Category: Drone

Update on Droning

So evidently I forgot to update after So this is happening. Since that time, my DBA got rejected because the county clerk thought that “RochDrone” was too close to an existing DBA for “Rochester Drone”. I couldn’t find anything about this “Rochester Drone” company, except an unclaimed listing on yelp.com that pointed to a domain that doesn’t exist.

Interestingly the county clerk didn’t follow the instructions from the letter from LegalZoom that said to return it to them in the self addressed stamped envelope, and instead sent it to me. I sent it on to LegalZoom, but it’s just as well that they did send it to me, because otherwise I would have had no clue what was going on. I waited a few weeks for LegalZoom to get back to me with my next steps, but eventually I got tired of waiting and so I went down to the clerks office and registered a different name, FlyerCity Drone. I of course also registered the new domain and with help from Bob Raymonda, I got the new site up and running.

Registering a DBA in person is dead easy, and only costs $33 and only takes a few minutes. If I’d known how easy it was, I never would have bothered with LegalZoom. I’m certainly not going to use them again.

About 2 or 3 weeks after I’d done with that, I finally got an email from LegalZoom, which they described as their final attempt to contact me. Except it was also the first time they’d tried to contact me since the last time they sent me a couple of forms to get notarized. I wrote them back and said in view of the fact that they never contacted me for over a month, I had done the registration without them, and I would like a refund of the registration fee, since I knew the county clerk had returned it to them. They refused. Bastards.

Meanwhile, I bought a second drone – this time an Air 3. The Air 3 is a much larger and more capable than my Mini 3 Pro. The major features are a second semi-zoom camera, and omni-directional obstacle detection (as opposed to front, back and downwards only). I’m looking forward to finding out all the things I can do with it.

Experimenting with Hyperlapse

I tried to shoot a hyperlapse with my new Air 3 drone. First I tried setting up a set of waypoints from the main menu. I was disappointed that I couldn’t find a way to use those waypoints in the Hyperlapse waypoints – I had to set them up again as close as I could.

I shot a hyperlapse with the hyperlapse waypoints, and a video with the other waypoints. Then I brought them both into Final Cut Pro X and fiddled with the speed of the video so it was roughly the same speed as the hyperlapse. And quite honestly, I can’t see the difference.

Except for the best difference – I felt like both of them were too damn jerky, so with the video I was able to change the speed of the video and got a nicer result. Can’t do that with hyperlapse.

One thing I do wonder is if a ND filter would give this a bit of motion blur. Or if there is a FCPX plugin that will do it in post?

So this is happening

I’m slowly ramping up to start a drone business. I have the website https://RochDrone.com/ with copious design help from Bob Raymonda, I have business cards (also designed by Bob), I’ve just filed a DBA, and I’m about to start advertising.

My business card

Funny aside here: Notice that the URL is https rather than http. I’ve got several websites hosted on my server, and I’ve been resisting for years getting certificates for them all and redirecting from http to https. I figured it would be a full weekend type job. But what I discovered once I decided that it was a major requirement if I’m going to run a business website on my server was that basically I had to install a script and run it, answering a couple of questions mostly with defaults it provided, and I was done in 20 minutes. And 10 of that was thinking it wasn’t working because I accidentally forwarded the wrong port on my router.

The goal of the business was originally was to get my neighbors to pay me to get a look up on their roofs to see if their gutters are full of leaves or they have a shingle lifting or an obvious leaking spot at a chimney or a vent pipe. I mean, I would have paid for that when I had contractors telling me my gutters were full and I should pay them hundreds of dollars to clean them. But when I talk to other people, they don’t seem all that enthused. Well, maybe when they see the ad they’ll come around.

Alternatively, there’s a lot of real estate listings that would be improved by some nice drone shots. Or maybe contractors who’d like a look at a roof before they start estimating. Or home owners who’d like before and after shots of what the contractor has done. Or maybe weddings or graduating classes who’d like a cool video group picture. Or (and this one I didn’t think of, but I got approached by two rappers) an overhead shot in a music video.

I never thought this would become a full time job. What I’m hoping for is for it to grow to the point where I’ve got one or two shoots a week. But first, I’ve got to drive traffic to my website. Having a link here on my blog couldn’t hurt.

I’m trying to decide if I want my drone stuff to move to a separate YouTube channel. I worry that going forward it’s probably going to be the only content on my channel and I don’t want to make a new channel and starve my existing one.

