Quadcopters, drones, and other RC fun

I picked up a Hubsan 501s - $200 with a bunch of extras. I can’t swing a mavic, but this thing is a nice bridge between toy and drone. Nice motors, gps hold, follow me mode, speedy little thing.

They have some on Amazon for like 270. They can be squirrely but at this price point they are good units for outdoor, decent fpv (1080p and not stabilized video, and fisheye lens, but smooth and no lag, just doesn’t make publishable video really) and more range than anyone needs.

Last night I was standing out on my porch when suddenly I saw, about a block away, a small object with red lights flying around trees and rooftops. I realized that technically I was looking at a UFO, even though I knew it had to be a hobby drone. First one I’ve ever seen at night.

What are the current thoughts in the $700-800 range? I was thinking about a Phantom 3, but then I ran across the Autel X-star and Yuneec Q500 and I’m having some difficulty figuring out which way to go. Looking to shoot still and video, mostly over water, reasonably near a boat…

I got my remote pilot temporary certificate yesterday (which is funny, because while I have 2800 hrs of flight time in airplanes, I’ve never flown anything R/C). My employer has a Blade 350QX which they got a few years ago but haven’t flown, but I think we need something with more flight endurance and a gimbaled camera.

@tfernando, definitely the Phantom is the way to go. The prices on the Phantom 3 series have dropped nicely with the release of the Phantom 4 and Mavic. And honestly, about the only thing my Mavic has over my old Phantom 3 Pro is the awesome portability. (And collision avoidance, but I’ve learned not to fly into things.)

It looks like DJI only sells the $499 Phantom 3 Standard now in that series, but the Phantom 3 Pro is available for $799 from Adorama via Amazon. (I paid over $1K, and Best Buy still wants $999.) Though you will likely want another battery, and you want to stick to official DJI models for that. The Pro offers 4K video and much longer video and transmitter range than the Standard. The biggest difference is really the Lightbridge video transmission, which has much less delay and much better range than the system used by the Standard. ($399 for a refurb’d Standard from DJI is an amazing deal, though, for anyone here on a budget looking for pro-quality stabilized video.)

Autel’s US office is actually the guys who used to run the Woodinville, WA DJI Store. They found Autel and have helped them get going in the US. The X-Star Premium is essentially a good Phantom 3 Pro clone, but it’s the same price, has less third-party support (there are some cool apps for DJI’s API), and it’s not as easy to find parts, etc. With no price advantage, I would stick with DJI.

Yuneec stuff looks great spec-wise, but just go to YouTube and search for “Yuneec crash” or “Yuneec problems.” There have apparently been a lot of issues due to the firmware not being nearly as tight or reliable as DJI’s.

TL;DR: Get the Phantom 3 Pro. Great drone, now $460 less than when first released.

@Editer Thanks, that pretty much sells me on the Phantom 3 Pro :) I had the chance to see a DJI Inspire 1 in action up close, but that’s enough over my budget I’m looking for something else.

I read an article a while back, probably linked from here, that positioned a strong case for DJI still leading the industry by miles in price/features when it comes to drones as a camera platform. They consistently have the best, most feature rich and reliable product in several price ranges of all well known brands. Can’t find it now, though, but doubt you will go wrong with a Phantom 3.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I seem to have acquired another 'copter…


This is another micro sized quadcopter - Eachine QX90C, one of a growing range of cheap, small sized units coming out of China characterised by70-100mm frames, 8mm brushed motors, full featured flight controllers running open software, usually as bind and fly. There are many different models available now, coming thick and fast and improving rapidly in terms of build quality, components and performance. This sucker was AUD$75!

I have not managed to fly my previous FPV bird much, but when I tried it outdoors, it was a complete no-go. Slow and sedate indoors, but too light and way underpowered to cope even in a light breeze. Good to practice on and fly around the house with the kid, but not so good for getting outside in some wide open space and really getting a bird’s eye view.

Took a few days to manage to get it set up. Comes with a choice of built in receivers, DSM in my case, so I managed to bind it with my 9XR-Pro TX with no problems, but from there, you really need to fart around in the flight control software to ensure everything is working correctly and assign a TX switch to arm the motors. Getting connected was painless - the flight boards have a USB connector on them and are pretty much plug and play on Win10. The CleanFlight software has a standalone Chrome App configuration tool that is completely painless. But all my channels were messed up, out of order and reading incorrectly. It took me a bit of trouble shooting to get to the bottom of the problem, which turned out to be disabling an ‘auto’ option for sub-protocol selection on my TX and setting it manually. Channels immediately mapped correctly, so a bit more trial and error to work out how to configure a three position switch (flight mode selection) and I was done.

Took it out today and it flies very nicely. Decent power, very agile and quick and seems to have a nice tune out of the box. Flight modes are the key though. CleanFlight has three flight modes, angle, horizon, acro. Angle is fully stabilised with limited pitch/roll axes. Horizon is stabilised, with unlimited pitch/roll. Acro is completely unstabilised. Horizon mode is great - you can be really aggressive and get the thing tipped right over, but if you get into trouble, just middle the sticks and it returns to level.

