=== Let's Drone Out — Episode 322 ===
Title: LDO 322 - X Or +?
Recorded: 2021-10-28
Hosts: Stephen "Belrik" Howell, Wayne "CurryKitten" Andrews, Andrew "Frank" Hyams, Jack "Brightontillifly" Nash
Guest(s): (none recorded)
Total audience: 2,393
Platforms: YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0BQNgiBv38); SoundCloud (http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/1150880650-letsdroneout-ldo-322-x-or.mp3)
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[0.0] Jack: Hello and you're listening to Let's Drone Out and special thank you to our lovely patrons that help donate so that we can pay the editor to remove the swear words and silly things we say. Massive thank you too.
[14.0] Jack: Carlos Campos.
[16.0] Jack: Art Faulkner.
[18.0] Jack: Sam Dahmer.
[20.0] Jack: Mikey Dread.
[22.0] Jack: On with the show.
[24.0] Frank: Let's Drone Out now.
[54.54] Frank: And welcome to Let's Drone Out, Episode 322.
[60.54] Frank: Jack's not amazingly well at the moment, even by his standards, but tonight we are joined by Kerry Kitten.
[69.54] Frank: Hello.
[70.54] Frank: Stephen.
[71.54] Frank: Hello.
[72.54] Frank: Hi, I'm Andrew slash Frank.
[74.54] Frank: Get well, Jack.
[78.11] Frank: That's asking way too much of him.
[80.11] Frank: Too much pressure.
[82.11] Curry: Get slightly better.
[84.11] Frank: Yeah.
[85.11] Frank: Stay out of A&E.
[87.11] Curry: Good luck, mate.
[88.11] Frank: Yeah.
[89.11] Frank: So, what have we all been up to? Has anyone been flying this week?
[96.11] Frank: Kerry put his hand up.
[98.11] Curry: No, I went twice with an attempt today, which didn't go so well.
[104.11] Curry: So, we were just talking about this before stream.
[108.11] Curry: I ended up accidentally reviewing something and then publishing a video, although frankly not public, for something that doesn't exist yet.
[116.11] Curry: But I'm not under NDA, so which is this? This is called the Beta FPV Light Radio 3, as I found out.
[122.11] Curry: Not the Light Radio 2 with the ELRS module, which I thought it was, and thus had some links to it.
[129.11] Curry: I went out to test that with my Quilla frame, which was the light frame from STP and Russia FPV, which I'm putting some merchandise on.
[139.11] Curry: There it is.
[140.11] Curry: And I managed to get a failsafe from this. That was exciting.
[144.11] Curry: So, I took it out on my Mambo with the Namimno module in, which has like a proper antenna.
[151.11] Curry: And I don't know if you guys have seen the video, but sometimes I fly from this sort of thin corridor of trees.
[157.11] Curry: And then I have to fly out on the trees and get really lined up, else the video signal gets lost.
[162.11] Curry: So, I managed to get a kilometer.
[164.11] Curry: You should have a work with them, mate. Get them to trim it in a straight line.
[167.11] Curry: Yeah, that would be helpful. I got a kilometer with the Namimno module before it started getting a bit hazy on the video.
[173.11] Curry: But we were at full signal on the ELRS, so came on back, landed, flew this guy up.
[180.11] Curry: We got to about 800 meters, following the same direction.
[183.11] Curry: And then ELRS, which you occasionally see sort of flicker down to like 96, 92, suddenly said 80.
[190.11] Curry: And I was like, whoa, I haven't seen it that low before.
[192.11] Curry: And then it said 40. This is the LQ.
[195.11] Curry: And then it started flashing. I was like, that can't be good.
[198.11] Curry: So, I turned around and it said RX loss.
[201.11] Curry: I was like, that's really not good because I'm out over the trees.
[204.11] Curry: And I've got an untested rescue mode.
[208.11] Curry: I did actually put fail safe to rescue mode because I thought, well, if it does go bad, I don't want it just to fall out of the sky.
[214.11] Curry: But instead of doing anything, it just sat there for about two seconds and I wiggled the controls and it was like ultimate lag.
[223.11] Curry: So I do this and a second later, I sort of see the quad do this.
[226.11] Curry: I was like, is it coming? And it's like we had lag and then eventually it got back.
[231.11] Stephen: And that was a good toy radio, but still fundamentally a toy radio.
[235.11] Curry: It is a toy radio. So today I attempted to fly some more and this time BFPB sent me a bunch of stuff.
[242.11] Curry: These were the old. This is the meteor 65. This is the.
[247.11] Stephen: This looks like an 85.
[249.11] Curry: 85 pro something. These were the old versions.
