Everyone Has a Story

I was sucked into this hobby by a friend who showed up one day in the ‘hood’ with a simple flyer called a Slow Stick, and he had mounted a tiny video camera onto the wing top. He taxied down the street and lifted into the air while video recording the incredible sights of our mountain home and the land beneath the wings. He then made a slow descent, lined up for the final approach, crossed the imaginary runway threshold and at about three feet off the deck, ran into our neighbor’s parked SUV. 

After a few minutes of conflict resolution, we immediately ran into the house and threw the mini SD card into the laptop. “Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Halle, Halle, Hallelujah” There was this wonderful video of our hilltop neighborhood and our homes. It was a friggin miracle.
 

Well, two things happened that day; Day One. First, I caught ‘Remote Control Disease’ and second, I first learned of HobbyKing. HobbyKing! Where everything is amazing and really cheap. At this point in my life, I had to make a choice between HobbyKing and my kid’s inheritance. Let me tell you, this choice was not easy. Of course, being focused only on myself and my immediate needs satisfaction; I opted for HOBBYKING.

That is when my hobby life began and started to unravel, all at the same time. I saw the amoebas of life reconfigured into a new formula.  A formula of cheap China parts and unreadable user manuals.  Screw the user manual, I can figure this shit out by myself. How hard is it to fit Piece A into B, through hole C. Oh, there is no piece B and piece A is the wrong size. Oh, and hole C is actually on a different airplane. 

My first remote controlled airplane along with a brand new HobbyKing transmitter costs $110 and the plane never flew and I threw the radio away as well. And it began! Cheap part after cheap part from every corner of the People’s Republic. This $5 part and that $7 part and $36 for some weird freight through some rich ass Hong Kong dude. Bravo! Good for you guys.

As I said, that first plane never got into the air. Nor, did the second one. Forty seven days later, plane three did fly; 28 seconds. My maiden flight was over. It was then that I had another one of those friggin opportunities to learn; I needed to buy two of everything from HobbyKing. Shit doesn’t work. Shit doesn’t fly. And if it does fly, I will crash it faster than you can log onto HobbyKing.com.

Sometime about one year later and after more mangled airplanes than I can count, I read about quadcopters. Finally an air worthy flying machine that hovers. Stops in space. Defies that gravity thing.

Spot On

We are back on the cliff going through our preflight checklist and chatting with our spotter. You have a spotter, right? A spotter can be anyone. A spouse, a friend, even a stranger who seems interested in what you are about to do. Ok, we now know what a spotter is or can be but, what purpose do they serve for our vidding adventure?

 

The FAA declares that anyone flying First Person Video, looking through goggles, is in fact flying without maintaining constant visual contact with the UAS (Unmanned Aerial System or Vehicle). That is a FAA violation. Well isn’t that a load of government over reach crap? Maybe, maybe not. Hear me out here Grasshopper.

I belong to a RC flying club where we have wide open flat land to fly. We have experimented with FPV in both fixed wing aircraft and recently in quads. There have been times out at our field when flying ‘under the hood’ has left me completely at a loss as to where my quad is. Imagine driving around in your car for five minutes looking only through a 10”x10” view out the front windshield. Now ask yourself, “Where in hell am I? And, what am I about to run into?"

After five minutes of flying using only your FPV goggles, the quad can be so far away that you cannot see or hear it and very likely cannot pick it up in the sky. Your spotter has been visually following your flight and it is your spotter who is going to tell you where to start looking. Nope it is not to your right but to your left and 200 feet in the glaring sky, slightly right of the sun. It is just a white dot in a very bright sky. Now bring it back before the batteries go dead and before your baby performs a perfect auto landing out near Seal Rock. Get the point? Have a wingman or wing-woman or wing-stranger.  They might be worth $2500. Plus it’s fun to share the adventure.

BTW, I usually share my FPV googles with anyone interested around me. Their first comment will be, “Oh, is that one of those things to spy on neighbors with?” Their departing comment is always, “That is really cool. Thanks for letting see this.” One more convert. 319,000,000 to go.

