Video progress report!

[Tomstoy2]

Glad to hear that, Jerry. You're going to love it.

A couple of things. When you download the driver, it's a .rare file so you'll need a winzip to recognize it, or not.
After rebuilding my computer I had to download the driver today for my wkm. They finally had the .rare zip and a .exe that worked flawlessly.

Don't forget to set magnetic declination on the gps. A sign it's not correct is it will toilet bowl in a hover.

If you get stuck, you got my number, just give me a buzz.

[sutty]

Well it is not as interesting as I'd hoped, but you should be able to tell when the automatic HD ERs kick in, especially if you turn the sound up a bit. They are much more aggressive sounding and spectacular in real life, but there you go, I did my best to capture it for you guys.

Once again apologies for the diabolical focus of the Bloggie. How they make any money at all I have no idea when they can sell junk like this.



Did you think I was brave letting the 600 plummet to earth like that as a test, lol. I do, I was myself. Just kidding, actually I had faith, and felt quite calm.

Well though it works, sadly it is not for me, as I said elsewhere it is just too high.


Cheers

Sutty

[jperkosk]

Impressive, Andy
Haven't gotten mine commissioned yet, but I will feel the same about 50' limit. Was flying around my 600N today and definitely my flying space / comfort level combination falls in the 10-15m range for a 600N, not above 15m

[jperkosk]

Some progress on my FPV platform. Got the 3-blade 8x4.5 props mounted on my HPQ1 450-sized quad for higher lift (stock are 2-blade 8 inchers), front ones in red and rear ones in black, readjusted CoG a bit, and what difference it made!!! The quad no longer feels short-breathed carrying GoPro in the housing, the red propellers make LoS orientation possible to about 20m out, and I even had many 5-10 sec spells of looking at the video monitor while flying . It helped that we had a very calm day today, the winds under 15 kph most of the time .

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcqeoCXyVVE[/ame]

Next step: installation of DJI Naza controller with GPS. hopefully to be completeded by the next weekend.

[jperkosk]

Final achievement of the busy weekend, GoPro Hero2 new ProTune mode test. It's allegedly cinematic quality video introduced for the upcoming Hero 3 (and made available as firmware upgrade for Hero 2 as well) with much higher bitrate (not to be confused with frame rate, higher bitrate means just less video compression). Turns out to be a complete BS claim, as suspected the optics on GPH2 is not really up to the task, so no matter what you do on the processing side you can't improve much. Two hugely negative side effects of ProTune turned on:

1. In 1080p mode the narrow angle of view option disappears. You can only select Wide (big fisheye) and Medium (small fisheye). Narrow angle still available in normal (non ProTune) mode.
2. As the bitrate grows, and the SD card is still FAT32, the <2GB file limit kicks in. My 8min flight videos got split in 2 files . As I can't see any quality improvement, I'm switching the ProTune off in a hurry!!!

Sample flight video of TR600N, shot with ProTune on, 1080p/30fps, medium field of view, judge the quality by yourself. Andy, as a bonus I'm doing two ERs with CP2 (unfortunately still pre-HD). First half-ass (too far out and possibly not enough aileron before flipping CP2 on) @0:48, then I brought it closer and did another one @1:00. This is FB bird, so response is quick, but not dramatic (still quicker than FBL SK720), will probably get quicker after MB FBL conversion.


[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxycXQ6lxaw[/ame]


[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbirw89pI6c[/ame]

[Tomstoy2]

I read about that myself, but didn't bother with it. I find the quality of the vids is just fine as is, plus, like you said, with the H3 black it's probably more geared for that.

Dude, in you vid with the quad, you got some serious vibration issues there! Have you balanced those new props?
You're going to love that Naza!

[rapidgaz]

Originally Posted by sutty

Yeah, won't be too long before you have them nailed. They were already looking pretty good. Funnily enough I was practicing those too yesterday on the 550, but they didn't come out as well as yours.

Today I binned the 250, so then went out with the 450. When I came in to switch helis I grabbed the hatcam. Managed 3 packs before the rain came, and sent me back inside, but I can't be bothered video processing packs 2 & 3. Firstly because they are very similar, and secondly because I recorded it upside down, and I have to hold my lap top upside down whilst I decide where to crop it, and I just cba.

Uploaded Pack 1 to youtube upside down, and turned it over on youtube, which I only found out today that you could do.



Cheers

Sutty

Bloody hell sutty nice flying, really enjoyed.

[jperkosk]

Maidened my 300X today
Did absolutetly nothing to it, flew it straight out of the box. Just took the DX8 settings out of the manual and punched them into my DX18 (well, preserving my preferred switch layout, of course), bound it, and did pre-flight checks described in the manual. Don't even know what mode the BX (or AR7200BX) is in .

Beast X is amazing!!! If 130X is way more predictable than mCPx, the 300X more than doubles that. It actually flies better than the FB 450, albeit feels a bit less powerful:

[ame]http://youtu.be/81Nkekv9DtQ[/ame]

[jperkosk]

Originally Posted by rapidgaz

Bloody hell sutty nice flying, really enjoyed.

