Quadcopters 101

I’ve been really into quadcopters lately (or quadrocopters or quads or multi-rotor helicopters or drones or whatever you call them) and wanted to put all my examples in one place because I keep sharing the same info over and over w different people.

Inspiration

For me interest in quadcopters has not come from rc flying itself; othser than owning an rc glider wing I haven’t really had an interest in rc flying. I’m a paraglider pilot and that satiates any sort of flying bug I have.

I realized i wanted to participate in this when I saw this footage captured of climbers ascending the Trango Towers in Pakistan:

The quad is flying at 20,000 feet! amazing. The footage is clearly stabilized and wobbly, but holy crap it’s definitely acceptable footage and would be next-to-impossible to film otherwise, unless you could get a heli pilot in pakistan to take you up 20,000. The risk factor drops exponentially with this approach to getting footage, which is super sweet.

Buying a Quadcopter

I immediately did research and bought a mini quad to practice with. I got this one on recommendation from the forums, and it’s been awesome. super cheap, super durable – a great way to start.

Not sure why the chinese manufacturers thought a ladybug on the shell was a good idea but don’t let that stop you from getting one, they are awesome. It’s taken a beating(it ultimately broke when I was replacing the rotors, replacement parts coming), and learning to fly these accurately and consistently is trickier than I thought but I’m glad to have started on this one as it’s inexpensive.

Programmable Drones

I went to the Drone Games which happened to be going on at the Groupon offices downtown. The participants were given a Parrot AR Drone 2.0 which is open-source and programmable – the teams hacked together demos and showed them off. There were some cool people there and I learned a lot talking w the participants. It helped me understand where things are at now and where they’re going to be in the near future, like learning about matternet who plan to save the world with legions of automated flying drones:

Another one of the demos would take the on-board 720p camera footage and run it through facial-recognition software, and then post any faces it detected to twitter. Definitely cool stuff and makes you realize how awesome it is how fast things progress today.

More Awesomeness

Some time later I saw this video:

which is an amazing example of piloting skills. Some of these shots have been impossible until now. Again you see it’s been handled in post quite a bit but the final product is awesome. This guy is apparently also using a gimbal that auto-stabilizes the camera (think of the accelerometer in your phone, this zeros out whatever input it gets) similar to this: (link broken)

FPV

Both the Pakistan vid and the San Francisco one are flown via rc controller, but both pilots are using fpv equipment(first-person-view) which basically gives a live video link to goggles that you wear, effectively giving you the pilot first person perspective from the camera on the quad. So awesome, but that’s down the road.

Next Quad

I ordered a larger quad, the dji naza f450, with a spektrum dx6i controller which is the same one I had w my rc glider. This is adequate to carry a gopro. it’s a much larger machine though, and it’s definitely going to take some time to get used to. I got this quad because you can add on the naza gps module which gives the quad gps capability – it knows where it is and you can program in targets/courses etc. It will still have enough power to lift the fpv radio equipment when I’m ready to add that.

Spektrum DX6i Controller

dji naza f450

Nerd Alert

This hobby is a little nerdier than most things I’ve been interested in because it’s in the rc world(no offense rc world) but this may end up making rc cool! Imagine getting a shot of the riots in Syria or rockets firing from Palestine into Israel or any other political situation that would be next to impossible to get footage otherwise. Same goes for action sports and even cinema. I have like one million shots I want to try to get. It’s been so fun envisioning the capabilities of this thing and I can’t wait to get some awesome footage.