Daniel Riley over at rctestflight resurrects his two year old giant foamy and puts Ardupilot on a Pixhawk on it.
Compass calibration might be easier before putting it into this plane!
Mark Harrison's Posts (109)
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Obviously staged, but a fun way to advertise sunscreen!
http://www.digitaltrends.com/health-fitness/seagull-drone-poops-sunscreen-on-kids/
Picture this: You're out enjoying a sporting event, just minding your own business. All of a sudden a 2.7-pound DJI Phantom 3 drone falls from the sky and beans you squarely in the head. What do you do? You file a lawsuit.
Idiot comments he has "zero explanation" and believes he "acted in the safest way possible."
Woman responds, "oh that's OK then." No, actually she's suing.
Probably everyone who hangs around diydrones is familiar with Eric Cheng, who has done as much as anyone to pioneer drone photography as a modern day art form.
He's written a book about it, and EastBay RC has reviewed it here:
http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2015/10/book-review-aerial-photography-and.html
executive summary: it's great!
With the tagline "Design Cinematic Shots like a Pro", DJI has released a firmware upgrade with several new features that push them further along in the autonomous flight area.
- Waypoints
- Point-of-Interest
Follow Me (Phantom 3 only) - Home Lock
- Course Lock
Some of these features will of course be familiar to long-time diy-droners... it will be interesting to see DJI's videographer-centric take on these.
More details here... I've got everything downloaded and installed, and will have a report later today.
http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2015/09/intelligent-navigation-interesting.html
Stealing a march on Amazon, Lending Club is testing cash delivery via drone.
"The Loan Drone would provide two things that borrowers love: speed and cold hard cash. While getting a transfer into your bank account is nice, getting a wad of $100 bills delivered to your doorstep in less than 60 minutes is very compelling."
Observant readers may recognize Long time DIY Drones member Andreas Oesterer's handiwork involved!
I don't know any more than what 777BlueAngel notes on his Youtube page:
Showtime Nandlstadt 2015 - Harry Potter
Not only the kids loved Dietmar Metz's radio controlled Harry Potter.
Actually it's 3DR's rather sane Colin Guinn, who did an excellent job presenting his material and seemed to impress Chairman Lamar Smith.
Colin Guinn, an executive with 3D Robotics, released the unmanned aerial vehicle during a hearing on the subject of drone development, much to the amazement of the committee’s chairman, Representative Lamar Smith (R., Texas).
“I was hoping you’d fly it around the whole room — not just one location,” Smith said after the drone landed.
“You said no haircuts!” Guinn joked back. “We could have arranged that.” A disappointed Smith admitted he set those parameters before the hearing.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/396874/drone-flies-through-congressional-hearing-andrew-johnson
"Golden Globes viewers may get to enjoy some unusual camera angles of the event this year.
A drone will be used to film celebs on the red carpet at the awards show Sunday at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. DJI Global is providing the drone."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/golden-globes-drone-be-used-762555
I dusted off theNoodle Copter last night for a quick flight with reporter Joe Vazquez of KPIX news. They had a story based on the new knowbeforeyoufly.org site.
It's great to see these kinds of guidelines being made available to beginning flyers who might not know the parameters of safe and legal flight. Hope this helps avoid the "Mayhem and Bloodshed in the Skies" after-Christmas posting!
Couldn't get the video to embed (oh woe, all sites with custom flash players!), but the video link is here.
http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2014/12/eastbay-rc-joins-faa-in-encouraging.html
(update: now with beginner-friendly title!)
It seems that the argument is between those who want to require a commercial pilots license and those who believe a private pilots license is sufficient for flying quadcopters.
"Enabling private pilots to work commercially would set a precedent, the inspectors wrote, boxing in the FAA while it developed a permanent set of drone regulations. They also noted that private pilots are twice as likely to be involved in fatal accidents as commercial pilots."
Story here.
Reported instances of headshaking, sighs, looks of general annoyance on the uptick.
Drone Photographer Extraordinare Eric Cheng has been a long-time friend of EastBay RC, and he kindly invited me to the DJI Inspire product launch.
It's an impressive unit and looks to be competitive in the "prosumer" aerial photography market.
I shot the video above, and have collected some notes over on EastBay RC.
http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2014/11/eastbay-rc-attends-dji-inspire-launch.html
With a special appearance by celebrity drone enthusiasts!
NEW YORK, October 27, 2014 – Graphic video from an unknown drone is uploaded on the internet on an all-new episode of South Park titled “The Magic Bush,” premiering Wednesday, October 29 at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on Comedy Central.
