Be Excellent To Each Other

If anyone is on the fence about buying a DJI Phantom 2 and is looking for a reason - I've got a $150 discount code for a Phantom 2 (or a Phantom Vision) that I got for being an early adopter of the original Phantom - problem is, I didn't realise this until I'd already ordered mine.

So, if anyone is looking to buy a Phantom 2 or Vision between now and December 31 and wants $150 off - drop me a PM. You just need to send the relevant code to your dealer before buying and they can take the amount off

Video of the new Phantom and gimbal flying around Shrewsbury in the floods.

That's incredibly stable - it remind me of a game the way it moves and pans.

I needed to find out a bit about Wordpress and stuff for something at work and so decided to make my very own blog. I've never had a blog before. Do people still have blogs or am I about ten years late with this? Anyway, I don't expect anyone will ever really read and I don't know if I'll keep on updating it but it's actually quite nice to have somewhere to write stuff down and keep bits in one place.

It's here:

http://loopdreamsfpv.wordpress.com/

That's a great idea. I'm sure people will find your posts very handy mate.

Needs a teaching n00bz how to fly planes section too

Cheers for today, really enjoyed having a fly of your plane with the control set up you had, defo took the edge off and it's got me wanting my own now.

Very tempted to get something like this now.

http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/stor ... _RTF_.html

I'll wait for my birthday. Probably.

Yeah that would be perfect, it'll use your car batteries too. Although I'd probably get the one without the radio gear and get that separately.

Yeah some of the TXs that come with the RTR planes look pretty gash.

Try and pick up a second hand DX6i from ebay, receivers are less than a tenner from HobbyKing. That way I can still connect it up to mine with a trainer lead and you can also use it for a flight sim on your Mac (as long as you can run Windows on there somehow).

Make sure it's Mode 2 or else you'll have a horrible time.

Yeah saw that on a few, left stick throttle like yours is, is that not swappable then?

It felt right to me anyway, so yeah, get me one of those.

Was this from a little helicopter? it's awesome. Also, living in a world where there is a place called "Shark Island" never fails to make me happy.

http://vimeo.com/86146617

Just updated the firmware on the autopilot board I have. It should now have an artificial horizon in case I get in a cloud and also has what's called a fence mode. Which means it'll only allow the plane to fly within a limited area. So once it gets past a set distance, say 2km, it'll just turn tail and fly itself back to wherever it took off from. Quite excited to try this. Just need to set up a plane to fit it into.

They're great new features.

Still need to get my gubbins for my plane. Car kinda swamped everything but all sorted now so this is my next 'priority'

There's barely been a flyable day for months anyway mate. Hopefully the weather's looking up a bit now..

True. To be honest, I think I'll wait till I have some birthday pounds and buy a new DX6i and receiver. Get some buggy action in the meantime.

Thank fuck for some decent weather at last, I thought winter would never end.

Got a load of flying in yesterday with my trusty quadcopter. Over winter I've added new motors, shed some weight and tweaked and tuned the flight controller software. It flies pretty well now (even though I did nearly side slip it straight into the ground on the first video here):


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xxO3JMQtw8


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIgwGndBcQk

I'd been doing so well at not buying new things, just tweaking and working on stuff I already had. But then I saw this sexy piece of gubbins and had to have one:

http://www.eagletreesystems.com/index.p ... uct_id=136



It's an autopilot and an on screen display that I can use in my quadcopter or in planes. So many graphs, numbers and features and stuff for me to tinker with and geek out over, should keep me going for ages. Plus it'll be nice to know that if I do decide to push the range of my video or control link that the thing can just take over and fly itself back to me.

Careful.

Beautiful night for some flying on Tuesday. I went down to the beach and flew around this old wreck.

Was that sped up at the beginning? It looked like it was screaming along!

Bit harsh, it's not that bad.

Just normal speed all the way through. It was perhaps going 50mph, but pretty low down so that makes it look quicker.

Had a great flight this morning with my trusty twin motor. Got the FPV kit on there that I've been tweaking and rewiring to get rid of interference and increase the range. Pretty happy with it now. I got just to cloud level and then shat myself. I went higher on the flight before this one but I had left the lens cap on the recording camera.

Does the camera turn with your head?

