Where Do We Go From Here?

The Disease
 (Actually, one of these is a friend's needing recalibration and setup.)


 Sparkle flew ‘OK’ with the lampshade for a few minutes but it was a little breezy and it took lots of real flying to keep the rig within a 5 foot space. It is highly unusual for a Phantom to wander that much with GPS locks acquired. Something was wrong and I decided to fly another day. The next day, without wind, Sparkle continued to act up with a concluding ‘very hard landing’. For some reason the addition of the fabric to the outside of the shade frame was problematic. Or, maybe it was the fringe at the shade bottom. Or, maybe something else. My only course of action was to shit can Lampshade 1.0 and work on a new costume. The new costume was envisioned as a space ship thingie using all blue LEDs. Each new configuration requires a new set of prop guards and I bought four more sets further depleting the kid’s inheritance.

It also dawned on me at 3AM (way before dawn) that I simply had too much weight hanging on Sparkle. Though I managed to get back to sleep, my unconscious brain knew that was on to something. After my bike ride, I weighed Sparkle. 1700 grams. So what? I had no idea as to whether that was too heavy or within reason. I turned to the forum and found that most folks posting had their head up their butts. (I sometime wonder whether these dronies actually have a Phantom let any person drone at all.)

With no help there, it dawned on me to weigh Tommy. After all Tommy has a 3D-3H gimbal, Fatshark video transmitter and a GoPro. Tommy weighs about 1500 with instant connect prop guards*. I really didn’t think the 200 grams was the issue. However I was all done with using the metal wire frames from Michael’s.

The next morning at 3AM I decided to use thin bamboo. Not exactly the easiest thing to find as it turns out. After a few glasses of wine that night it flashed across my brain that I might be able to use the bamboo frame from inside those Japanese paper lanterns. (Maybe Chinese. Not sure about that.)

Off to Pier One or whatever they called these days. Bingo! 36” paper lantern. Well, not lantern but lanterns. I needed three. As it turns out, you can use smaller ones and soak the bamboo to spread and fit around Sparkle’s new set of prop guards.

The second costume for Sparkle (Big Blue) went together nicely and flew much better that Lampshade 1.0 which was now in the trash can. Keeping lights to simply strings with no encircling cloth seemed to be one the right track. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yytHj32JXTk

With Big Blue meeting expectations, I turned to making Lampshade 2.0. Bamboo frame, short external fringe but still with cloth around the frame for a real lampshade look. We’ll see!

 *Note: Given the extra weight and increased wind resistance, I only fly Tommy with prop guards attached when there is the possibility of a tree killing it. Trees and multi-rotors do not get along. Trust me.


 

The Beginning of Sparkle: Concept to Maiden Crash

A while back I was fascinated by Cirque du Soleil’s YouTube post of an informal concept project called Sparked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C8OJsHfmpI and the technology behind the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YqUocVcyrE

Like any true hacker, I set out to create my own light and magic quad. The first challenge was that I really did not want to dismantle Tommy or risk my very reliable video platform. So honey, nothing else to do but buy a second Phantom 2, further tapping into the kids inheritance. Plus, I envisioned flying the light and magic P2 while capturing the undertaking with Tommy and the GoPro. And, thus I introduce you to Sparkle.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBPrJQi0CDk  Actually, two visions of Sparkle. (Yep, there is also a third 'costume'.)

I decided that I wanted the ability to change Sparkle’s ‘costume’ as I thought of more configurations of light. Since I assumed that Cirque used some Phantoms, I started to craft a lampshade starting with installing prop guards for the basic structure that would support the shade. After wandering around three hardware stores and a couple of crafts stores, I found a wreath wire at Michael’s. For cloth, I fought my way through the Halloween moms at Joanne’s. Both Michael’s and Joanne’s are among my least favorite environs.  (Plan on standing in line for a good 30 minutes.)

Here is the completed initial configuration with top fringe removed.

