The thing that disappointed us was how banal the aircraft were. Our focus was always making the hopelessly unstable stable through software & here our government was flying tried & true, statically stable gliders, pushers, & R-maxes. It was hardly the crazy stunt that Ares-1 was.
Sadly, we were depressed about the Air Force. Last year seemed to be a dead cat bounce driven by hope, but the most basic thing never happened with the Air Force & now we're winding down again.
We're not completely dead yet, but we conceded flying UAV's on the golf course is never going to be the happy escape that it was. That was really our #1 weapon against the reality of getting old, forsaking love & all the other stuff in the pursuit of feminism. There was but 1 way our hobby could fail & it failed as hard as it could. Thought it would come back for a year but it wasn't possible.
Nothing we did that year in place of flying actually comes across as enjoyable, just because it was a year in which progress came & went.
Indeed, the most trouble we ever got into was trying to forsake love by spending all our time flying UAV's on a golf course.
HELIX ANTENNA CONTINUES
Open drain hack to get the uBlox to work. It needs configuration commands every time it starts.
Ublox strapped in. Haven't seen any difference between this & the patch antenna on the bench.
Rebuilt yet again.
1 day later. PID calibration required for manual attitude control. The human takes it to levels the autopilot never did. This time, we're shooting to make attitude control permanent.
NOW WE HAVE CAMERA #4.
1080p finally got cheap enough to upgrade from the $100 Canon A's we were crashing to a $190 Sanyo, our very 1st 1080p camera.
The fixed lens & electronic image stabilization shouldn't break in a crash like the telescoping lenses & mechanical image stabilization did. Unfortunately this camera has a rolling shutter. Still photos suck. It gives up a lot of the picture fidelity of the $100 cameras in the name of HD video. Video is recorded at 13Mbps which is not enough for water.
The stock battery dies after only 40 minutes. Buy several aftermarket batteries.
Wasted no time in building a battery eliminator, but this circuit ended up heavier than a stock battery.
Continuous shooting mode requires reducing the compression quality, but haven't noticed any difference between compression qualities.
The battery charger blew up immediately due to a stray solder ball. Be sure to open it up if it rattles. Fortunately, managed to salvage it.
Now some ground footage in case you're in the market.
Looks like Dean successfully blocked Hobbyking from selling clones of its connectors. Ended up using those for all our gadgets & now the price is back to income tax levels.
Comments
Keep up the good work comrade.