I’m glad it’s Friday and we have the weekend to look forward to. I thought I would end the week with some fun images I took last Saturday at Gabby’s birthday party.
I’m not sure Josh is ever going to be a great fielder on some baseball team but he may improve. Fundamental one, keep eyes open. Fundamental two, keep eyes on the ball. 🙂
What ever athletic skills he develops he will get them from Ben’s side of the family. Neither Jeanne or I have much athletic ability.
Gabby is transitioning from sad to happy in this image. Once she saw her Mommy things got happier. Isn’t that the way it is in life. Most of us always feel better when we’re near our Mom. 🙂
And finally, I’ll leave you with an image of my Son Mark. I have taken hundreds of images of Mark over the years and he normally gives me a manufactured smile (say cheese) like Josh does. So I had the camera on him Sunday and he gave me that smile and I didn’t push the shutter. I just waited until he relaxed the fake smile and gave me this look, which I captured. He is a good-looking young man. 🙂
That’s it for today. Not much pontificating or profound thoughts. Just some mindless ramblings and some fun images. 🙂
Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your day and be careful.
What a great day yesterday was. I was scheduled to do training for the bulk of the day but late Tuesday afternoon that got rescheduled. Since I had already blocked off the entire day for training I decided I might as well take the day off and tackle the Phantom wiring job. Not that I couldn’t have found something to do at work but this wiring thing has bugged me for a couple of days and I really didn’t know when I was going to be able to find the time to try it again. It’s just too difficult of a project to start at 8:00 p.m. after work.
So as the image above shows it was a complicated process. I decided that I would rip everything that I had done before out and start from scratch. It started by watching the videos again. Then I found a video that gave me a key piece of information. DJI industries color code their wires different then we do. Their ground wire is always brown and their hot wire is either yellow (most of the time) or sometimes orange. That made a big difference in how I approached the wiring project.
I also decided that I was going to disassemble the Phantom. I was going to take the top off and doing the wiring on the inside to get rid of all that extra cable. I have taken a video class on soldering and I felt I had a good knowledge of what to do and how to do it. So one hour later I have all the screws out except one that just won’t come out and one that has been completely stripped. 😦
By this point I’m pretty frustrated. I did some research on how to get a stripped screw out and then went to Lowe’s and got the tools I needed and a bunch of stuff I didn’t need. Back home I finally got the two remaining screws out and disconnected the GPS system, cut wiring harnesses and began the process of tinning the wires, soldering, connecting, and bundling again. After a couple of hours and retracing my steps I was ready to put the top back on and button it up.
It’s actually a pretty neat package. I never have to worry about a battery for the transmitter as it is now powered by the Phantom’s power supply. The video from camera runs through the Zenmuse Gimbal (which also runs off the Phantom’s power supply) and that is then fed to the transmitter and it sends a signal to the FPV device (which in my case are the FatShark Goggles.) Additionally the IOSD Mini reads flight data from the Cambus and sends it through the video feed to the transmitter and is applied over the view you get with the goggles.
I got it all put back together and then decide to put some new decals on that I had ordered from the same company that sold the immersion transmitter.
So now my Phantom looks pretty patriotic which will be nice around the 4th of July. 🙂
Now for the big moment. It’s sitting there all nice and retouched and I know the wiring is correct so it should work unless I fried the goggles or the transmitter. I powered it up and turned on the goggles and nothing but gray screen. But a few clicks on the channel selector and I started getting fuzz and a few more clicks there it was in glorious color with all the flight data you could ever hope to have and then some. Only one problem! All the data is metric. Meters and kilometers and a bunch of other things I don’t recognize. Well it shouldn’t be a problem. I’m sure there is an easy way to convert to feet and mph. Nope! The website rather arrogantly states that the rest of the world is on the metric system so there is no need to make a conversion fix available.
So it looks like I’m going to have to learn the metric system after all.
