I have done nothing on the aerial photography front for awhile now and needed an excuse to go fly again so I ordered the DJI iOSD from UAVproducts.com (or available on Amazon if you prefer that). I plan on using this to orient myself to my home location and get a more accurate read on battery voltage while I am flying. In case you don't know, it overlays your FPV feed with data from your onboard flight controller (the Naza) and has a bunch of useful stuff on it. Think of it like a heads up display in an advanced aircraft! My friend Ian has had the iOSD for awhile now and has nothing but good things to say about it, so I had to try it out! More on this when I get it. I live in Haiku on the island of Maui and it can be really humid here. I kept opening up my hard protective case to find a layer of dew all over my Phantom. To solve this problem, I ordered a bunch of silca packets and I drop three of them into the case every month or two and it seems to have solved the moisture problem! You should be able to get these anywhere, but I ordered mine from Amazon because I order everything from Amazon!! Here is a picture of the packaging as well as a link. These are great if you are in a humid place or plan on visiting a humid place and want to avoid a rusted gimbal like mine (although it still works perfectly!). Another awesome purchase I can now easily recommend to Hubsan X4 owners is the 5 pack of extra batteries offered on Amazon for around $20. They have more capacity than the stock pack and you can really tell - it seems like it flies forever! These are 380mah and take a bit longer to charge on the stock charger, but you can easily make a hookup to use your existing charger if you want a better charge. Luckily these are only 1 cell so they don't need to be balanced. With the recent price drop of the Hubsan X4, throwing in 5 additional batteries is something to consider if you want to be able to fly for what seemed like a solid hour or more. Lots of practice. These batteries are a bit bigger, but you can still squeeze them in. I would stop flying as soon as you get your voltage warning (blinking lights) to prevent them from puffing up. If they puff, I am not sure they would still fit. I took my extra batteries, my hubsan x4, and my two boys and went to a playground. It is a challenging place to fly and a great training ground to improve your RC skills. I wanted to get some cooler pictures, but I had to fly and take the picture at the same time so I could not really get the pictures I wanted but figured I would post them up here anyway.
Comments
There is nothing that can help you more in aerial photography than having a good background in remote control airplanes and helicopters. If you are new to RC vehicles and have developed an interest in aerial photography, you have probably felt a little confused or overwhelmed the first time you take the controls on your new quadcopter. Many people like to run before they walk and they immediately start flying their expensive Phantom or other advanced copter before they have developed enough RC flight skills. Do not be fooled by the amazing GPS stability these offer you, you still need to be a good pilot! If you are just getting into aerial photography and have your eyes set on a Phantom, you should budget in a micro quad for training. I really like the Hubsan X4 because it is cheap (sometimes as low as $35 on Amazon!!) and is challenging to fly. If you master the Hubsan X4, the more advanced copters used in aerial photography will be a breeze to fly! I have written several blog posts with some different tips and techniques for learning to fly and recently conglomerated all of these into a short eBook in case you do not feel like going back through my blog. Basically, It is just short collection of 10 different exercises to practice over 7-14 days to quickly improve your line of sight flying. If you follow the program, you will be ready to safely fly your DJI Phantom or other advanced photography drone via line of sight. Once you have mastered line of sight flying, you will be ready for FPV as well. The underlying lessons in the book are simple - they walk you through flying tail in and progress through nose in forward flight and advanced maneuvers. If you want to start capturing really cool aerial content, you really have to work on your RC skills. There are also many other things you can do with your new found RC talents like exercise your dog (See the youtube video below). This short book is $2.99 but most of the content is available elsewhere on my blog if you don't want to buy it. If anyone has other practice routines they used to improve their flying, please post them in the comment section so others can learn from you as well!! I use my RC skills to exercise my big white dog because he loves trying to chomp my RC stuff. This is also a great way to improve your skills because it becomes so dynamic. This can get a big expensive if you are just learning to fly so I recommend this once you have gotten pretty good at fast forward flights and figure 8's. My dog is old and lazy so a 5 minute session of full bore running after this usually makes him sleep all day!! If you happen to watch the video below, you will notice he managed to shoot it down once but the Hubsan X4 just kept on flying without any damage. I really do love this little quadcopter. I am always on the look out for stuff to do with my remote control toys, and I am sure many of you have discovered this one already but I figured I would make a brief post about one of my favorite things to do with my Hubsan X4 micro quadcopter - Exercising my dog. I have two dogs and one of them is a long distance jogger and the other is more like a football sprinter and refuses to even attempt to run farther than about 100 yards. However, he would gladly chase an RC truck like my beloved Revo until his legs fell off but the tires were getting a bit expensive and it was much easier for him to catch. This is where the little Hubsan x4 comes in - it flies and he can't catch it unless I mess up! It is only marginally more expensive than revo tires and adds to my RC skill set every time I fly. If you need to improve your RC skills AND exercise your dog, I recommend you get a Hubsan X4 immediately! In the following video, I thought he chomped it pretty good and broke it but turns out he did not, merely a flesh wound (and maybe a new plastic shell soon..). If you have any videos exercising your pet with a flying RC drone, please send it my way! |
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