At this point I have to warn you that this beta Sparkle really had problems. My assumption was that if I kept all the cloth and fringe on the outside of the prop guard rings nothing would interfere with the props. WRONG! As it turns out, the props suck air from outside the ring and thus on the first flight of a completed lampshade, Sparkle sucked in the upper fringe and had what we will call a hard landing. A very hard landing but from only about five feet. (DJI Phantoms are tough.)

So, off came the top fringe. But, I needed lights. That was solved by HobbyKing who sells some great Turnigy LED strings. They come in red, green, blue, yellow and white depending on what is currently in stock. (BTW, you will pay dearly and wait dearly for orders coming out of China.)

Most of these add-on LEDs run off of 12v and thus the typical three cell LiPo battery. I did test using the P2's available power but quickly decided to run the LEDs off a separate battery Velcro’d to Sparkle’s bottom shell.  I use Willy hacked servo extension wires for the harnesses.

Finally, I had lights, camera and action as you have seen in the short proof of concept video. Just before the second ‘hard landing’. More on version 2 later.

Time for Tech Talk

At some point in this adventure we have to peel the onion back and dig into raw science. And that begins with the differentiated laurel algorithm or ‘algor diff’ as the science community knows it. (Don't confuse this with that guy that invented the Internet.) The ‘diff’ is exactly how such flying devices as quadcopters stay in the air and is ‘mapped’ according to the Bernoulli distribution in probability theory and statistics. (See explanation in graphic below.)

It was Nikola Tesla who first attempted implementation of these flight anomalies with his "teleforce" weapon after studying the Van de Graaff generator. Much like today’s ‘drone brain’ , (See  photo above) Tesla’s ‘nozzle’ was to send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, “of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation's border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks”.

So, we dronies have that going for us, which is nice. (Bill Murray, Caddy Shack) 

(Note: This post is embargoed until April 1, 2015)

Now What?

We are standing here at the edge of the cliff with our quad safely back on terra whatever, now what? Time to make a movie. That's what!

I am a Windows 8.1 user with a nice laptop. I use Adobe Lightroom for still images and Corel Video Studio Pro X7 for editing. Not sure that this is the best setup but it seems to work for me.

The first challenge in editing the raw file is GoPro. Many video editing software apps simply cannot keep up with the amount of data the GoPro places in a file. That said, you can use GoPro’s free software though I find it pretty worthless and non-intuitive.  BTW, my GoPro Hero 4Black is even more problematic in regards to file structure. And, use the fastest SD card available.

As this blog will most likely stay live forever, I’ll not get into settings and such on the GP4. Except to say, experiment with your camera before you go to Nepal to capture the renaissance of humanity. There are trade-offs in these settings including frames per second which dictate how much slow motion you can achieve when that lion attacks that white rhino on the Serengeti.   

Another challenge for your finished movie is that the camera captures excellent sound and that sound is the buzzing of four motors with 9” props. The sound has to be taken out of the raw file. But what to insert into your epic documentary? Well, music seems to be the medium of choice by most 'creators' but it does not have to be the only option.

There are a number of free sound effects websites for cool add-ins. Also, try recording in areas where you might want to use just the audio portion of the file. Or, record your own narrative and then merge all of this into your movie. Here is one site that I use http://www.freesound.org/browse/

Checkout my video were I removed the Phantom rotor noise and inserted not only music but also occasional pounding surf. (The goal for this movie is a meditation piece or a ‘screen saver’ for home ambience.)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP_xc0rbl6w

Back to Fly Aways

The other day some folks on the PhantomPilots forum had an interesting exchange regarding a statement by Frank Wong, founder and CEO of DJI. Frank’s comment was, "some customers are losing control of their drones because of technical issues, including a reliance on GPS signal, which sometimes can be lost, it’s our fault. We have to make something that cannot go wrong in any scenario."

