Be Excellent To Each Other

Cool, glad you like it. Now buy one for yourself and start looking at brushless upgrades

I'll never be motivated to fix the Riot if I do that!

I love my Chinese style steering wheel transmitter. Are the American ones too big and loud?

Flog your riot and go leccy you big twerp. Just as fast (with the right motor / battery) and far less fannying about.

Sorry to hear there was more damage than you thought Mark. You still thinking of one of those Rally cars?

Nah, I'll just stick with what I've got for now I reckon. Need to crack on with building that new quadcopter.

Zadrdoz, that looks awesome..

Can you come and paint my Golf

Drop it off on Friday.

With a bag of cash.

hmmm I am not sure the company would approve but I am fed up of driving a red car

KovacsC, yesterday.

GazChap strikes again:

http://www.10tv.com/content/stories/201 ... tatue.html

It's a Phantom, as well. Brilliant.

After a month or more on the bench I finally got this thing in the air yesterday:



Still needs some more work tuning the PID values in the flight controller and I need to get to grips with it but even roughly tuned as it is it's just amazing to fly.

Here's a brief snippet of the second flight (better a bit bigger, but not too big, I only shot it at 720):

Needs more BBQ sauce.

Top RC action this weekend. New Quad's very nifty Mark, well built mate.

Swapped the Tamiya connectors for Deans on the lights in the 240z shell, so I'll be able to do some 24hrmin endurance racing now.

Going to miss my little cars when I'm in Spain

12t motor turned up yesterday so ill be off roading again when I'm back... although I'm really smitten with my road car now. Have to always take both out I guess.

Getting better with the Phantom. I'm reasonably sure that the damage to the body shell (which has made the motor on one arm point slightly inwards) is unbalancing it to such a degree that it's causing very visible camera shake (at the sides) so I've just had a new body shell come through this morning so I can transplant everything across.

Excellent. Looks to be working pretty well now. A new shell should certainly improve matters.

I bought one of these little things the other day:



I've had one of these similarly tiny planes before and it was hopeless in all but flat calm. This one is just as tiny wee but it's gyro stabilised and it makes a huge difference. It flies like something that is much bigger.

Really nice little RC flight sim here, Windows/Android/iOS:

http://www.rowlhouse.co.uk/PicaSim/index.html

It works surprisingly well even with touchscreen controls. Download and have a nice chilled time slope soaring.

New 11.5t sensored brushless combo and receiver turned up. Think it'll all go in the 4x4 buggy and ill transfer the stuff from that into my 2wd. Be nice getting them all road worthy again.

Patterdale MRT are experimenting with drones to blow the utter shite out of people who couldn't be arsed reading a map/forgot their sandwiches/forgot that it gets dark & cold at night/were too proud to ask for help & got into more serious difficulty help them find casualties* faster
*... and morons.
http://www.grough.co.uk/magazine/2013/0 ... trict-fell

Next trial is Thursday 25th July at 12:30pm, shame I'll be working as a) it'll be cool to see the place fae the air & b) if it works well it'll be massively helpful.

A (sped-up) flight over a local retail park. The damaged body shell is causing definite camera shake and instability, but unfortunately a number of stripped screw heads and the fact that I drilled into my thumb trying to get one of them out means my attempts at swapping the components over to the new body shell will have to wait.

Have also ordered a FatShark Predator V2 FPV kit for the Phantom, which I'm rather excited about.

Really good that, the camera shake isn't too bad either. When you get the FPV kit on it your first instinct will be to try and just hover, this is actually pretty hard if you're flying in manual, better to just power up a bit and get it moving.

I had a little fly yesterday morning and the other night

I've been flying in GPS mode all the time really, to avoid a repeat of the first video and the quarry crash - would you recommend switching to attitude mode for FPV flight or would GPS work well too?

Ah! They're goggles.

I'm not entirely sure exactly what that mode will do. Does it just hold position if you release the sticks?

Just use whatever makes you feel safest initially, you'll naturally want more control once you realise how much easier it is to fly FPV.

Our kid has asked if you can bring a plane along tonight mate (if you still popping out with cars).

GPS mode holds position when the sticks are released, attitude mode doesn't - which is why my first flight ended up crashing miles away

Yeah, I'll probably bring my quad too. It's getting taken apart as soon as this nice weather breaks for some more upgrades.

How high can it go?

You'd make a terrible limbo instructor.

I had to say something to give that away?

Touché, sir.

I guess as high as the transmitter range would allow. 300 metres is the official transmitter range for my quad, but people have flown up to 1km away and still had control.

Other quads may vary, I guess.

I took my mini quadracopter outside and played with it in the garden the other day for the first time.

I was so scared of losing it next door but it was great being able to fly and not worry about bumping into walls and furniture.

