i feel like i should get a drone

[Dan Druff]

Questions:

1) How high did you take it? Looks above 400 feet. When I go to around 400, things on the ground look a lot bigger than that.

2) How did you do the effect like the drone was turning upside down? It looks more angled than a straight down shot.

3) What was the farthest you got from where you were standing?

I was close to 1000 feet I believe. I didn't care, it's an extremely rural area with no air traffic in the area.

I'm not sure what effect you are talking about...lol. Let me know what time mark and I'll try and let you know what I did.

Farthest I went was just under a half mile there, about 2000 feet out.

Start at about 3:30.

I'm just afraid to go above 400. With my luck, it will be the one time a plane flies in the area, and I'll cause a deadly crash which changes drone laws forever.

[Dan Druff]

Speaking of 400 feet, it's 400 feet above the ground directly below, right?

Because I flew up to a hill today which was about 500 feet higher than where I was standing. I didn't want to take the drone over it, and then I realized that, compared to the hill, the drone was almost on the ground.

[Avon Barksdale]

Start at about 3:30.

I'm just afraid to go above 400. With my luck, it will be the one time a plane flies in the area, and I'll cause a deadly crash which changes drone laws forever.

Oh, that was nothing special. On the upper left of controller, there is a wheel dial that moves up and down that controls axis on gimbal. All I did was slowly hold that wheel so that it panned down slow into birds eye view mode.

[Sanlmar]

Panel approves police use of armed airborne drones
https://www.google.com/amp/www.ctpos...s-11036872.php


This is Connecticut.... and you guys are worried about N Korea

[snowtracks]

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/dji-phan...?skuId=5710367

Buyin a Drone this week. Any Advice Please

[snowtracks]

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/dji-phan...?skuId=5710350

Is this better for $300 more?

[adamantium]

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/dji-phan...?skuId=5710350

Is this better for $300 more?

No way I would pay 300 just for that android screen, get the cheaper one + an Ipad

[Dan Druff]

The Phantom 4 has an "Active Track" feature. You can click on an object in the current picture, and the drone is supposed to track and follow that object. I tried using it a few times and it was a FAIL.

Today I tried it again, but a bit differently. I was playing soccer with Benjamin in the backyard, and wanted to film it. I hovered the drone about 20 feet in the air, and a little off to the side. I figured that being lower, it would be more successful, and I tried to have it track Benjamin.

That was also a FAIL, as it lost him fairly quickly.

Then I had it track me.

MUCH better!

It kept track of me the entire time, and kept moving itself to keep the action on me. The final result looked like I had someone actively videoing the "game", and moving the camera along with the action.

I determined that the difference was both that I'm a much bigger target to track than Benjamin, PLUS I was wearing a black jacket, which contrasted a lot better with the green grass.

Anyway, I'm still skeptical that this would work very well if the drone is even 80 feet up. Maybe I'll play with it some more.

Does anyone have any experience with this feature?

[sonatine]

There was a kickstarter for a drone that had one (1) claim to fame; it would follow you like a puppy dog and film you no matter what you were doing.

Obviously it was a massive success, right up until someone found out the company was basically fake and had zero (0) tech to support that feature.

So honestly? Kudos to the Phantom 4 for even getting it half right.

[sonatine]

https://medium.com/kickstarter/how-z...g-85c0abe4a6cb


Boom.


Fucking Zano.

[Dan Druff]

There was a kickstarter for a drone that had one (1) claim to fame; it would follow you like a puppy dog and film you no matter what you were doing.

Obviously it was a massive success, right up until someone found out the company was basically fake and had zero (0) tech to support that feature.

So honestly? Kudos to the Phantom 4 for even getting it half right.

That's actually a separate feature on Phantom 4, called "Follow Me". That was also a fail the one time I tried it, but I think I'll give it another go.

Of course, one limit with all of this "follow" stuff is that the drone can only stay in the air for a maximum of 25 minutes, so it's not like you can take it on a long hike and film your experience.

It's one of those things which sounds cool until you really think about it, and you realize it's mostly useless. That's why I stopped bothering trying to get it to work.

However, today when I was playing soccer with Benjamin, I thought, "Now this is one of the rare cases where the feature could be useful", so there I went.

[sonatine]

If memory serves, Zano had this super dramatic video of a guy freestyle skiing down some virgin mountain with his drone auto recording/following the whole thing.

You can imagine how hard people geeked on it. And the first great crack in their story was someone sheepishly admitting that the drone had been piloted because the tech was 'still being ironed out'.

It's a much sought after feature, definitely, even with a 20-25 minute ceiling on it.

