Today was the day that I have been preparing for the last 6 months.
Here goes my FPV story
Since hearing about some crazy french guys meeting every year at l'Aigle to do things that most people only dream of, I have been hooked to FPV and put a lot of thinking, time (and money ...) into it.
I started with an EasyStar with ailerons, brushless, pan/tilt cam.After a lot of testing and improvements on the RX/VTX/pan tilt servos/..., we were finally ready with a friend to fly it for real in FPV.
It was wonderful but lasted 3min30s as after each of us thinking that the other one was controlling the plane, brought the plane to the ground at high speed . The plane has been rebuild since but I then started to look to safer alternative and realized that I needed :
- a safe trip back home even if the video becomes unusable
- stabilization when hands off the radio
ArduPilot was non of my interest before as I like to fly my plane myself and saw ArduPilot as a playground for waypoints to waypoints navigation and for people who like programming and not piloting. But .. it was now meeting my needs.
I changed plane as well and went for the Skywalker. The Skywalker is a must have if you do not like to think for 2 hours about the layout of your APM/OSD/batteries/ESC/.... It is heavier and therefore faster than the Easystar which is not a good thing for my FPV use but it makes my life simpler in term of maintenance.
Refine ... refine ... refine
I spend countless hours understanding the behavior of the APM in xplane to make sure that it will do what I expect. Thanks to this I manage to find which settings where the most useful and try to adapt them to my real plane (this process is far from being finished). I have been flying as often as possible with no FPV to validate all the behaviors as well.
Then .. the day
Thinking about the year ending, I promise myself that it would be this year or not. Today was planned to be sunny but cold which made it a perfect day. I did a final test by flying once with cam off and tested all modes and then launched again. The plane took some altitude and then I switch to RTL/Loiter and put the glasses on.
The magic began : I could watch the scenery while the APM was doing the job of keeping me safely in the air and bringing me back home when I was lost. I have been able to see all around one of Paris's park : the Eiffel Tower on the horizon, the business district of "la defense",.. me like a small ant on the ground. Wonderful !!
Thanks to you guys, all of what you have done made this possible for me.
Thanks !!
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