tried to claim it didn’t count as one of my crashes, as I was, technically, not in control at the time. Tom called Bullshit on that claim.
A little patching up, some new props, and it was ready to fly again. This QAV500 is indestructible, I’m telling ya!