Here are the FPV FatShark goggles with the antenna set to the same frequency as the transmitter on the Phantom. It’s pretty cool and a lot easier to fly with these than with a small iPhone screen. 🙂
At one point (I think it was when I stripped the screw) I asked myself what would make this a great day? The answer was to get the wiring all done, the thing put back together and have it work and then take it for a quick flight before the rain came. And that is what happened. There is a video below of a quick flight this afternoon to test everything out and then a merge to a night video I shot on Sunday evening around 9:00 p.m. I hope you enjoy it.
Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your day and be careful.
Oh by the way, the video is about 5 minutes long instead of the 7:20 it shows. I made a mistake so it runs empty screen at the end for two minutes. I’ll fix that when I have some time.
Here are some Common Grackles and a Red-Winged black bird sharing a communal bath. You can click on the image to have a larger image to view. I love how the water drops are all over the image.
I’m taking a PTO (paid time off) today to catch up on some unfinished projects and I’m going to rewire my project on the Phantom to see if I can get things working. I wrote to several sites seeking advice but received no responses so I’ll watch the video again and take it step by step.
I’m not sure gulls can be considered beautiful but I really like this image of this gull. It is one of my favorite shots from the weekend.
Finally I’ll leave you with this lone Common Grackle. I like their coloration and this was taken with the fading light of the day. I’m not a student of wildlife species or a bird watcher for that matter. But I do enjoy taking images of birds. The only reason I know this guy is a Common Grackle is because my friend Andreas correctly named one that I took last year. I called it a Brewer’s Black Bird. 🙂
That’s it for today. Hope the rewiring project is successful. I’ll let you know tomorrow. Enjoy your wet day and be careful. Thanks for stopping by.
No April fools jokes here. Just the facts and nothing but. 🙂
I’ll show you some images from Sunday’s photo run. Jeanne and I like to drive through the country and see the sights and as always looking for photo opportunities. Sunday was mostly about Ring-Billed Gulls. I can’t remember seeing more of them around the area as we did on Sunday. There were hundreds of them at the Basin, the river, the little park just off Kerper Blvd., even at Mud Lake Park they were plentiful. So what’s a person to do but capture some images of the little guys.
As I have documented several times, I am not a wiz when it comes to electronics. I did manage to install the video transmitter on the Phantom 2 and get the goggles to work but they didn’t covey any information other than a visual representation of what the camera was seeing. In other words no flight data. So in my research and watching hours of YouTube videos from people who do know what they are doing I purchased an “immersion 600Mw 5.8ghz transmitter and a IOSD mini device that provides telemetry from the internal guidance of the Phantom. It displays data like direction, altitude, distance, speed, battery power left, and angle of attack. All very useful information.
After buying all the parts and waiting for two weeks the last part came in yesterday. After dinner I watched the video again and then set about installing the device to my Phantom. Everything seemed to go well. I even took my laptop to the work table and replayed the video in steps so that I didn’t make any mistakes. Got it all soldered and put together at 10:15 p.m. Turned everything on and I got nothing! Just gray screen on the goggles and that’s it. Not even any static. I fiddled with it for another 15 minutes, then dejected and demoralized I put everything up, cleaned up and went to bed. Whine!!
This low quality image of a Cardinal is for my friend Ronnie. Yesterday he asked me if I could get some images of a Cardinal. I’ve only seen a couple so far this year but as it happened we saw this guy Sunday. He was far away and back-lit but maybe this will do until I can get a better shot.
Well that’s it for today. I’ve got to do some research and check some of the forums on the internet and see if I can figure out what the heck I did wrong. More to come I’m sure.
Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your day and be careful.
Enjoyable weekend. Gathered lots of material for the blog. So much to show and so little time to show it. Saturday the weather was pretty nice and not much wind so I did something I’ve wanted to do for awhile. I flew both Phantoms at the same time. I ran the Vision 2 up to 385 feet and let it hover there and the took the Phantom with the gimbal up to take some video of it. I was getting a lot of interference from the goggles so I couldn’t tell where the vision 2 was. So after bringing them both down to around 175 feet it was much easier to take some video of the Phantom flying. Kind of cool actually. I’ll show that later in the week.
