Video progress report!

[Luke Warmwater]

[jperkosk]

Originally Posted by Tomstoy2

Just got back from my first FULL FPV flight, take off to landing! Pretty proud of myself right now.

Can't cook it to boobtube until after work so look for it tomorrow.

Been spying on topless neighbor's wife again, Tom?

[Tomstoy2]

"you can have her,
I don't want her.
She's too fat
for me"

[jperkosk]

No can do without at least Naza on my quad I should get it for Thanksgiving and then verify if she's worth the hassle of taking her off your hands

[Tomstoy2]

Ok, so here it is. My first full fpv vid done all under the goggles, take off to landing.

To begin with,,, you all have watched me thru all my trials and tribulations venturing into the darkest of the dark arts for close to a year now. You have seen failure after failure, going thru vairous equipment and set-up's, and witnessed my triumpth's. Thank you everyone for your support and patience.

I'm now pretty well versed in what works and what doesn't. I'm now working on my second 100 flights, and the confidence level is now soaring.
Discovering what works, getting the set-up correct, and pure persistance has paid off, big time!

This I can say unequivocally, the flight controller is the key to the kingdom! Without it, all is for naught. In this department DJI Innovations shines! Absolutely blows my mind what the Chinese have done. It is what Skookum is to fbl, but really more thought out. Considering that they are just a little over a year old they have come out with, damn I don't really know now, what, 15 or so updates in firmware? No other company had such dedication toward their product, period.

Enough of my rambling, let's get on with my impression's.

My personal experience, under the goggles,,, it's just too cool! Nothing beats it.
For me, I find it totally relaxing. Others don't, but for me, I don't know, maybe because of my flying background, mixed with my inability to do that for decades, but it is as close to the real thing that you can get without dying in a crash!
Had a flight instructer tell me once, " In the event you find you are going to crash, fly as far into it as possible ".

You do your preflight check, make sure everything is set correctly, push the count down timer on the tx, strap on the goggles and power up the motors.

Lots and lots of people have trouble with lift off, even flying line of sight. These things are, in my case, 6 times the gyros and accelerators and none of them like to stabilize fully until out of ground effect.
I hope you have noticed my take off's are pretty smooth and controlable. I like to advance the throttle until it get a little light on the skids and do a slight stick stir. This gets things warmed up and somewhat stabilized. Then I advance the throttle and smoothly lift off the ground.

Once in the air, about 2 feet up everything is locked in.
I can then take my time, or not. These things will flat out move if you want them to. They have all the attributes of a heli, minus the 3d stuff, but even then the guys that are into that will amaze you what they can do. I fly a camera ship, I'm not interrested in the sport flying end of it, I have plenty of powerful srh's for that craving.

In the air, the scenery is just a total thrill ride. It's easy for me to just set the altitude I want to be at and then just drive around. Plenty of time to look about without fear and enjoy the ride. If I want to take some time and really examine something, well it's a heli, it hovers in a fixed spot just fine. With gps it will just hold itself there waiting for you to do something, no drifting off, no change in altitude, not corrections, no problem.

Landing is a real trip! it blows me away how easy it is to determine how close you are to the ground. Because you are always seeing what is in front of you your fight controls never change. None of this worrying about reversing stick direction.
What is a little disconcerting is knowing what is behind you and to the side, as you can not see that. Now, if I had a 3 axis gimbal, I could hook up the 3rd axis to my head tracker and just move my head side to side and see. Hmmm, might need to look into that this winter.

My last vid, when I went under the goggles at Southpark to go explore the river over on the other side of the valley, for me, was what it is all about. No longer having the ability to comfortably walk down there, I can now still enjoy and have a whole new perspective of the journey.
Then there is the ability to share it with my friends in high definition! It's not just a solitary adventure anymore, plus I can re-visit the memory anytime I wish.

In short, it's the epitomy of what I ever wanted when I first started this hobby back when I was 5 years old.
I can honestly highly recommend it!!!

So, what's up next? Well, more range, obviously. A better vtx, like the one I ruined, and a better ground station antenna to push the range out to not miles, but tens of miles. This will require a UHF add on to my Futaba, not too expensive, in the 433mw range, plus a ham lisence to keep it legal. Fortunately, I don't need the full ham lisence, just a portion of it. No need to brush up on my Morse code.
A better gimbal, and stabilizer for it.
An OSD so I know the telemetry.
Longer legs, more battery.
That is the immediate agenda.
In the future, I see a larger platform decked out with a nice real camera, like the Sony Nex7, but that is in the future.

So, enough of my hot air. Here is the vid.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viTshDS7eME&feature=player_detailpage[/ame]

[Tomstoy2]

Seems like I got the whole weekend off! So, I'm heading up to the Scottish festival in Estes Park tomorrow. Me and the bud's have a 4000sft party home rented for the weekend. Should be a hell of a lot of fun, ( and one hell of a Tequila hangover )!!!

The boys want me to shoot them on the bikes, ( with the Hexa, that is ). All ride Harley's except 2. Bob rides a damn Suzuki road king looking thing because he has no balls, and my buddy Grant rides one of the sweetest bikes you will ever lay your eyes on, an Excelsior Henderson!
I should get some great shots as the house is on a mountain top over looking the town.

Not looking forward to the drive home Sunday. I'll be a hurting unit for sure.

[jperkosk]

Once again, very impressive, Tom.