And then a couple of forum responses:
 

1)…I still believe that many of the "fly aways" are still pilot error - primarily, like not waiting for GPS to get a home lock. I've corrected local pilots who I saw doing this... taking off before the blinking green lights.... or ignoring other light blinking error codes (like compass needs to be calibrated etc) and flying anyway... A pilot has to be responsible and make sure they go through the proper pre-flight procedure every time.

I am glad DJI has admitted a problem, but we all still need to follow all the pre-flight precautions and not depend entirely on pure technology to get our craft back - learning to fly in manual mode would (sometimes) be another failsafe when technology fails us. Cheers

2)…For what it is worth, I purchased my first Phantom Vision 2 + early upon release in the spring. While my early July flyaway was my fault due to not waiting for enough GPS signals, I will share the following.

In mid-July, I ordered a new Phantom Vision 2 +. Soon after that purchase, the original lost Phantom was found, pretty much undamaged. LOL. Too late however to return the second Phantom.

In August, I took them both into my yard, same place, same conditions, same same same. First the old one, which took many minutes to finally acquire 6-8 sats. The number varied, and dropped when video turned on. Turned both transmitter and copter off. Took the newer version out, and it acquired 10-12 sats, quickly, and no drop off when camera turned on. Again, same time within minutes, same place.

3) I still maintain that if we learn to actually fly the quads before we start relying on advanced features we will be much better prepared for many technical faults. I belong to a club and have noted that many times newbies immediately fly in home lock or worse 'relative' mode where they don't have to learn orientation drills out at 200 yards. These guys have had 'fly always' when the quad goes into regular flying mode and the pilots are clueless as to how figure out the quads orientation and thus a flight path back to home. This usually happens as the batteries are getting low compounding the crisis. (Timer!!)

In my opinion it is the manufacturer's fault when the craft does not respond to basic radio commands and my fault when I cannot fly the quad visually.

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United Pilot to passengers, "Ladies and gentlemen and am sorry to tell you that we will be crashing somewhere because Boeing caused my plane to fly away. Stupid Boeing!."

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NET- NET: This shit is expensive. Protect your investment and the safety of those around you with competent flying skills.

You Gotta Be Shitting Me!

Those are some of the wickedest words you will utter or hear around radio control pilots with gear in the air. Unfortunately, those words are anything but foreign for me. Whether I am flying fixed wing, rotor or multirotor, YGBSM is never far from the tip of my tongue.

I started this RC escapade learning to fly a Real Flight PC simulator. After a month of crashing computer animated airplanes for hours upon hours, I decided to go out to the club field and smashup real planes. And, smashup real planes, I did, but that was after I learned to assemble $100 foamie aircraft from HobbyKing. It was while first attempting to assemble these models that were engineered by one group of peasants in Wyn Bin Qi and documented by another tribe somewhere in the heart of the good People’s Republic when I fully integrated YGBSM into my every other sentence. (Family was not pleased, nor neighbors when I was in the shop.) But, not to digress. We’ll get back to the wonderful world of HobbyKing some other day.

I found that flying DJI Phantoms was a real walk in the park. And, not a walk wandering around looking for my quad. But just because these babies fly in almost ‘cheating mode’ doesn’t mean that I was out of You Gotta Be Shitting Me World. My first YGBSM moment with Tommy was just after my observation that some of the RC Pilots at the club had these cute little lanyards attached to their transmitters and slung adorably around their necks. Very stylish. Others, the real men, grabbed their Tx by one hand and then at the last minute before liftoff placed both hands on the radio.  I flew (crashed) with the later style.

So, Tommy is out maybe 200 yards at 100 feet when I dropped my radio and six AA batteries went in six different directions. YGBSM!! At this moment I appreciated more than ever a quads ability to hands-off hover. I had done a lot of dumb ass things with fixed wing aircraft (none of which fly today by the way) but I had never dropped my Tx.

Of course, because DJI designed the Phantom to ‘return to home’ upon losing contact with the radio, Tommy was on the way back regardless of my state of panic.  As it turned out, I got the batteries back into the radio and regained control of Tommy as it started its final earth bound decent. (Remember, I don’t like the P2’s auto landing mode as tipping over seems to be a regular behavior and takes out a prop just for fun.)

