Bandwagon's Drones Thread

Just had my first crash in over a year, and first with the solo. I had to test it after replacing 3 props and make sure it works before sulking back here and telling.

As it turns out, 20ft is too low for MOST obstacles, trees included.

I was at my coworker's dad's house because I want to do a 3d scan of a nice rural house and combine it with ground shots, then see if I can 3d sandstone print it. Well, the tablet was fucking up and I just got a new phone, so I decided to use tower on my phone. Everything was fine and I noticed that the flight path was too low right after I started, but I couldn't find the "PAUSE" button on my phone's app quick enough. I stopped it right before it hit a tree, but either myself or my coworker's son bumped the stick as he was handing it back to me, and it went right into the tree.

I wasn't worried about any damage to the gimbal or anything, but the motors were just sitting there stalled against the limbs and grinding. No idea why the motor stall prevention didn't work and I was pretty pissed that they just kept going. I think those motor pods are about $70 or something, so I didn't want to burn a couple up. I also couldn't remember the dumb emergency shutoff combination. FYI- It's A+B+PAUSE, not A+B+POWER.


Lessons for the day -
Stick with the previous soft rule of 60ft or higher in auto modes. 20ft was dumb.
Keep the controllers in your hands, unless it's wide-open spaces
Make a sticker with the emergency shutoff combination.

No pictures of the solo in the tree, but here is the last photo it took (tree on the left is the one I hit)....




edit: bonus pictures from the post-crash test flight, just because it's a pretty day.

Lenardo_sl said:

Sweet picts. Have you looked at in mapper? I looked at it and it looked decent. Going to give it a go this weekend or sooner I planned the mission for the Boston site flyover. Going to do it twice. Once at 60 meters once at 90 then upload both sets to run on pix4d.

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in mapper? No idea what that is.

Ohhh, no. Haven't really seen much feedback on it. I think it was just released.

Make sure you're doing that survey stuff as a "hobby", otherwise the bogey men will getcha.

Still required to have a 333, guy. The commercial option is for 333 exempt people/companies.


Not that it really matters anymore, but we'll see what happens next month

It's the bottleneck.

Anything other than flying for hobby purposes (the FAA's definition of hobby purposes, not yours) requires an exemption....at this time.

Man, I don't know how you made it through this thread without seeing that?

Kais_sl said:

Part 107 (the new improved and streamlined 333 process) can't come soon enough. I'm meeting with one of the guys from the IDD event to discuss a possible partnership for 107. woohoo!

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Nice. Make sure they have something to offer you, too.


Skyward just gave us a shoutout in the Portland biz journal, which was pretty cool to see -http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/...ampaign=buffer

Somehow I got talking with one of Insitu's product managers over email, didn't even know who he worked for at first.

After he found out I was a firefighter, he sent me this video of a test scenario they did. Blew me away...so awesome.

Whats the update, Lenardo?

Finally got to do the test with the survey/engineering company. Not over the land we planned to do, but it'll work.

They've only quickly looked at the first results and haven't actually done the real test yet, but they're impressed thus far, and I'm someone what relieved. The owner said "I like it, better than even I was expecting. Send me a quote for how much this would have cost so I can start getting an idea on using you on our projects. I'd like to make this a normal thing".

Still working on the other stuff, but here is a low res 3d map. You can see 4 of the GCPs in the corners.

PLR400 by omnifoxaerial - 3D model - Sketchfab