Cartman and Butters get their hands on a drone and can’t resist the urge to take it for a spin around the neighborhood.
http://southpark.cc.com/blog/2014/10/27/episode-1805-the-magic-bush-press-release
I'm sure it will be up to their usual high standards of good taste!
http://petapixel.com/2014/10/27/ok-gos-new-music-video-will-blow-mind-fancy-drone-camerawork/
"Brown reports that the entire video was done in one continuous shoot, and that it took 50 or 60 tries to get the final version."
[...]
"For the final shot, which features umbrellas making up “pixels” of a giant human-powered display, was shot by flying the special camera drone about half a mile into the air and controlling it manually and with GPS."
[...]
"During the filming of the video in Japan a couple of months ago..."
- Aerial Display System with Floating Pixels
- Aerial Display System with Floating Projection Screens
- Aerial Display System with Marionettes Articulated and Supported by Airborne Devices
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/themargin/2014/08/22/disney-may-use-drones-in-theme-park-entertainment/
Mayhew, in an interview conducted by email, said a user on an Internet forum reported him after seeing flight statistics online. One video by Mayhew says a drone reached an altitude of more than 3,600 feet.
“The local FAA office contacted me via certified letter. I responded by phone and had a good conversation with the front-line manager,” he said.
In a statement, the FAA said it had investigated a report that an unidentified drone operator flew an unmanned aircraft up to an altitude of 4,200 feet northwest of the airport.
“The FAA spoke to the operator who agreed to fly the unmanned aircraft below 400 feet, which is the maximum altitude for model aircraft flights, according to FAA guidance,” the agency said.
Mayhew said he is now limiting the altitude of his drone flights.
http://atlanta.cbslocal.com/2014/07/03/high-altitude-drone-flight-prompts-faa-warning-at-airport/
Forbes Magazine has an update on the recently posted fireworks video, indicating that it may have been flown in violation of a Coast Guard established "safety zone."
"The video’s caption indicates that the flight took place in West Palm Beach, Florida. If it was a large Fourth of July celebration, the Coast Guard likely established a safety zone....
"There’s no way to know when the video was taken, but most major fireworks demonstrations will have a Coast Guard established safety zone. The punishment for violating a safety zone is a whopping $40,000 fine and for willful violations it is a Class D felony, punishable by at least 5, but no more than 10 years in prison!"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/07/04/video-shows-drone-flying-through-fireworks/
Remote control drone carrying drugs crash-lands at Wheatfield Prison
A sophisticated plan to land drugs into Wheatfield Prison using a state-of-the-art remote control drone has been foiled after it crash landed in the yard.
But before prison officers could retrieve it one inmate managed to pull the drugs off the device and swallow them.
The incident happened at around 11am yesterday morning when the device, called a quad-copter because it has four rotors, was being landed in the yard.
[...]
An digital memory card onboard the mini-helicopter recorded the exact route the device took and also shows the smugglers carried out a trial run before the failed attempt.
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The Turnigy 9XR Pro has been released by HobbyKing. I've been beta testing it, and it seems like a pretty good radio. Here's a couple of pages of information I put together on it, including a video tutorial done in cooperation with the development team.
http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2014/06/welcome-to-turnigy-9xr-pro-video.html
http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2013/10/hobbyking-9xr-pro-notes.html
It's based on the much-admiredSky9x board which has been discussed here before. I'm excited to see another er9x based radio on the market. It's fully open sourced, ARM Cortex M3 based, and has all the nifty features you would expect. It has several open connection sets on the board, and was designed by skynorth to be open to hardware hacking as well as software hacking.
It's interesting to see how much open source development is moving to ARM.
Here's the blurb:
diydrones moderator Mark Harrison (me!) will be appearing on the popular CrashCast podcast today, Wednesday April 30, at 8:00pm Central time.
A 30 year veteran of the Open Source Software (OSS) world (he release his first open source program in 1982), he will be talking about his experiences with RC OSS such as OpenTX/er9x and Ardupilot Mega. In addition he'll be presenting his views about the interesting challenges being faced in the relatively new Open Source Hardware (OSH) world, such as cloning and developer support.
You can listen to the live stream, download the podcast, and access the show notes here:
I had originally planned pure tech (summary: open source RC = Great) but topically I'll be touching on the recent diydrones thread regarding the pixhawk clones and how this site handles potentially controversial topics .(summary: with grace and style).
So give it a listen, and check back Thursday morning to see if I'm still a moderator here!
