Bandwagon's Drones Thread

The flight times on there are wildly unreliable. But you're right....don't push the limit.

I'd recommend that he bump the battery failsafe trigger up to 50% at first and run multiple missions if needed. Back it down to 40 and 30% after seeing where it triggers and how much he comes home with.

BrutulTM - make sure to include a waypoint with your preferred launch location when you send me that KML.

Edit- just confirmed what I was talking about earlier, for the Phantom at least.

Waypoint missions and photo captures will work even without signal, gimbal angle will not. So, you can get NADIR/straight down images np.

BrutulTM - I'm assuming you don't mind if I post these since there's no road names or coordinates or anything, but let me know if you want them taken down. I'm rendering videos right now, I'll post when done.

Both look possible, but also plenty of opportunity for a crash due to battery or elevation changes. I added a waypoint every 1,000ft to try to avoid running into the terrain anywhere.
Something that might be an issue on both of these, especially Flight 2 - The automatic return-to-home failsafe doesn't trigger based only on the current battery level. It also factors in how far away you are from your home/launch point. So, you could be three quarters of the way to waypoint and still have 75% battery life, but the failsafe may trigger because of how far away from home you are. You can eliminate that, but I'd recommend doing some test runs with the number set high, and back off slowly. Set the camera to take a picture every 5 seconds so that when it gets back home, you can look to see how far you got before the failsafe kicked in.

After you ran it a couple times successfully at 300-400ft, you could add waypoints over the water tanks that will lower the drone to ~80ft or so to get better shots.

And put your Name/Number on the drone.



Flight 1 (Video in spoiler)



Flight 2 (Video in spoiler)

That is awesome man, thanks for taking the time to do that.

I do think you would have to drop down over the tanks. You can see them just fine from that altitude but I think you would need to be quite a bit closer to tell how much water was in them. I thought the second flight would probably be more challenging because of the size of the hills up there. Of course thats the one I would most like to use it on since the road up there is terrible.

If the drone gets lost does it have any way of sending out an SOS or a waypoint or something to help you find it? I can imagine even if you could follow the track on the ground that if it got blown off course a little and crashed in the trees it might be impossible to find.

Yea, it's pretty much impossible to find if you lose it. Your best bet would be sticking a small, battery powered strobe to the top of it and go looking after dark if you lose it.

Honestly, I think it's worth it for you to get one. Just start off slow and plan on taking 3 or 4 weeks to work up to what you're trying to do.

If you start a Litchi account, give me the password and I can help you refine it and work up to what you're trying to do.

Edit - wrong link

"Work"

One of my cleanest point clouds yet.

Low & Slow is a whole lot easier when there's no trees or powerlines.

Stakes for excavation. That hut floods every year, so they're trenching around it.
There's a word for that, but I'm just the dummy that flies drones and I don't remember what it is.

And I'm heading out the door in 45 minutes to use our Sokkia for the first time.

I did almost an entire ALTA with the drone, we just need to pick up the building corners in the field instead of from the point cloud.

So I bought a Syma X5 because it was cheap and I just wanted to play around with it a bit and I saw it recommended a couple places as a good starter. I'm still quite poor at flying it but I can keep it from crashing for several minutes in my living room now so that's progress. The only one I had flown previously was a palm-sized one I got shipped direct from China for $17. I'm finding the Syma considerably easier to fly than that. A couple questions though.

I'm under the impression that the higher end drones are easier, perhaps much easier to fly than this thing? Is becoming proficient with a basic drone a worthwhile use of time if I want to use a more expensive one down the line?

That thing will be very good for building muscle memory, but that's about it. Practice going around stuff when it's facing different directions, think of it like the game "operation".

The bigger ones are definitely easier to fly, but they also tend to be completely destroyed in crashes. The main stuff you want to learn with the big drones isn't how to fly them manually (though that's required), you need to understand how the flight controller and firmware work. Know what triggers a failsafe and exactly what happens when that kicks in. How the sensors work, what can cause problems, etc.

Keep playing with your Syma, but download and print out a Phantom4 pro manual. Read it front to back 3 times.

I've got the dreaded Phantom stress cracks happening on one of the drones. Pretty annoying.

I think I'm going to do a CA+Baking soda repair myself because I really don't want to deal with DJI's infamous support.

Just watched the official announcement/live stream for this. 20mp hassleblad w/ 1" sensor. Maybe we'll switch from the P4p to the M2

Just started accepting orders today. @brutaltm

Meh