Told you a couple of times that he was getting really good...

[jperkosk]

And some more of 130x flying today, on camera this time:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm-306jhEg4[/ame]

[sutty]

Cheers guys, I appreciate the nice comments.

Welcome to the world of the MicroBeast Jerry. They're just awesome aren't they. Enjoyed both your videos. As a matter of interest, not that you need to know by the sounds of it, but I am pretty sure the default for the 300X is Tx mode. So you can go ahead and alter the travel adjusts and expo if you like, though it doesn't look or seem like you'll need to at the moment, as it seemed to be flying pretty good right off the bat.

Cheers

Sutty

[jperkosk]

Mrs. P saw the aerial video test results over my shoulder last weekend, and it called her attention (she runs a real estate agency for living). Said she had a customer selling the prime-location lot for a 20-story apartment building that she would like an overflight video of. Closed the deal, went out, taped in on my quad, did some basic editing, passed it through YT de-shaking algorithm (the wind was quite gusty yesterday so the video came out too shaky), delivered the finished product to the happy customer and received the payment in a currency not suitable for PG-rated forum :

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OMb3PfwS0s[/ame]

Tom, your videos might be much better, but have you managed to sell any yet?

[Tomstoy2]

Sell them? Hell, can't get people to watch them! Just kidding of course.

However, my leaf blowing service is taking off! Seems lots of people are like me and have annoying neighbors who park and leave their cars in front of their houses.

[sutty]

Argggh.

Well done for making a sale though.

Cheers

Sutty

[Tomstoy2]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=pCKyJfHJFlA

[jperkosk]

Will try to get it embedded for you :

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCKyJfHJFlA&feature=player_detailpage[/ame]

When embedding fails, I found out the easiest way is to go to your video on YT, right click on it, select "copy video URL" and then paste it here on Helifreak as a normal link.

Very nice place, Tom, glad you had a blast. Was interesting to watch the gimbals stabilization while you were carrying the the hexa around the house

Just ordered myself a F550 kit with GPH2 sized gimbals and everything for Xmas, I think it'll keep me entertained with FPV project at least for another year, before I decide if I want to go any further with it.

I just got into Jack's neiborhood again, will be here almost 2 weeks, but he's not answering PMs. Hope he's not getting worse

[sutty]

How could you tell what the gimbals were doing? The stabalisation of the video, however it was done, seemed like youtube, was fixing it all up anyway. Couldn't see what was left for the gimbals. Didn't even know the gimbals did that. How does that work then? I've obviously been missing something with all this gimbal talk. I need to know for when it's my turn.

Cheers

Sutty

[Tomstoy2]

Boy, did boobtube ever screw that one up! Here's a better copy. If you look close you can see the gost flames on the Fatboy tank.

Sut, all a gimbal does is to stabilize the camera while the Hexa moves around. My WKM controls the gimbal stabilization, but it's pretty poor at it.
A good independant stabilizer for a gimbal costs aroud $300 by itself, and even then it's pretty dificult to get set up properly.
Before I ever spend that for a stabilizer I would need a good gimbal worth the expense of putting it on. Mine is just a cheap piece of crap. Don't regret getting it, as I realized it was going to get hurt in the beginning. No sence spending $800 when you are just starting off.

I changed to APC 10"x3.8 props and this was the first test of those. The jury is still out on them. I'll do some more flying during Thanksgiving holiday to see how I really like them, that and some more fine tuneing on the gimbal itself as it's still moving too fast.

WKM has a new firmware upgrade specifically aimed at allowing a Hexa to fly with a motor out, so I'll be installing that too.

[sutty]

Thanks Tom, No video link for the unstabalised version though, so I would enjoy seeing that too if you could put it up. Pity youtube can't do that and also crop to a smaller size, because if it did that as well I think that would be pretty good. I looked at trees and things, whilst the frame was moving around pretty good, and they were very stable.

As for the gimbals, I didn't realise they stabalised the camera in that way, as I thought that would be a required part of the flying experience, but when I think about it this would hardly apply to multi-rotors and even on single rotor I guess you would need it to stll look forward when tipped forward for fff. Aileron might be a different matter perhaps. Not sure, but it's interesting.

Cheers

Sutty

EDIT: Found it Tom. Looks pretty good without youtube's efforts at fixing it up. Enjoyed it very much. Here it is for others.



Cheers again.

Sutty

[jperkosk]

When YT does post production vibration removal, the algorithm seems very rudimentary, some sort of averaging without any intent to detect the content.

Hence, while the moving image gets stabilized, the editing add-ons like titles start floating. It actually is very funny to see your titles float. Tom added titles twice to the scene of carrying the hexa and there wasn't much of the floating, so YT stabilization wasn't there or it almost ignored the scene.

The image moves quite a bit around as he carries the bird, but there is not much tilting, so unless he managed to shake it while holding it perfectly level, there was a gimbal stabilization active there. DJ has a 2-axis gimbal stabilization in their system (it's present on Naza-M as well ) that sends signals to camera mount servos to counter the multicopter movements in aileron and elevator axis, uses the same gyros as for flight stabilization.