Ms. Gabby celebrated her birthday Saturday. It was actually on the 26th but her party was on Saturday. With 4 loving Grandparents and 3 doting Uncles she does not want for attention or gifts for that matter. It was hard on Josh watching Gabby get stuff. He has always been the one to open all the presents and have all the attention focused on him and it’s hard to understand for a 3-year-old that wasn’t all for him.
He did end up playing with almost all the presents she got but he was a good sport and handled it pretty well. I told Angie she was the same way when it was Mark’s birthday she would play with his toys before he ever got a chance to play with them.
It was a very nice party and a great dinner.
Thanks for stopping by the blog today. I hope you enjoy your Monday. Be careful.
First, let me apologize for the lack of quality of this image. Both of the subjects are soft focus and there is a lot of motion blur. I debated the entire week about showing this image because it is not up to my standards. Yes, even I do have some standards. 🙂
Anyway aside from the poor quality it is a an amazing image. Their wings actually did touch. The eagle caught a fish the Heron was stalking and the Heron was pi**ed. This is the only time this has happened to me and I couldn’t let it go without showing you.
So, that’s all I got. My cupboard is bare now so I need to replenish my image library this weekend. We also get to celebrate Gabby’s first birthday tomorrow. 🙂
I pitched my project to one of the people I really need to contribute to the success of the project and her answer was YES! So I’ll be talking about the project more in the coming days but I am really excited about it.
That’s it for today. Enjoy your Friday. Thanks for stopping by and be careful.
I missed the opportunity to wish Ms. Gabriella Grace Rolinga special one year old Birthday yesterday. Jeanne and I did get to see her (via Skype) last evening and wished her a Happy Birthday.
Today’s images are all about the ubiquitous Ring-Billed Gull. They are fun to watch and a little tricky to capture images of because of their constant motion and size. They are plentiful at the 16th Street Basin and along the Mississippi.
Yesterday I and several members of our Culture team went to Cedar Rapids and provided lunch for the staff of our new branch. Actually it is a complete make over of our existing bank, but it was a total transformation.
So yesterday was moving day for the staff from the temporary trailer bank to the beautiful new facility that will officially open today. We helped move a few boxes and the provided lots of pizza for the staff and the construction crew who are frantically trying to get things those last things minute things ready for today’s business. We have the opening celebration later in April but they’ll be doing business out of the new building today.
As usual on the way back from Cedar Rapids I was looking for things to capture with my camera. It is such a bleak time of the year for scenery shots. Everything is brown, the trees are bare and what little snow is left is dirty and disgusting.
So it was one of the few times I’ve driven from CR to Maquoketa without a shot. Then I had to go to Cascade yesterday evening for training and normally I’ll see a few deer on the trip. Not a one yesterday. So I was pretty much (well completely) empty-handed yesterday as far photography was concerned. I did take some images of the new facility and I’ll show those one of these days because today is all about the little Ring-Billed Gull. 🙂
Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your day and be careful.
I’m sorry. I still have a lot of images from two weekends ago at the 16th Basin and since (other than yesterday) I haven’t done much still photography I’m going to show you some more eagles and herons.
Interesting day yesterday filled with frank and stimulating conversation with a variety of individuals. Gave me much to think about and reflect on. At some point I will share the content of those conversations but for now just know that they were thought-provoking and very enjoyable.
I have decided on a project that I am going to work on in the coming year. It has taken me almost three months to finally figure this one out. I can tell you that it is going to be an ambitious project to say the least but one that if I can do it correctly may yield some of my most satisfying work yet. I have some people to talk with and some permissions to get but I think those will be readily available.
Then there is the small matter of learning and mastering a new skill that I do not yet have but that is a small matter. 🙂
Anyway this new project should take about six months to a year to complete and involves video, flying, still photography, extensive video editing, interviewing, research, and a bunch of other skills. But it promises to be fun and enjoyable so I’m ready to get started. Once I have all the details and permissions finalized I’ll share with you what the project is. In my mind right now it will not be as difficult as the 365 project was.