With the QX90C I did my first manual flips today (in Horizon mode, which makes ‘catching’ a cinch)! My Dromida has an acro mode, but it is gutless and I would never attempt a manual flip as I don’t think it would be possible (it has a auto-flip button, but that seems to use customised rates that are otherwise unavailable). Power reserves make a massive difference to responsiveness and the ability to roll quickly to complete a flip.

Flying FPV is amazing, very, very cool. Next step is some flips while flying FPV!

Is there an assistance group for people addicted to buying these things?

I took some awesome photos yesterday of a fog-frozen Colorado. Here’s just a sample and a short video (editing a longer one together):




There is always one…

Haha I didn’t even spot that.

Another video from yesterday, wherein I harass my llamas and then bump into a tree. I was really impressed how well the Mavic recovered from a ‘crash’ like this. It just went right back to being stable.

I love how the llamas are like, whatever man, we’re just trying to eat over here. Llamas gotta llama.

Awesome stuff, @Vesper!

Shot another 360 panorama, this time using HDR to keep the sun from blowing out. So it’s actually 26 photos, each one made of 5 bracketed exposures to create an HDR image, so 130 total pictures.

The shooting is all automated by Litchi, but the HDR stuff took me about an hour in Photoshop. :)

Sorry, haven’t found a viewer off FB for these that will let me embed:

Cool stuff Vesper. 2 things:
-Adjust your horizon =)
-That embedded video doesn’t work, you have to go to Youtube due to some setting you have selected.


Snowy Snoqualmie Valley Sunset by DennyA, on Flickr

I need to tweak the rightmost shot’s exposure a little (this is a collage of four vertical HDR photos, 20 shots total), but overall, pretty pleased with this capture of last night’s sunset. My son was like “Dad, get the drone.” Told him I was busy. Looked at the sky. Got the drone. :)

Looks better on the Flickr link, BTW. Not sure why, but the color’s muted on the embed compared to the version on Flickr.

EARLY SPRING! TIME TO PLAY!!!


17-EaglesRestMavic-0031
by Sam Posten III, on Flickr

/salute

17-EaglesRestMavic-0015
by Sam Posten III, on Flickr

So, I did get the Phantom 3 Pro, thanks for the advice in the thread earlier. Flown a bit, but haven’t taken any really cool videos.

Mostly by virtue of having the RP certificate and a drone I’m willing to use for work, I’ve sort of become the unofficial part 107 coordinator for the natural resource management agency that I work for… we’re trying to use the Phantom for mapping/vegetation monitoring, and once we have some completed projects will probably be able to justify buying Inspires.

Here’s an example of the south side of a lake, automated flight using MapPilot and then processed by MapsMadeEasy:

Question- I think MME is using structure from motion to generate the rectified mosaic. There are programs which can do this on our hardware, or on a EC2 instance (eg. VisualSFM, OpenDroneMap). My one concern is that we’d lose geopositioning since SfM seems more oriented towards building 3D models than mapping. Generally our projects will not have surveyed ground control points, we’re relying on onboard GPS. … I’m not a GIS/cartography specialist… is there a better workflow to get geopositioned orthomosaics than paying MME for processing? Anyone have experience with Drone Deploy vs MapPilot?

Thanks in advance!

Anyone looking for a fun starter “fly in the house” drone, Amazon has the Air Hogs Star Trek Enterprise on sale for $29.97 today! Retails over $100 and even on sale usually costs $70-ish.

It’s pretty easy to control – not as easy as something like a Phantom, but much better than the micro quads – and it looks pretty cool to have the Enterprise flying around in your house. :) Plus it has Phaser sounds!

I started playing with minidrones :)

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Quarter is for scale. The lower one is a CX-10D… Does anyone know what the upper one is? Its controller is on the right. It looks like a Mould King X6-33022, but it doesn’t have any of the markings and the UPC resolves to a ring. I picked it up for $12 at a local farm and ranch store. The CX-10 was $20 from Amazon.

Both are pretty indestructible, but the orange one is a little touchy. The CX-10D hovers in place (or close to it) if you take your hands off the controls-- it’s almost like a mini-Phantom. The orange one needs constant attention. I’m keeping battery logs … charge time for the CX-10D is 21-22 minutes and I’m getting 5-6 minutes flight time. The orange one is 27-30 minute charge for 5-8 minutes flight. I think using the flip features reduces the flight time, but I haven’t been careful enough with my records to say for sure.

I find them both really fun! Next for me is probably a CX-10 model without altitude hold to see what the difference is.

An appeals court has vacated the registration rule for model aircraft. There’s lots of news coverage, the forbes article has a link to the opinion.

I don’t think this will affect drones being operated under part 107.

I regret that there are no likes to give to that post, TF, thanks!