[MumblesBadly]

There was a kickstarter for a drone that had one (1) claim to fame; it would follow you like a puppy dog and film you no matter what you were doing.

Obviously it was a massive success, right up until someone found out the company was basically fake and had zero (0) tech to support that feature.

So honestly? Kudos to the Phantom 4 for even getting it half right.

That's actually a separate feature on Phantom 4, called "Follow Me". That was also a fail the one time I tried it, but I think I'll give it another go.

Of course, one limit with all of this "follow" stuff is that the drone can only stay in the air for a maximum of 25 minutes, so it's not like you can take it on a long hike and film your experience.

It's one of those things which sounds cool until you really think about it, and you realize it's mostly useless. That's why I stopped bothering trying to get it to work.

However, today when I was playing soccer with Benjamin, I thought, "Now this is one of the rare cases where the feature could be useful", so there I went.

Who would watch multiple hours of someone hiking???

Seriously, if you want takes of different parts of a hike to splice together, send the unit up for a few minutes at each good location, and bring along several batteries to swap out for fresh power. That will also save you a ton of time when editting the final video, as you won't have to rewatch and pull clips from an uninterrupted stream of the entire hike.

[Dan Druff]

That's actually a separate feature on Phantom 4, called "Follow Me". That was also a fail the one time I tried it, but I think I'll give it another go.

Of course, one limit with all of this "follow" stuff is that the drone can only stay in the air for a maximum of 25 minutes, so it's not like you can take it on a long hike and film your experience.

It's one of those things which sounds cool until you really think about it, and you realize it's mostly useless. That's why I stopped bothering trying to get it to work.

However, today when I was playing soccer with Benjamin, I thought, "Now this is one of the rare cases where the feature could be useful", so there I went.

Who would watch multiple hours of someone hiking???

Seriously, if you want takes of different parts of a hike to splice together, send the unit up for a few minutes at each good location, and bring along several batteries to swap out for fresh power. That will also save you a ton of time when editting the final video, as you won't have to rewatch and pull clips from an uninterrupted stream of the entire hike.

Others wouldn't want to watch it, but the person who took the video may want to watch themselves doing it, for various reasons.

As I said, this feature seems cool on the surface, but doesn't have a lot of realistic uses.

To be honest, nobody would want to watch me playing backyard soccer with a 6-year-old, but it was cool for us to see, especially given the moving camera angles following the game.

[MumblesBadly]

Who would watch multiple hours of someone hiking???

Seriously, if you want takes of different parts of a hike to splice together, send the unit up for a few minutes at each good location, and bring along several batteries to swap out for fresh power. That will also save you a ton of time when editting the final video, as you won't have to rewatch and pull clips from an uninterrupted stream of the entire hike.

Others wouldn't want to watch it, but the person who took the video may want to watch themselves doing it, for various reasons.

As I said, this feature seems cool on the surface, but doesn't have a lot of realistic uses.

To be honest, nobody would want to watch me playing backyard soccer with a 6-year-old, but it was cool for us to see, especially given the moving camera angles following the game.

What you describing reminds me of the home movie syndrome. Meanng, how many of you can remember being bored to tears watching someone else's home movies/videos that were interminably long and boring which the maker thought was faacinating and eventful?

So, if you had a few replacement batteries (4?), would that provide you enough time to take vids of a hike? With 5 batteries total, that would give you about 120 mins of footage, albeit you'd have to stop and change batteries a few times. Because I'm guessing that's what the makers of this vid did.



Or would that be too inconvient?

[Dan Druff]

Has anyone with a Phantom tried it on sport mode, where it can go up to 45 MPH?

The downside to sport mode is that the object avoidance is turned OFF, so you could crash it into something.

Mind you, I've never come close to hitting anything, but for some reason that still kinda freaks me out.

I want to try it though. Flying 45 MPH over landscapes would look pretty cool on video.

[MumblesBadly]

Was this posted earlier? Might be another reason to get a drone for some folks.

[sonatine]

https://blog.kaspersky.com/drone-gone-in-11-ms/14692/






tl;dr there is a standardized communication protocol in play on virtually all of these drones, where they switch frequencies every 11ms. problem is they have shitty encryption so its fairly simple to hijack the conversation and assume control.

[Dan Druff]

So I lost my drone yesterday.

My fault, too.

It was after sunset, and I was flying it to find Benjamin and his mom on a hike. I finally found them, but the battery was getting low. I decided to press the matter, since I knew it wasn't too far (by air) from my home point, so it wouldn't require much power to get back.

Finally I decided to start flying back at 13% power.

When it got to 10%, it notified me of "critical battery" and auto-landed. I did not know a way to stop the auto-landing (apparently you can press the stick upwards and it will resist the auto landing), but I didn't know this, and this is not a well-publicized or documented feature by DJI!

