Blogs

A complete home entertainment system for FPV, but with the same old analog NTSC video.


For someone who reads rcgroups.com & diydrones.com, there was very little new to see, besides the real life equivalent of the photos.


 Thought that was very Silicon Valley: a stock reference board for a standard set-top box with the standard server room BNC, RCA, RJ-45, connectors untouched, all to send very delayed video over LTE.




The most hated vehicle there.  It was really wobbly.



 Some guy trying to get a rover to work.  Unfortunately, it only rolled a few feet, very slowly.


A chassis that would normally cost $200 on hobbyking was $20 at a garage sale.  Could desperately use something like that.


 Everyone congregated on a south field, while a north field shown in previous videos was empty.


Standard quad copters.


 Some ghetto indoor vehicles.  Marcy 2 was a complete disaster, as a vibration problem, wind, & uneven ground screwed up her indoor navigation sensors.



 3D Robotics dominated the attendance.


There was very little autonomous flying, only a few times someone would go into loiter mode or a lost radio link would send a DJI Phantom into the trees because some arcane loss of signal setting wasn't set right.  No-one replicated any Marco Robustini demos. 


The stock 3D Robotics Iris hovering far from the trees looked like it wasn't going anywhere, but it did look twitchy.  1 DJI guided black sheep was hovering motionless near the trees.  It drifted a long way, as it tightly tracked the drift of GPS near the trees.  Still looks like perfect calibration, perfect prop balancing, perfect vibration damping, & satellite visibility is a big part of the results.


Despite the improvements in sensors & software making autonomous flying much more accessible than years ago, there was little interest in it.  After all the expense & calibration, people would rather fly manually than program a route & watch it play back.  There was certainly no interest in making a timelapse movie from 1 place in the sky.