Today, I never fly anything without one of those cute little neckless lanyard things. But mine is from Oracle Team USA. Friggin nailed it dude/ette.

 

Frosh Orientation

What else makes for crappy videos? Herky-jerky flying. And, what makes herky-jerky? Shitty flying skills. Few out of the box quads are more stable or easier to fly than the Phantom. I could teach Tyke my cat to fly it. But flying is not perfect flying. Perfect flying is driving your little baby exactly where you want and keeping it oriented exactly the way that you want. What is orientation? Better go get some popcorn. This will take a while.

Unlike an airplane or a helicopter, a quadcopter is basically a flying square. To the sideline novice, the front, back and sides look all alike. To the pilot, it can be just about as confusing. There is an implied front and an implied rear and of course implied right and left sides. But rotate Tommy 90 degrees 400 yards out to sea and you just might have another ‘friggin opportunity to learn’. Turn Tommy another 90 degrees and every control on your radio is now backwards. Now Tommy’s front is facing us and moving the aileron stick right will push Tommy left. At this time, hopefully you understand why I suggested that practice thing. Perfect practice makes perfect. Like flying any remote control aircraft understand and keeping your brain properly oriented will keep you in control of your flight.

One of the most redeeming qualities of quadcopters is that when properly set up, they will hover. No matter where in the hell Tommy is out there in the wide blue yonder, if I take my hands off the radio controls, Tommy will hover in place until I figure out which way it is pointed and thus how to get it back to me.*

Another recommendation. Resist flying in a mode called ‘relative flight’. In this mode, manufacturers will claim that you can’t lose orientation because the quad stays oriented for you. In other words, if you push the right stick forward the quad moves forward. Left moves the quad left. Right is right. Perfect. Except it is far from perfect if you are using the quad as a ‘filming’ platform. As a filming platform, that quad is part cameraman and part flying machine. Remember that the camera is fixed to the quad pointing forward between the two forward motors. You direct the camera view by pointing the quad at the intended scene. Spin right, should point the camera to that right. Continue spinning right and you should have the camera pointed at you. Push the right stick up and the quad will fly back to you, with the camera pointed at you. This is the way to fly a quad if you want to take compelling videos. (Yes, I understand there might be situations where ‘relative flight’ is useful.)

As long as we are taking about orientation, I’ll touch on one more dimension of orientation; camera orientation. The GoPro is attached to the bottom of my Phantom 2 via a mechanism called a gimbal. The complete definition is ‘a device consisting of two rings mounted on axes at right angles to each other so that an object, such as a ship's compass (GoPro), will remain suspended in a horizontal plane between them regardless of any motion of its support.’

These gimbals are magic for very professional videos, however one last control is necessary to master; the camera tilt. I modified my DJI radio to remove the stock tilt lever on the back and installed a control pot on top. I also modified the speed and amount of tilt response from that control. The camera moves from almost straight out to about 20 degrees from straight down. The biggest benefit from the modification has been slowing down the tilt speed and thus a much smoother transition in the video.

 

Note: One recommended practice maneuver is to fly your quad in figure eight patterns. Both ways.

That James Cameron Thing

The next phase of our adventure is to mentally review all 248 pages of Stockman’s, ‘How to Shoot Video That Doesn’t Suck?’ We need a video plan. The ‘video plan’ is a step in my approach to recording that I am just now starting to consider before I get in the car with my gear.

I think there are four basic types of movies; or a combination of the four.

1. Play-purposeless, 2. Art (including Beauty, Impact /emotion, and Exploration such as the color red or the wind), 3. Documentation which is to record reality such as Inform, Chronologically capture an event or phenomenon. The 4th type of movie would be to tell a story: manufactured and edited. 

 

Hopefully, your epic flick includes all four of these fundamentals.