So it went down and landed in a terrible spot -- basically out in hills which were covered in thick brush and small (4-8 foot) trees.

After a lot of fucking around with the app, I found what appeared to be reliable GPS coordinates of where it landed. I also had the final seconds of the drone video saved on my phone -- 13 seconds of it auto-landing, but I didn't get to see the landing itself, as I had lost signal when it got too low.

The good news was that the drone appeared to not be too far from a hiking trail. The bad news was that the relatively short distance to travel from the trail was REALLY tough. Semi-steep, VERY thick, full of sharp branches and very thick foliage.

I tried it right after the drone fell, but it got dark very quickly (it was after sunset when it went down), so I aborted and tried again this morning at about 10:30.



It was very hot, and I didn't bring enough water with me. I was at least smart enough to dress properly for it. I wore old jeans, snow shoes with a rubber sole, a cap, and a jacket. This worked great, as the shoes were strong enough to kick down some of the branches and brush in my way. The jacket and jeans protected me from the sharp foliage. That was the good news. The bad news was that it was freaking HOT wearing all that stuff, and my water ran out super quickly. There was also a rattlesnake danger, as many live in the area and are active at this time of year.

But the biggest problem was that my cell phone was not giving a reliable GPS reading for my position. It kept giving me a range of where I was (the blue dot with the light blue circle around it), and I needed EXACT coordinates to get there. It was also VERY thick with foliage -- and it was hard to even get through, plus it was on a hill.

I knew I was very close, but I was boiling hot, tired, getting steeper. and I was out of water. Being 45 years old and tall didn't help matters. Had to abort.



I was so worn out by this venture that the thought of returning was just dreadful to me.

I decided to just place a Craigslist ad. I didn't give the coordinates, and explained the situation well. I offered to meet with people and have them search for it (to ensure they wouldn't just go find it on their own and not tell me -- or hold it hostage for more money!) I said I would give $100 if they found it in bad condition (to give incentive to be careful bringing it back) and $200 if they found it in good condition.

I got a number of responses, almost all of which were from 20-21 year olds.

I ended up hiring a nice 21-year-old Asian guy who was a college student and needed the money. I wasn't very confident he would be successful, as he seemed to underestimate the job and the toughness of the venture into the foliage, even though I repeatedly said so in the ad and in my responses to him (this was a chronic problem with just about everyone who responded).

After a few failed attempts where he ran into foliage too thick to pass and came back up, he finally got to the spot and called me -- to tell me that he couldn't see it.

Fuck.

But then about 15 minutes later, I heard him calling out to me from the trail, where I was waiting for him. I walked down the trail, and there was my drone, sitting in good condition.

He must have forgotten the ad (or not read it correctly), because he asked "How much do you think I should get here?", seemingly nervous I would give him very little money. He looked super worn out and kept repeating how hard it was -- and seemed very sincere. When I told him I would give him $200, he acted very surprised and seemed thrilled. Kept telling me how much this money would help him out. As we walked back to our cars, he kept saying over and over how awful the trek was, and how he was so scratched up and worn out by the time he found it, he wasn't even that excited to see it. But he was very happy to have the $200 and I was very happy to have my drone back.

I recharged the battery a bit, and took it on a very short test flight. Worked perfectly.



So this was a shitty weekend, but I guess it ended well, and a local college kid is $200 richer.

Once I got home, I took the video off the drone's SD card. Interestingly, the drone kept recording for 16 minutes after crashing and lying on its side on the ground. The crash itself had the drone originally landing on top of a bush or tree, then forcing itself off, turning over a few times, and eventually hitting the ground and landing on its side. Was actually surprised it wasn't damaged, though I guess it only fell like 5 feet, and not all at one time. Even the propellers seem okay.

Lesson learned about the battery. My biggest mistake was pressing the battery life to the end. The second biggest mistake was not just landing it somewhere easily retrievable, instead of trying to fly back on 13% battery. Had it not auto-landed, though, the consequence could have been worse. If the final 10% wasn't enough to get back (I think it was), the drone would have just fallen out of the sky and broken. Also, had it flown for about 10 more seconds, it would have ended up too deep in the hills and would have been unretrievable. Of course, had it auto-landed 10 seconds EARLIER, then it would have auto-landed in a relatively easy spot to retrieve. This auto-landing was in a bad spot, but it could have been worse.

Might post the video later of the crash.

[DirtyB]

Speaking of 400 feet, it's 400 feet above the ground directly below, right?

Yes, because commercial aircraft have to stay at least 500 feet above the ground.

Glad to hear you got your drone back.