I thought I would show you a couple of aerial shots from the Ridgeway reunion. I’m still struggling a bit with the video portion of the Phantoms. I can’t seem to get the results I want.
One of the things that you will notice is just how much green space there is on Main Street. When I was growing up there Ridgeway was a vibrant community with an active and thriving downtown. Two cafes, a pool hall, two grocery stores, two gas stations, a bank, a wonderful drug store and soda fountain, a beauty shop, a doctor’s office, and a variety of other stores. Not bad for a little town of only 450 people.
It’s sad to see the state of downtown now.
On Saturday there was almost always a dance at the Lion’s Hall. Various bands would come to Ridgeway and play at what was called “Teen Town.” At one time there was even a movie theater in Ridgeway and my Dad ran the projector. I got in free. 🙂
Well those days are gone but the memories remain and those will be with me to the end of my days.
Thanks for stopping by the blog. I’m not happy with the quality of the video but it will give you an idea of the community.
A short post today. I realize this image is not very good and I do not post it for its esthetics but merely as a visual representation of how I spent most of my day yesterday. This image is from the “Phoenix” the name I’ve given my DJI Phantom that crashed several months ago. I have been rebuilding it piece by piece and yes I would have been money ahead just to buy a new one but I wanted to see if I could get it flying “properly” again. The emphasis is on “properly.”
The short list of things I’ve done aside from a complete cleaning and drying of all the parts. I installed 4 new motors and controllers, a new compass, a fair bit of new wiring, and yesterday I installed a new GPS system. Additionally I installed a new H3-3D gimbal. I took it for a 3 minute flight yesterday and it flew like it used to. It was very steady in the hover position and was responsive to the controls. 🙂
I did get a new Phantom as well. Thanks to some wonderful friends who felt bad because I had crashed my Phantom trying to help the community with a project. It was unbelievably gracious and generous of them and I am humbled and very grateful. So I spent a fair amount of time yesterday preparing the new phantom for flight.
Today I have to install the H3-3D gimbal, the video transmitter, and the iODS telemetry module and it will also be ready for flight. Yea! Too cold today to fly unfortunately.
I’ve been asked if I would be willing to help Clinton County with a project they have and need some aerial photography and of course I can’t say no.
I’m excited to be back in the air and hopefully I will be able to have some interesting images and videos for you in the coming months.
That’s it for today. Enjoy this cold Sunday. Be careful and aware.
I do not usually post on Saturday but since I missed yesterday I decided I would put up a couple of images and relate a couple of stories.
The first two images on the blog today were taken at the Duck Pond on Thursday. This family has taken over the little island from the two geese that had their nest destroyed by the swans. I am hopeful that this family is not the same one I photographed a couple of weeks ago because if it is they are missing some of their young.
About the only thing going on at the Duck Pond right now is there are still a fair amount of geese there and some coots but the swans will come and go and are rarely there during the times that I stop by. Once in a while there will be a pelican or two but not a lot of other wildlife that I have been able to capture.
I took yesterday off so I could enjoy a 4 day holiday. I’m really glad that I did too for a variety of reasons one of which was that it gave me a lot of time to work on the Phantom problem. So I went through all my packaging and screw parts and found enough replacement screws that I could put the phantom back together. I went through the process of rewiring the new gimbal, re-installing it and then hooking the phantom up to the computer.
It took me a few minutes to find the gimbal calibration (it is neatly hid in some of the menus) but I did find it. The first settings didn’t do anything. It made the gimbal shake (that was the software recognizing the gimbal) and then I found the control that let me set the parameters of the up and down pitch. That made all the difference in the world.
I got it all put back together and took it up for a flight. All seemed to work well and I had complete control of the gimbal action. On the way down I got a little concerned that I lost some control of the copter and had to make some radical corrections to keep it from slamming into some trees and buildings. I almost lost it on top of the school. That would have been embarrassing having to go to the Principal’s office and asking if I could get my quad-copter off their roof. 🙂
I think I just need to recalibrate the transmitter controls and all will be well. Probably wouldn’t hurt to recalibrate the compass too.
That’s it for today. Now you know the rest of the story. Thanks for checking out the blog.
A special thank you to all veterans. I cannot believe the sacrifice you have all made for this country. “All gave some and some gave all.” It is an absolute disgrace the way our government treats our military Heroes once they have given so much for our country. We should all be ashamed and we should all let the self-serving sanctimonious politicians know about it. I’m going to.
Fun weekend even though it was pretty cold. The sun was out most of the time and that does a world of good both physically and mentally for humans. We need the sunlight to rejuvenate us.
As is our custom, yesterday Jeanne and I took a “photo drive” to see what we could find. Where to go is always a challenge. Kind of like fishing on a lake. If you go here you are concerned that they are biting over there. We decided to go out by the Mines of Spain yesterday. Since we weren’t really dressed for hiking and that is not our inclination anyway we didn’t stop and take any of the trails.
We did come across this little guy who seemed confused or sick. He was moving very slow and didn’t seem to know which way to go. He didn’t try to run away from me when I got out to take this image, which surprised me. I hate to see any creature suffer. I hope he was just confused because when we came by this area a few minutes later he was gone, so I’ll hope for the best.
