Hi guys,

   I was asked to come film in avoriaz, france to film for the volcom rail jam, video above. 

   I have flown in snow storms and temperatures down to minus 10 with no problems, but i discovered on this day is the dangers of "freezing fog".   You can see from the video that it was only snowing a little, wind was gentle and it was a positively warm 5 degrees. I thought this was going to be a good day to get the most out of my hexa and show people what we can achieve using a drone.

   However, on my first flight after just a couple of minuets i was in real trouble. I was at full power and coming down. Luckily i was near my landing zone and i managed to make a hard controlled landing. Normally i can fly for 20 mins no problem so was a little perplexed at my loss of power.

  A quick inspection revealed the problem. A thick layer of ice on the underside of the props. My drone hovers at about 60 percent throttle, but with just a millimetre of ice on the bottom of each prop i can't even take-off! In hindsight it was an obvious danger, but be warned the dangers of freezing fog.

Unfortunately the weather got worse and my first flight was the only shot used in the video edit, they used as their intro. I was disappointed  but the clients were happy,and impressed that i flew at all in the conditions. I have been asked to com and do the tour next winter perhaps!

   What i need now is a solution to freezing props. I know that real choppers use heated blades, but i can't see that being available to us for a while. I think if i had a heated cabin and 2 hexa's flying in rotation with pre heated props that it might be possible.  If anyone's got any ideas i'll happily test them....

   Thanks tristan

Hi guys, i'm trying to develop a platform that auto follows mountain sports, such as skiing. i first started with ardupilot but found it to unreliable and spent to long tuning, i since switched to zero uav's YS-X6 as the main flight controller. With this FC the main aim of auto follow is achieved, but there is limitations, the main one being the camera controls are not taken into account, the head of the craft follows me, but at times you want the camera to automatically look straight down, for example when your stopped and it's hovering right over head, for this reason am now reintegrating apm into the system for it's camera gimbal operations. But what i need is the apm planner running on android on my s3  so i can auto update apm with my location, then using apm planners "point camera here" function, i should get apm to point the camera at me whilst the YS-X6 fc fly's the drone on auto follow.....

    If any one else out there is doing anything on tracking, or getting the planner on android i'd love some help!!!

Here is a link to my first attempt at following myself snowboarding  https://vimeo.com/58317994

Thanks tristan