Fly-away, Fly-away

Here is probably a great place in this discussion to touch on a highly exasperating phenomenon called ‘fly-aways’. That’s not a typo. Fly-aways are moments in flight when the remote controlled aircraft simply flies away from you: completely on its own initiative and completely out of your control. Fly-aways happen for a variety of reasons and a variety of ‘no reasons’. In my 10 months of flying my Phantom 2, which I have named Tommy, I have never experienced a fly-away. However, I did have another branded quad leave my controlled airspace and crash into an office parking lot a half a mile away, about 60 feet away from a six lane intersection. Miraculously, no cars were hit but the quad was pancaked. Lesson learned. (As to Tommy, you’ll have to pull out that old Who album to understand the connection.)

Back to fly-aways. They seem to happen for two basic reasons. Technology failure* and human failure. Not much that can be done about technology failure except preventative maintenance and preflight testing. But, the human failure can almost always be pointed back to not reading the manual or not having practiced enough. (Ex: many newer quads have a ‘relative flight mode’ and I have found that newbies that invoke this flight mode are asking for real problems. Learn to fly the friggin quad, Grasshopper.

Before, we leave the subject of flight anomalies, let’s touch on the automatic ‘return to home feature’. This is a terrific feature made possible by the GPS systems in high end quads. In summary, when you lose control of your quad, invoke the ‘come home’ feature and your quad will return to its launch site. Kinda. For the Phantom, return to home involves some automatic maneuvers by the system including climbing up about 50 feet before flying back. Also, the auto-landing maneuver is a little rough on Tommy. I have only invoked the 'auto return to home feature' in test situations and it is still unclear as to what Tommy would do here flying 70 feet below my cliff if it went into auto return to home is invoked. Would it rise to 50 feet above the takeoff spot or 50 feet above the spot where auto home is invoked? Will it run into the side of the cliff. Right now I am betting on rising to above the takeoff elevation. That is a $2500 bet folks. The price of my combined aerial video technology. Not for the faint of heart.

 

* Note: A common problem with inexpensive quads is bad solder joints where critical wires come loose from connections. Many solder problems are called cold solder. If you are handy, you might want to open up these inexpensive quads and check solder joints. Particularly battery connection points.

The Weakest Link

 

Some useful links

https://www.mapbox.com/drone/no-fly/?embed=true#6/39.462/-121.597

http://www.phantompilots.com/index.php

http://www.smalluavcoalition.org/

http://diydrones.com/

http://dronelife.com
 

Free music and sound effects for video

http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?feels%5B%5D=Bright

http://www.freesound.org/browse/

http://freemusicarchive.org/curator/video

Always useful downloads and terrific videos.  http://gopro.com/

Just for fun

http://www.gizmag.com/

http://robohub.org/

Management 102, Be The Battery

For P2 and other personal drone pilots, keeping track of inflight battery usage is an essential task in making sure that you have that mini SD card in your hand following a video session. There are a few ways to monitor batteries but the most important is to have a timer set to the maximum flying time that your experience dictates that you have on one battery. Seems that I am always a quart low on electrons. I Velcro the timer onto my transmitter radio.

The amount of flight time that you have on a battery will vary depending upon how hard your quad needs to work on a specific flight. I have found the attaching the FPV Tx, Zenmuse gimbal and GoPro has cut my flight time from 20 minutes to around 14. However, if I have some wind and active flying in the mission, that time is further reduced. For me, I set the timer at 11 minutes. I bring Tommy back at that time which can take a couple of minutes to return to home.  Of course, the Fatshark googles also show remaining battery life in the display. (I have 5 batteries. ready to go.)

Make sure that your checklist has a line item regarding the timer and make sure that you start the timer upon launch. That’s right Grasshopper, more discipline with the checklist.