Angie brought the kids over Saturday for a visit as Ben was working. We had a nice visit and lunch together and then she and Josh wanted to see the Phantom fly. So even though the conditions were borderline I decided to throw caution to the wind and do a short flight. I did a 10 minute flight up and over the school and then coming back for a landing. Angie wanted to make sure she got in the image. 🙂
The whole time we were out there Joshua had his arm around my leg. I guess he felt safer that way. It was fun to watch him react to something he had never encountered before. After it landed and the motors had shut off he went over and touched one of the propellers. He thought it was pretty cool.
That’s it for today. Hope you enjoy your Monday. Thanks for stopping by and be careful.
Happy Tuesday! I have an amazing story to share with you today. I’m somewhat embarrassed yet over joyed to share what happened yesterday to me and the Phantom. I had yesterday off because of MLK day and I really wanted to go flying somewhere other than our neighborhood. I piddled around in the morning and then around 11:00 a.m. the sun came out and even though there were a lot of white clouds in the sky there was also a good amount of sunshine. It was 34 degrees so that wasn’t too bad. The wind was a little high about 22 m.p.h. but acceptable.
So where to go? I wanted to take an image of the Julian Dubuque Bridge I said to myself, so I loaded up the Phantom and a camera and off to East Dubuque I went. I went to the boat launch on the Illinois side of the river because it is close to the bridge and I reasoned I wouldn’t have to venture too far from my ground location. When I arrived it was apparent they had not cleared the snow in some time and so there was no good place to launch the Phantom from. As I sat there contemplating my next move I reasoned also that flying close to the bridge might be distracting to some motorist and that might cause an accident and I’d spend the rest of my life in jail. 🙂
Ah ha, to the Great River walk and I can take a video and some images of the old rusty railroad bridge. Yep that is what I’m going to do. Again I won’t have to get too far away from where I’m standing so it will be perfect. Fast forward now I’m standing on the river walk and I have the Phantom sitting on a circular pattern on the walk and thinking about my flight plan. So I fired up the Phantom and it jumped into the air. Now it is here that I have to explain a few things. First of all I wear transition lenses and they get very dark. Very dark indeed. So it is hard to see my iPhone and the flight app with them on. If I take them off I can see my iPhone but it is a big blur so I have issues.
Second the river is completely covered with snow. Snow is white (remember that), there are a lot of white clouds in the sky (remember that) and the Phantom is white. So I ran it up to an altitude of 112 feet so I could be sure and get a good clearance over the bridge and then I stopped and rotated the Phantom so I was looking at it from the other side. That is where I must have gotten disoriented. I could not see the Phantom so I wasn’t sure exactly where it was. I could make out the bridge on the iPhone so I flew it like that. I thought I cleared the bridge and was back near the place where I was standing but nothing looked right and of course I couldn’t see the Phantom so I was mildly concerned.
Finally I got it oriented to where I could see the Wisconsin Bridge and the Railroad Bridge and felt like I was re-acclimated once again. The wind was pretty strong and the more I tried to come back to the bridge the farther away I seemed to get. I couldn’t see my monitor good enough to really tell where I was but I also knew I could eventually figure it out. Then the worst thing happened. A “Lost signal with the Phantom” message appeared on my iPhone. Oh CRAP!! Now what. Well I can’t believe I’m that far away but I must have flown further than I originally thought. So I started walking South on the river walk thinking I was over by the Julian Dubuque Bridge.
I couldn’t connect to the Phantom so I figured I must have gotten turned around and it was North. I walked to the end of the river walk and then climbed a fence and walk another 150 yards or so trying to reconnect with the Phantom. It was nowhere to be found. OMG, now what? How am I going to explain this to Jeanne, to my readers of the blog, to my friends at work, hell to the insurance company? To say I felt dazed and dejected would be an understatement. I felt really bad. How could I have been that stupid, with less than an hour of flying experience under my belt, to take it over the Mississippi River. I walked back a lot slower than I had gone out so it was about 25 minutes from first taking off by the time and I knew that the Phantom had a 25 minute flight endurance on one battery. I finally got back to the bench and where I had left the Phantom’s case.
As I approached the bench there on the River Walk not more than 12 inches from where it had taken off set my Phantom. In one piece, fully powered down and just sitting there waiting for me to pick it up. So I reconnected with its WiFi and stopped recording. I had hopped it had recorded the entire event so I could tell where in the hell it had gone to. Sure enough it was still recording so I stopped the recording (see Lesson #5) and then powered down the Phantom again. I wanted to kiss it but I didn’t (in public anyway.) 🙂
The video below is the flight that I made. I cut out the long 10 minute hovering part until it went into fail safe mode. I’m impressed, just like they said it would do if it lost its connection with the controller it would return home. I didn’t turn the controller off until I started my walk back. So even though I had lost contact with the WiFi connection from the Phantom it was still receiving contact with the controller. When I shut the controller off, that is when it went into its fail safe mode and returned to its launch point. WOW!
So if you want to watch the video it is about 10 minutes long. Again I trimmed the sitting and waiting for me to turn off the controller so it could come home. Lesson #6.
Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your day and be careful.
Not much for today. I thought I had lost this 46 second clip of the landing. Of course I also thought I kept the camera running as I landed but I didn’t do that either. Anyway I found the clip in a place it should have never been.
The weather was lousy yesterday (at least in my estimation) for still or video. The wind was up around 25 mph gusting to 30 mph so no flying the Phantom. Overcast day so it is very hard to shoot eagles in that type of condition. I opted to take lessons on video editing instead. There is always so much to learn and I love it.
Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your Monday and be careful.
