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Practice regaining your orientation while flying with this indoor drone exercise

2/16/2017

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When flying a symetrical drone, it is really easy to lose your orientation relative to the drone.  There are ways to fix this like turning on an intelligent flight mode or hitting return to home to get your drone back safely and you should practice using the return to home feature at least once in a controlled way so you know how it works.  But lets say you want to keep your drone "on target" and filming, then the only thing to do is to regain your orientation.  Practicing this with your photo rig is certainly one way to do it, but you might also consider using a $20 CX-10D and the following practice exercise.  It can be done inside or outside.  
Picture
The CX-10D with altitude hold and a center sticked throttle
  1. I really like that this tiny thing has a controller that works in a similar way to the Phantom and other high end photography drones.  To make it take off, you hit the button that looks like the up trim button (the down part of that toggle makes it auto land).  The CX-10d will lift off and hover 2-3 feet above the ground.  
  2. Normally having a tiny drone is a disadvantage because it is easy to quickly lose sight of it.  In this case, that is exactly what we want to have happen.  The first time you do this, start with the drone about 5 feet away from you.  Use the yaw (meaning the left-right movement of the left stick) and give it a nice spin for a few seconds and let it randomly stop somewhere. 
  3. Work on regaining control by learning how to detect its orientation with small movements using the right stick (the one that controls all the forward-backward-left-right motion).  Try and use as little motion as necessary to figure out how to get the rear end of the drone to face you.  In real life with your expensive rig,  making big movements might be actually making your drone move farther away from you!
  4. Start the random spinning farther and farther from you until you can confidently regain control of your drone.
Tips:  Small movements work best.  If you fly it forward and you could not learn anything about its orientation, try and fly it the opposite direction just so you aren't losing any ground.  

I used to have an affiliate link to banggood to buy this but I have had an issue twice already and I just can't recommend them anymore.  You should be able to get them off Amazon and Ebay with no problem, just make sure you get the CX-10D.
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