Finally got it!

So I already wrote about my first attempt to do “Active Track” with my drone at Bristol Mountain Nearly lost my drone today. My second attempt got abandoned because after I launched the drone and was trying to set up the video when a gust of wind took it and drove it into the bushes. The third time I think I forgot to start the video recording. The fourth time, I bought a screen shade / screen protector so I could see the screen better, but I forgot about the big video start/stop button on the top of the controller, so it stopped recording as soon as I tucked it into my jacket, and started recording again when I took it out at the end.

But this time, it all came together. I decided not to tuck the controller into my jacket, and just let it pendulum around in front of me. That was mostly a factor on the big climb at the turn-around on the Hale-Bopp train. But I checked that it was still recording a couple of times, and it seemed to be recording fine.

Bristol Drone Video

Ok, there’s one weird thing – at one point it gets very close to a small branch, I can’t tell if it touched it or not, but the video got strange and wobbly. About 3 minutes later, it gets close to another branch. This time, it really doesn’t look like it touches, but the wobbliness clears up. I wonder if the gimbal is a bit frozen and it’s just bouncing around. I’ll have to look to see if there’s anything on the logs.

Oh, and a second weird thing – on the second loop around, the drone hits that very same branch and crashes. Maybe it was harder to see because the snow got knocked off the first time, but I don’t know. When I tried to relaunch it, it first wouldn’t climb, and then when I tried to land it, it suddenly took off upwards and hit a branch way above me and crashed again. I figured there must be some snow in one of the motors or something so I put it away..

Nearly lost my drone today

So I went skiing at Bristol today. I brought my drone alone just in case it wasn’t too crowded. However I made several mistakes:

  • I didn’t bring my reading glasses, which makes it hard to see what’s on the controller screen
  • I didn’t preload a map of the place on the controller
  • I didn’t recharge the batteries even though it’s been long enough that (I now know) the batteries purposely discharge to 60% or so
  • I didn’t realize that the wind was very strong above the treetops, and do something about the battery low or loss of signal RTH (Return to Home) function to do something other than rise up to 300 feet and get blown away
  • I didn’t set the home point somewhere where there were no trees overhead

So anyway, it was doing a fantastic job following me. I kept glancing back because the Mini 3 Pro is so quiet you can’t hear it unless there’s no other sound around. Even people who skied past me didn’t seem to realize there was a drone behind me. (Obviously I had it flying high enough that it wouldn’t hit anybody) But with about 300 meters left on the course I suddenly realized it wasn’t following me. I couldn’t read the messages on the screen, but I suspected it had done an RTH.

I quickly continued on to the home point, and it wasn’t there. I was looking up and I couldn’t see it or hear it, although if it was still up at 300 feet I probably couldn’t do either. Eventually I realized that the video was just pure white and it had a message about the motor stopping, so I realized it was probably crashed in the snow, but it might have been in a tree top.

I took off my skis and hiked a direct line through the woods between the home point and where I’d last seen it, scanning the snow and tree tops all the way. Then I hiked back to the home point along the trail, still examining the tree tops and snow to either side of the trail.

Around this time I remembered that the controller had a “Find My Drone” function, which I quickly activated while the controller continued to tell me how close the drone’s battery was to dying. Unfortunately, I hadn’t looked at the manual for this, and I wasn’t sure what I was seeing on the map. Again, I forgot to preload the map so all I had was a triangle and a dot with a line between them. I started to ski backwards around the trail, and the line seemed to be getting shorter, so I thought the dot was me. Eventually, however, I realized there was a third dot, and the reason the line was getting shorter was the third dot represented me (or rather the controller) and the map was zooming out to show that third dot as it moved further away from the other two dots.

Applying my masterful powers of deduction, realized the triangle and dot with a line between them probably represented the drone and the home point. I quickly returned to the home point, and that told me that the dot was the home point. Using my amazing orienteering skills, I headed in the direction of the triangle, and found my drone sitting in the snow beside one of the downhill trails. Phew. Can’t wait to see if the video looks any good. I’d love to do this at Cummings Nature Center if they ever get any snow.

Update: It turns out that because I didn’t have my reading glasses and couldn’t see the screen, I didn’t actually record any video during the important part. I got some video of my trying to get my drone set up to follow me, some still pics, and then nothing until a weird little bit of video evidently recorded during the RTH where I have about a second of a view over the valley taken from very high up, and then everything gets very over exposed and you can’t make out anything.