Is it one of the little Hubsan X4s? I've flown mine outside a few times and it's tremendous fun, especially in Expert mode where you can do flips and shit. It's mental how fast it'll go.

It is indeed. I haven't messed with expert mode yet as I was just trying it out but yeah, it's very fast and so maneuverable! I love it.

I got it to go as high as the house but then I got scared that it would end up in the guttering.

if you used a programmable autopilot then you could get it to climb right to its ceiling, where the air got too thin for it to generate lift. I'm not sure how high this would be for a normal quadcopter. I'm also not sure what would happen first, maximum altitude or battery capacity, you'd also need enough battery to fly it back down, or at least to catch it after a long free-fall.

It would go pretty high I reckon.

I'd love to know how high up mine went on it's ill-fated crash course, I assume it kept climbing until it couldn't climb any further but I've no way of finding out the actual altitude.

DJI are readying a new version of the Phantom apparently, which not only has a camera built in, but will also record telemetry too. That'd be interesting.

Once you've got your FPV kit you can get an OSD for not much money that will show you your altitude and ground speed etc.

ORLY? Any links?

I'll have a look later, it's while since I've looked at them and these things change on pretty much a monthly basis so you might be as well to look yourself:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=fpv+g ... e&ie=UTF-8

Just out of interest, I'm looking for a ball park figure on how much it'll cost to get a full size quadracopter and camera type kit.

I don't need to know specifics just yet, I just wondered if it would be in my price range?

It depends. Do you want to build it yourself or do you want something that you can just charge up and fly?

While I could build it myself, I'd probably be better off buying the full kit.

Something like what GazChap has then, a DJI Phantom:

http://www.firstpersonview.co.uk/multic ... tAodWEYAFQ

But that's without a camera.

Cool, thanks for that. It gives me an idea of what I would be looking at spending.

The Phantom is about £459-£499, then you can get a GoPro Hero 3 camera (or a Hero 2, or even a Hero 1 if necessary) to stick on it - I think the Hero 3 starts from £199 - there are three editions - White, Silver and Black - that get more expensive as you go up, but have more features. The lighter the camera the better, and the Phantom comes with a GoPro mount in the box (although it's not brilliant, I always use the normal GoPro housing rather than the one supplied with the copter.)

If you go down this route, don't use the Wi-Fi features of the GoPro to start recording etc. from your phone - there've been reports that the Wi-Fi signal from the GoPro interferes with the frequency used for controlling the whirlybird and some people have reported it just flying off with no control possible.

If you can wait a bit, DJI are releasing a new Phantom that has a camera built in, and the camera is pan/tilt controlled independently of the craft itself. That'll probably be a fair bit more than the current model though.

You can get much cheaper cameras than GoPros that are not quite as good but increasingly not very far off.

TT01 fixed up (not sure how the front arm came apart the way it did without being borked) and Wireless Madness have front arms for the Vandal at £3.75 for two, so ill be picking them up tomorrow Mark, ta for the donor offer anyway.

Tonights lesson then, front arms have a tendency to break when connecting with concrete.

Aaaand another one. Definitely improving control-wise, I'm used to the changing orientation now. Also, YouTube's anti-shake fixing is voodoo - how the hell does it work? The original video at the start was shaky as hell at the sides, they've smoothed it out incredibly well.

Now that I've stopped using the waterproof GoPro housing and started using the one that comes with the Phantom, I'm getting bad jello again though. Even with an anti-jello rubber mount on it - need to look at a gimbal I think.



(also discovered http://www.incompetech.com - loads of Creative Commons licensed royalty free music to stick into your vids)

Looking pretty good that Gaz. I find YouTube stabilisation to be really ham fisted, though. Have a look at this:

http://www.fpvmanuals.com/2012/10/05/co ... sual-cost/

It's a bit time consuming but the results are worth it. As for the jello, or rolling shutter effects, a brushless gimbal won't necessarily cure that, they are designed to take out the inevitable pitching and rolling that comes from a relatively tiny aircraft like our quadcopters. If it does cure the jello then it's probably just due to some vibration isolation and added mass rather than the gimbal's motors and electronics doing their thing.

What you really need to look at is eliminating as much vibration as possible at source. Balancing your props should be the first thing to do, even looking at using some different props. Then when you've reduced it comprehensively that way then look at adding some vibration isolation. People have had success with all sorts of things and it seems that there's no guaranteed method, what works seems to depend on a number of complex factors like the frequency of the vibrations etc. and as such it seems to be pretty much trial and error.

I've been out with mine quite a bit lately, mostly just turfing around for fun though rather than trying to shoot any footage of anything.

3:50 on this shows a bit of a different shot, looking back over the quad with a view of the gubbins.