More about batteries; specifically LiPo batteries. I have been involved with RC flying stuff for almost two years. I belong to a flying club with our own field and maybe 100 members. We fly only electric and therefore have lots of stories about LiPo batteries. Each one of us has had one of those ‘great friggin opportunity to learn’ times with LiPos. Net-net: If they catch on fire, you will want that flaming turd to be outside as it is incredibly smelly if not toxic. Have a good recharger and recharge where a possible fire will simply be annoying and not involve your insurance provider. Most everyone in the club has had a fire for one of many reasons. Mine was a bad Electronic Speed Control that shorted out the battery upon connection and I just barely got it out into the driveway where it burned for 10 minutes. 

Keep these batteries in a closed metal container. We use surplus steel ammo boxes.

For DJI Phantom 2’s and latter, the battery monitoring and recharge system is quite sophisticated and so far, safe. As a result, the batteries are very expensive. For other manufactures, you will most likely be using a standard off the shelf battery and recharge system. Be careful.

Parts is Parts

A Boeing representative recently commented that for most of us a Boeing airplane looks like a Boeing airplane. But to Boeing, it looks like a million parts flying in tight formation.

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 For many of us beginning at the bleeding edge of remote quadcopter flight commenced with some little $65 flying thing from Amazon and migrated to a slightly bigger thing and then with completely no reason to believe that you could do it, tried to build your own quad with parts from Hobbyking. Failure! (OK, it was just me then.)

It’s now 8 months later, all the HK parts are toast and you are unpacking the ‘ready to fly’ DJI Phantom 2 having just thrown away the $367 worth of incongruent parts that never worked as a well-oiled machine. In fact, it never flew for more than 28 seconds at any one time between repair sessions.

The Phantom flies. And flies easily. Just read the friggin manual or watch a couple of videos before you ‘arm the quad’ and push the radio’s left control stick north, given that you are facing north. If facing south, turn around. Anyway, I am not going to explain how to fly a quadcopter here. I am going to simply plead with you to practice. Perfect practice would be even better. Practice away from people, buildings and most importantly, away from trees. Trees and quads do not get along and trees will ‘paper your rock’; 'rock your sissors'. Trees seem to suck quads into them, many times never giving them back unless you are very good at climbing out onto a limb.    

Regardless of which brand of quad you are flying, there are characteristics and idiosyncrasies that will most likely subject your little hobby to the worst that gravity can dish out. You will want these little ‘friggin opportunities to learn’ to happen over dry land and not over the Pacific. Keep practicing where unexpected outcomes have minimal impact on your wallet. (Example: The P2 will simply land by itself when the battery depletes to 25%. You will have zero control of the craft as it lands perfectly in the Pacific or in the middle of Interstate 310 because you were trying to capture compelling video of a friggin freeway, idiot.)

Watch Out for That Curve

At this point in our adventure, it might be a good time to discuss the many nuances of The Learning Curve. Loosely defined, it is a noun; ‘the rate of a person's progress in gaining experience or new skills’. For our purposes, it is a verbish like phrase meaning, ‘to crash’.

The Learning Curve was first discovered 105, 000 years ago in cave in southern France. It was there that a very young Neanderthal, Tether, picked up a river rock and threw it. Launching that projectile right into Mom’s forehead. (It was Mom, Dad was not in the cave, the outcome of extremely poor parenting skills.)

Mom, on the other hand (or her forehead as it were.) had the patience of Job, though the Job that you and I know lived 102 -103,000 years later depending upon whether you are Jewish, Muslim or Christian. Not sure if Confucius knew him or not. The guy seemed to have gotten around.

Anyway, Tether, encouraged by Mom’s ravished forehead, continued to practice and one day he picked up a river rock, threw it and hit a rabbit. Mom screamed ‘Hallelujah’ (apparently she was Jewish) and the Learning Curve was invented.

For us learning to fly aircraft remotely; we will be living the “J”. The “J” curve is simply the harsh reality of doing shit where one has no idea. Basically, you (and me) start out somewhat below zero on the ‘J’ and then descend even further into the bowels of failure and eventually rise triumphantly, bask in the glory for a bit, and then crash for no obvious reason what so ever.  

 

Refer to chart above.