 

For me, much of the last nine months of taking Tommy, my Phantom 2, on video adventures has been pretty much, ‘I wonder if I can keep this thing in the air and get some good vids’. I haven’t really thought much about what the finished movie is really about. That changed when I decided to capture the beauty of the rough California Coast a while back.

For this undertaking, I had to dig down and see in my mind's eye what that final video should look like to viewers. With a clear (well, almost clear) vision of the expected outcome I headed to the cliff.

At that point I needed to decide what flight paths would result in captivating video. Where is the sun? What routes will I fly? Where am I going to take off and land from? When should I fly FPV and what parts of the intended flight path should I not be under the googles. What should my spotter be looking for when I am under the goggles? Review the CHECKLIST a final time.

Speaking of compelling videos and capturing captivating scenes, I have taken some really crappy videos. Though I have usually had kinda a vision in my mind as to what want to capture from what I see in front of me. Unfortunately, the results have been about a quart low on Nirvana. The most disheartening failure is pulling that mini SD card out of the GoPro and inserting it into the computer. Nothing. Not one frigging file. Why? Yep, I never pressed the GoPro record button. (Remember that checklist thing I have mentioned too many times? You get the point.)

Note: I have had occasions where upon landing, my seemingly perfect recording session resulted in a ‘SD card error’. If you are using a GoPro, format your SD card in your camera and not with your computer.

Here is an example of a 'story' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP_xc0rbl6w

Perfect Perfect

Back to ground zero on Dead Man’s Cliff. We have reviewed and complied with our 17 step checklist. We have made sure everything is in top flying condition. We have our spotter. We have perfect weather. We have a captivating view. Now we just have to capture that view, that scene out there, and conclude our 11 minute adventure with that mini SD card in hand. (Did I tell you the GoPro records video files onto mini SD cards? Well, it does, and yours does as well.)

WAIT! Before we get into the intriguing topic of ‘capturing compelling video’ let’s take a step back from the cliff and consider how we will fly the routes that capture the scene before us. Now that we have spent the money for equipment and invested considerable time in learning to fly our quad; can you actually maneuver the craft into the exact spot to ‘get the shot’? And, then can we fly around the object of our vision in a manner that yields a spectacular compelling video and not some crazy ‘Drunk Uncle” zig-zag?

If you want to capture that vision, you need to be able to fly. Remember Vince’s mantra, ‘Perfect practice makes perfect.’ For me, it took some basic remote control newbie drills. Flying figure 8s. That’s so basic. Go out to a wide open flat, unpopulated space and fly figure eights. And, fly them precisely as you planned. Got it done? Good.*

Now that we can fly figure eights, we need to fly them all the while video recording a subject. One identified subject. After all, our goal is to capture that magic vision that we see in front of us. Of course, we can fly willy-nilly all over the friggin place, come home, and post some shit on YouTube and do a victory lap for not crashing. But, that takes only partial skill, partial luck.

If you intend to have a point of interest, a specific video subject, you need to be able to fly about that subject. And, with a GoPro, that includes the distance between the subject to the camera as wide angle makes it hard to get close up video on a specific subject. You have to be close and that poses big challenges, especially when the quad is 300 yards out to sea and 70 feet below.

For example, I was FPV out over ocean rocks when I realized that right below me were sea lions on a rock formation. I wanted that shot. I had to have the skill to point the GoPro at the sea lions and flying in a circle (or hover) about them. I did, I had maybe 3 minutes of the group looking at Tommy and then started diving into the ocean, all the while two juveniles would not jump as they were fascinated by Tommy. Finally, Mom kicked their ass off into the water.

The video? Oh, I had forgotten to turn on the record button upon launch and missed everything.

Check List, Check List, Check List, Check List, Check List.

*Note: A final exorcise for quad & video control is to place a chair (a large object) somewhere unobstructed and fly a 360 pattern around the chair, never losing the chair in the center of the recorded video. Good luck Grasshopper. That is one bitch of an exercise. If you can’t do it. You are kidding yourself about being a competent pilot.