Just testing my TR450SE after flashing CP2 with a new, hard deck ready firmware.
Aaah, during the collective setup realized that my oldest CP heli had the pitch off by 3° , so corrected it and now it's an even +/-10°.
Flight uneventful, even the wind wasn't strong, under 15kph today. CP2 with a new firmware working normally, small SL test @ 0:45.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivynh_sKbcI[/ame]

[redbird300]

Fantastic stuff Tom, really fascinating.
Long time since I posted in this thread, well, here we go:
Tried a few more speed runs today at the club field with the TDR, just for fun. First with three sets of Turnigy 40C packs. I had great trouble getting them to 200 km/h.They just couldn't hold the headspeed with max pitch (14 degrees), you could even hear it. The last flight, I used a set of Thunderpower 65C packs. No wind at all, BTW. I don't do this a lot, and the heli is not tuned for real speed, it's still in governor mode for example.

This was the result:



That translates to 147 miles/hour. Need to practice a lot more, and start doing these huge stall turns instead of figure eights. But it's going better slowly. A bit smoother also. The Jlog2 showed peaks of 115 Amps, 4700 Watts and the (real!) RPM was 1850. Not really that much for this kind of speed if you ask me. I love this heli even more now, lol.

Here's the vid of the complete flight:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nTslToNkd4[/ame]

[ragge1]

nice Raf

[Tomstoy2]

Well, I was right, I don't feel so hot today.

Go off work Friday nite and headed up for the Scottish festival. By the time I got there everybody except Grant was passed out. Dumb old farts, anyway.

The festival was as I expected, tons of vendors trying to pedal crap, bad food, expensive beer and some great events.

Got some shots of the light armor jousting. This is really a fun event aimed at skill. Notice on the upper outer corner of the shields a white piece of paper with a red center target in the images below. This is the only area the contestants are allowed to strike. Both charge but only one person is a striker.
A girl won the event with a perfect strike! The sound of the impact is fierce.

The hammer toss was something to behold, crazy bastards all. Like to hurt my shoulders just watching. They were throwing these things out 146+ feet!

Then there was the dogs, and many other events. The most impressive and violent was as you would expect, the heavy armor jousting. As I expected this is a group of absolutly crazy people in full period armor mounted oh huge horses going at it with lances. Many a body tasted the dirt, one guy sent to the hospital.
At what point in life does this look like a fun thing to do?

The place we stayed was quite fantastic! Sitting on top of a peak looking down upon the whole town, no one piece of town could not be observed from any of the 3 decks.

I limited my flying due to consuming too much Scottish whiskey and beer, but did manage to get this vid recorded.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMA53M3oYAA&feature=player_detailpage[/ame]

[wocka_wocka]

Awesome FPV vid back a few Tom.

[Tomstoy2]

Thanks!

[Tomstoy2]

Another backyard fpv flight, testing a rubber band mod to my stupid cheap as sin gimbal. Worked pretty well!.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6db07kDyWNo&feature=player_detailpage[/ame]

[sutty]

Not so much a video progress report, more just a video of Tony Stevens flying at the night fly that we attended on Friday night. For once I managed to have the hat cam nice and lined up, which was surprising since I didn't couldn't see what I was doing. Sadly the focus hunting on the bloggie is as bad as ever. Also surprising, since there shouldn't, couldn't, be anything else it could see. Pathetic, what a waste of space it is. Thank god it was given to me by Sony, if I had paid for it I would be fuming, as opposed to just being a wee bit pissed off.

Something to aim for in terms of progress perhaps. Will be trying the 450 again with the night flying gear very soon.



Cheers

Sutty

[ragge1]

almost crashed my 6HV ,lost orientation at @ 1 min and mananged to save her , was really shaking after that but kept on flying

Compass 6HV Stend 23 september 2012 (5 min 19 sec)

[copterboy]

Good save Ragge and enjoyed watching the flying too

[jperkosk]

Nice save, Ragge !!!

The sign above the warehouse door, "Ragn sells", is it where your handle comes from?

[ragge1]

thanks guys
hehe no Jerry , thats a recycling firm

[Tomstoy2]

My best friend, Greg, came by to help reload my computer today! So, I'm back in business, finally!

Here's the promised " wire incursion' vid that I suffered last week. Only dmage was some busted super-glue joints on my sorry ass'd gimbal.

Hmmm, some things are not working right as before, if you want to view, go to YouTube and search Tomstoy2, sorry about this..



Before he came out today, I decided to test out the new 'crosshair' antenna I picked up for my goggles. I'm happy to report it worked flawlessly!
Unfortunately, flying over the pumpkin patch behind my house, I was a lot lower than I was last time and got the high tension lines between me and the Hexa, resulting in a crash a hell of a lot farther out than I normally fly!
I ended up spending a good 1 1/2 hours wandering thru the pumpkin's looking foir it before I gave up and walked back home.
By this time Greg had arrived, working on my computer and I enlisted his help to look forn the damn thing!
He ended up spoitting it in 10 minutes!!!

To say I was freaked is an understatment.The WKM flight controller is worth over $1000.00 itself, not to mention the cost of everything else!

Damage this time was a lot more. I broke a boom, destroyed 2 props finally, the top mounting plate to my cheap as hell gimball I never recovered and the tv camera that was mounted to this, plus the 850mah 3s battery used to to power the vtx was lost.
In all not to bad, considering!

Lesson learned, not to fly over the high tension lines any more, and to make sure when I go out to range to make sure it's some place free of vegitation that can obscure the Hexa, not to mention I need a 'lost acft buzzer!!!
Damn, I was elated to recover her!

WKM is soon to release an On Screen Display, so I can record the gps coordinates, not to mention the telemetry. Sure would have been handy!

Here is the vid.



Hmmm, some things are not working right as before, if you want to view, go to YouTube and search Tomstoy2, sorry about this..

[Tomstoy2]

Ok, seem to have this working again. Here is yesterday's wreck.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9et1BGyxlM&feature=player_detailpage[/ame]

And, here is last weeks wreck when I smacked the wire.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=UL...yer_detailpage