I've been playing around with the drone when I can over the last few weeks. Unfortunately it needs relatively windless conditions and a reasonable level of light to work, and it's hard to find that when I'm in the office most days and the infamous Ekka Westerlies are blowing.
Flying the drone always felt a bit odd but I couldn't figure out why. It all clicked into place when I read a post online that pointed out that you're not controlling the individual components of the drone like you are with a model plane. You're not increasing the throttle or tilting an aerilon - instead you're using the application that you have on your android device to tell the drone what you want it to do, and it then does its best to carry out that action. You don't increase the throttle to make it move faster, you tell it to move faster in a certain direction and the various bits of computing power make the adjustments to tilt and propeller speed to accelerate it. This is why it's so intuitive, but also why it can be weird if you're used to breaking down these things into individual components.
It also means that you can download and use different apps to fly the same device. Here's me trying to figure out a new app, as taken from the drone. Ah - so that's the camera button
'
Unfortunately recorded video is still jerky and hard to watch as I'm not very smooth in my movements. If you fly the drone at speed and then tell it to stop suddenly it needs to tilt backwards to make that stop, so I'm slowly learning to decelerate it in a way that doesn't leave the viewer feeling seasick. I'm getting there though and still aim to chase mountain bikers through the woods. I just don't want to be this guy...
Don't think I'll be doing any wedding shoots any time soon....
Flying the drone always felt a bit odd but I couldn't figure out why. It all clicked into place when I read a post online that pointed out that you're not controlling the individual components of the drone like you are with a model plane. You're not increasing the throttle or tilting an aerilon - instead you're using the application that you have on your android device to tell the drone what you want it to do, and it then does its best to carry out that action. You don't increase the throttle to make it move faster, you tell it to move faster in a certain direction and the various bits of computing power make the adjustments to tilt and propeller speed to accelerate it. This is why it's so intuitive, but also why it can be weird if you're used to breaking down these things into individual components.
It also means that you can download and use different apps to fly the same device. Here's me trying to figure out a new app, as taken from the drone. Ah - so that's the camera button
'
me trying to show someone else how it works (Hi Marin! Bought one yet?)
and a few scenic shots of the neighbours yards...
Unfortunately recorded video is still jerky and hard to watch as I'm not very smooth in my movements. If you fly the drone at speed and then tell it to stop suddenly it needs to tilt backwards to make that stop, so I'm slowly learning to decelerate it in a way that doesn't leave the viewer feeling seasick. I'm getting there though and still aim to chase mountain bikers through the woods. I just don't want to be this guy...
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