No, it turns with my thumb. You can get ones which do that, though, pan and tilt.

Do you have a modified transmitter with extra "stuff" on for controlling the camera?

You can tell I know all the technical terms.

No, I've just sacrificed rudder control so it's just left and right on the left stick. I can switch it out though and get control of the rudder back but for a hand launched thing like this to just stooge around I never really need it.

Just watched that edit back, happy accident but the track mixes perfectly during the approach and landing.

Plane no.3 arrived today.

Was looking at a Parkzone P-40 ultra micro for a while as it was 49.99 on eBay but after a quick read up the general opinion is that the updated Mustang flies better so went for that instead.

All bound up and ready to crash.

Nice, bring it out later.

Another flight from this morning, over and through some bits of light clouds



This was actually shot not with my GoPro which cost £300 but a £40 Mobius action camera, cheap enough to lose and not bad at all really, not a patch on the GoPro but watchable.

Wow, that looks a lot higher!

Booze has left me grounded this weekend.

Should be free tomorrow evening though if you fancy.

New flight controller get. It's incredible really, pretty much a full set of instruments and an autopilot in something as big as a box of matches:



Man, I'm going to be able to geek out on just the settings for this thing for weeks. It'll relay voice alerts for any parameters you specify, so you can set up stall warnings etc. It also has a variometer, a device that plays an ascending or descending tone if you are in lift or sink, it even adjusts for airpseed so if you pull up but lose speed the tone stays level. I plan to put it in a big thermal soarer first, always wanted to try FPV thermal soaring.

It also logs everything so if you land and plug it in it'll show you a trace of your flight in Google Earth.

Does that say Shit Bird at the bottom?

Yeah you can put in a call sign. I think it's meant for radio hams, so if they're using high powered kit and someone picks up the transmission they can see who it is.

That's proper impressive.

It fucking is.

Is it the same sort of thing as the NAZA in the Phantom? i.e. could I swap out the NAZA for that in theory?

Yeah I theory I guess, I don't know what it's like inside one of those though and if physical space would be an issue. I'm sure someone else will do it soon if they haven't already, though.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wo ... em-with-ai

this looks interesting

I don't understand why you'd buy that instead of just some tiny RC cars. It's easier I guess but there can't be that many people who find slot cars too easy and RC cars too hard and want something just exactly in the middle.

Here's some thrilling air to air footage of some of Zardoz's first solo flights. Some bits shot with the quadcopter and some with another plane. Surprisingly tricky to keep the fucker in view. He's was properly all over the shop. Excellent fun but I need some machine guns on there:



He's actually learned really quite quickly.

It's more the addition of an AI car to race against, reduced performance of cars that need pit stops to fix, random or targeted "issues" during the race.
It's basically a racing video game, but using real RC cars.

I see, I should have watched the video more properly. It sounds interesting but I still reckon it's too niche and with so many contrivances you might as well just play a game.

Looks like there were a few near misses there, Mark! Top fun, totally addicted to planes now.

Those RC slot cars look interesting but can't see who would go for them. Cant see them being cheap enough to take a punt and with all the components just seems to me like more things to break.

Flog your pathetic consoles and buy RC planes.

I saw this a while back. Looks like the guy is going to get in some bother over it. Not sure why a quadcopter in a fireworks display is more dangerous than a fireworks display but meh.

These things are going to get regulated to death soon mostly because with the advent of ready to fly quads etc too many people are flying them in cities and controlled airspace and other places where anyone with two brain cells to rub together would realise that you probably shouldn't. Actually that's not quite fair it's more that hobbyists are generally a lot more aware of the fact that they are liable to just plummet to the ground at any moment for no obvious reason. FPV flying has pretty much just been banned in America by their FAA.

Far too many fucking idiots out there doing stupid things with them to get precious, precious YouTube views, though.

I don't think calling them "drones" is going to help public perception, either.

It was a spectacular video, though.

Yeah I hate that too, drones are those massive things that Obama uses to blow the legs off foreigners he doesn't like.

Yea, I've already had a few people suggest that I use mine to film the fireworks at this year's Shrewsbury Flower Show.

My response that "it's probably not that great an idea, not least because it would be illegal" is usually met with s