I’ll finish up the Arboretum photo shoot today with the last of the flowers from that visit. I love to photograph flowers and this first one I was lucky enough to capture a bee doing his thing.
My new (and never been flown) Phantom arrived yesterday back from its 8 week odyssey to the California repair shop. I cannot see that they did anything to it however the email I received from the company stated that they updated the firmware and made “some adjustments” then test flew it.
By the time I got home had a couple of adult beverages and we finished dinner it was too late to test it. I’ll probably give it a test flight tonight.
I have several projects in mind to video and photograph with the new Phantom once I’m satisfied it is dependable. My other Phantom (the one that crashed into the water) flies but I don’t trust it especially over water. So I’ve been waiting for this one to get back so I can move forward on my ideas.
That’s it for today. I have an early meeting so I gotta run. Thanks for stopping by the blog. Enjoy your day and be careful.
Back at it today. The kids stopped over for dinner last night after Josh’s skiing lesson. I took this image of Gabby when she first got here and that was the last time I touched the camera.
We had a great time with Josh and Gabby and a wonderful visit with Angie and Ben. Jeanne and I took the grand kids to the playroom while Angie and Ben cleaned up after dinner. How about that having your guests clean up while you play. 🙂
I finished getting the new Phantom configured and wired up. Everything seems to work okay, but it was just too cold out to take a test flight. It is recommend that you not fly in temperatures below 22 degrees. It was much below 22 degrees here yesterday.
So now like everyone else, I’m waiting for some decent moderate weather. I think everyone has had enough of winter for one year.
That’s it for today. Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your frigid Monday. Be careful and be aware.
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.
Happy Tuesday! If you’ve followed this blog for awhile you remember me telling you I was working on a project that required some assembly and wiring. Well this is what I was working on. It is my second Phantom. I know what you’re saying. No there was no need for a second one but I wanted a better video camera than the Vision 2 (which has a great still camera) so this is it.
It carries a GoPro Hero 3+ Black edition video camera attached to a Zenmuse gimbal, which provides for a really stable platform. So no matter what attitude the Phantom is in the camera stays level. I also had to install a transmitter (that’s the white thing sticking out of the back) so that I could communicate with the camera. It took probably a full 8 hours of work to get the thing ready to fly. It was actually cheaper than the Vision 2 but required a lot of set up.
I know, the wiring looks terrible but that is just until I get things configured the way I want them, then I’ll tidy up the wiring.
This is the Vision 2 Phantom (so you can see the difference.) The vision 2 has a dedicated camera and is pretty much ready to fly out of the box. It uses a WiFi connection with an iPhone App to provide first person view (FPV) of the actual flight. There is no gimbal on the Vision 2 so you get a lot of distortion when there is wind (and there is always wind) and when you change direction. It has a 14 mp camera and shoots in RAW so it captures a lot of data.
This is the FPV for the new system. I’m having a lot of problems with it right now and I’m trying to correspond with the manufacturer about the issues. Hopefully once that is resolved I will be able to get some HD resolution video of the flights. The flight below is a 7.5 minute clip of the first flight with this system. It was 22 degrees and like I said I was having a lot of problems with the monitor, not to mention it was as cold as a witch’s heart. I couldn’t feel my fingers. I trimmed out a lot of sitting idle from the video. There still is a bit more than I would like but I was trying to fiddle with the monitor so I just let the Phantom hover.
I still have less than a full hour of practice with the Phantom so I have a lot to learn about controlling it and making it go where I want it to. Jeanne assures me that warmer weather is coming and I can get in more flying time. 🙂
That’s it for today. Thanks for checking out the blog. Enjoy your day and be careful.
Happy Monday. One of the advantages of working in the banking industry is that we traditionally recognize 9 holidays. Today is one that is recognized by the Federal Reserve (President’s Day) so we get the day off. Yea!!
Yesterday I looked at the thermometer and it said 31 degrees. The minimum flying temperature for the Phantom is 24 degrees so I reasoned that it would be a good day to fly. Well by the time we got to the little park that I like to fly at the temperature was around 22 on my car thermometer. Naw, that can’t be right so I decided to fly anyway. It was cold, really cold and the flight lasted only about 8 minutes I was out in the cold for about 25 minutes and I was a Popsicle.
I would like to show you the video from that flight (there is a lot of white in it) but I’m still trying to figure out the best way to edit the video. I need to take more lessons. 😦
After flying Jeanne and I drove through the country looking for interesting subjects to photograph. We found a few and I will share those with you as the week progresses. I like this lonely tree sitting in the middle of a harvested field. I hope you do too.
That’s it for today. I’m not even halfway through processing the portraits so that’s what I’m going to be doing today. Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your day and be careful.
Upde Designs 