So that’s it for today. A lot of ambiguity I know but I’ve got to have a hook to keep you coming back. I hope you enjoyed the wildlife images today. I do love to photograph eagles. I understand from my friend Andreas that many species of wildlife have migrated into the area of late so it’s time to get out and see what I can find.
Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your midweek hump day and be careful.
A couple of my friends asked me what happened over the weekend because not only was there no blog on Saturday or Sunday but none yesterday either. Well as much as I hate to admit it I never touched a camera the entire weekend. That is with the exception of the Phantom’s camera.
As you may recall one of my laments about the FPV (first person view) set up on the Phantom requires me looking at my iPhone (very small and hard to see in the sunlight) or a 7 inch monitor, which is also somewhat hard to see in bright sunlight. Enter a product called Fat Shark Goggles, which in essence puts two small TV screens in a pair of goggles and then you can see exactly what your camera is seeing.
So Saturday I spent most of the day reading material about how to install the transmitter on the Phantom and use the Phantom’s own power supply as opposed to having a secondary battery power supply. Between reading, watching videos, making diagrams and doing the actual wiring it took me most of Saturday to accomplish. Mix in there 4 flights to test the equipment and a visit from Angie, Josh and Gabby and that pretty much took up the whole day.
Then Sunday was reserved for a couple of well-earned naps, some more flight tests and finally a night flight around the neighborhood. So I’ve got probably 15 Gb of video of the Phantom taking off from our back concrete slab, rising to a height of 300 – 500 feet, a couple of 360 degree turns and then a landing. I don’t think you want to see that over and over again. So come Monday morning I didn’t have anything worth showing.
Yesterday on my lunch break I grabbed a bite and then off to the duck pond. There were not as many birds there yesterday as there has been last week. Only 3 swans and maybe 30 – 50 geese. The two geese in the first image were sort of stranded in a small open pool of water surrounded by ice from the morning’s cold temperature. The second image is of a lone swan (perhaps nesting) I hope. I am excited to see if we get some more cygnets again this year as I will enjoy photographing their development.
Finally just a pair of swans intermingled with some geese. Life at the pond was peaceful and relaxed yesterday. I think most of the territorial disputes have been settled for the time being.
As soon as warm weather arrives I’m going to attempt a fly over of the duck pond. I think it will make an interesting video.
So that’s it for today. I hope you enjoy your Tuesday. Thanks for stopping by and be careful.
Today is the first day of Spring – 2014. Yesterday morning I awoke to a fresh layer of snow, about an inch, which made the morning commute enjoyable. By the time I got South of the airport it was like it never happened.
Fun day yesterday. Jeanne got back from her Mother’s somewhere around 10:00 a.m. and then she, Angie and the kids came to Maquoketa to have lunch with me. We all decided to have breakfast and it was fun to watch Josh eat his pancake and eggs. He devoured them in a very short time. Angie said he loves anything that he can put syrup on. 🙂
I’ll finish up the week with some more swan images. You remember earlier in the week I showed you the territorial dispute between two male swans. After the skirmish the victorious male swan flew over his domain as if to survey all that he was master of. The next image is of him setting up for a landing. Full flaps as he creates a massive amount of lift with those huge wings and lets him settle onto the water softly.
When I got home last evening the winds were calm. There was plenty of sunlight left and the temperature was a balmy 46 degrees. So after greeting my bride I grabbed Phantom – 2 and took it out to the back patio for a quick flight. I wanted to show you the 4 minute video but didn’t start editing it until this morning and of course that means not enough time to get it finished. Maybe tomorrow.
Back with his mate the male swan did a number of puffing his chest and beating his wings just to show her how much of a man he was. I’m sure she was duly impressed. 🙂
That’s it for today. I still have several hundred images of eagles, herons, swans, and ducks but I’m going to take a break from them and look for other subject matter. Too much of even a good thing is not necessarily good and doesn’t help you to grow. So maybe I can find something interesting this weekend. If the weather is nice I’d like to practice some more flying techniques other than just going up to a high point, turning around a couple of times and then back down. Next week (weather permitting) I would like to do a slow fly over the duck pond. I think that would make a great video.
Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your TGI Friday and be careful.
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