[252.11] Curry: He had the the old and now I saw the announcement on that.
[256.11] Stephen: They said this is the 85 pro now also called the meteor 85.
[261.11] Stephen: Yeah, they just got two names.
[263.11] Curry: But I had the old ones. So they had the DA SBI receivers, which would get you on a good day about a hundred feet as long as you didn't fly behind yourself.
[271.11] Stephen: One point five kilometers.
[274.11] Stephen: I've seen it. It's written now one point five kilometers.
[278.11] Stephen: That doesn't work.
[279.11] Stephen: No one else knew you.
[280.11] Curry: But this one, this was so great.
[284.11] Curry: Here's a good reason not to have push in props on anything this big.
[289.11] Curry: It's like I went to take off this prop and this prop and launched off the feature and did their own thing.
[297.11] Curry: It's like it's got a little bit a little bit loose. So I don't I don't trust tension props.
[301.11] Curry: I couldn't fly that one at all, which is a shame because it actually has an antenna there.
[305.11] Curry: So I was quite confident about the range.
[308.11] Curry: This little one, these these are flight controllers I'm testing with the inbuilt SBI E LRS.
[313.11] Curry: This one's got a little ceramic antenna and this did OK.
[316.11] Curry: But by the time I got to 200 meters, it was flashing.
[319.11] Curry: It was on three point five volts battery.
[320.11] Curry: So I think the batteries are knackered.
[322.11] Curry: So I had to come back again.
[324.11] Curry: So I used to wasn't the most successful flying experience for me this week.
[329.11] Curry: I had one year that I can't publish.
[331.11] Curry: I'm sorry.
[332.11] Curry: And then then no real footage from these quads.
[335.11] Stephen: I was going to say I used to suffer a lot from the props detaching like like you had there.
[339.11] Stephen: And prior to Bardwell publishing his don't put locked out on your props.
[343.11] Stephen: I discovered the problem with that as well after trying to lock tight props onto the one metal shafts
[348.11] Stephen: and dissolving my prop hubs.
[350.11] Stephen: That was all fun.
[351.11] Stephen: I ended up using dabs of that welder glue just to keep them on their snud
[355.11] Stephen: because after you've knocked a few props off those one metal shafts,
[358.11] Stephen: I think they just you have to put fresh props on and just throw away good props
[363.11] Stephen: even if they're not damaged because they loosen up too much around the hub
[366.11] Stephen: or you've got to like glue them on.
[368.11] UNKNOWN: Yeah. Yeah.
[369.11] Curry: It was only funny because, of course, I take off with the goggles on all the time.
[372.11] Curry: So he was like, let's go.
[373.11] Curry: And it sort of tips off.
[374.11] Curry: And I was like, I'm a bit rusty here.
[376.11] Curry: Whoops.
[377.11] Curry: Pick it up, put it back.
[378.11] Curry: Does the same thing.
[379.11] Curry: Pick it up.
[380.11] Curry: I'm like, hang on.
[381.11] Curry: Where are two props gone?
[382.11] Curry: And then I had to have a nice wander around in the grass,
[385.11] Curry: long grass, looking for tiny two inch bits of blue
[388.11] Curry: because I didn't have any spare props with me again.
[391.11] Curry: That was fun.
[392.11] Stephen: How do those things fly?
[393.11] Stephen: It's been ages since I've flown a ducted quad.
[396.11] Curry: Badly.
[397.11] Curry: Badly.
[399.11] Curry: I think whenever you put a duct on a quad,
[402.11] Curry: it takes something away from it.
[404.11] Curry: So this, well, that's got 22,000 kV motors.
[407.11] Curry: It just felt underpowered and underwhelming
[411.11] Curry: and the camera's not very good.
[413.11] Curry: So it's very, very wide and it sort of distorts.
[417.11] Curry: So you get this weird warping effect as you go around.
[419.11] Curry: Not that I could fly it for more than a minute on each battery
[422.11] Curry: because all the batteries are completely knackered.
[424.11] Curry: But yeah, I didn't like it.
[426.11] Curry: I didn't like it.
[427.11] Curry: I didn't like flying it.
[428.11] Curry: I mean, I wanted to really rip around the trees.
[430.11] Curry: I had a bit of an open session to check the range
[432.11] Curry: and I wanted to sort of, let's go around the trees
[434.11] Curry: because even when you're not flying fast,
[436.11] Curry: that can be quite good fun.
[437.11] Curry: But because it was like 50 seconds of battery
[440.11] Curry: and it was like 15 seconds,
[442.11] Curry: I got low battery burning its image in my goggles.
[445.11] Curry: It was less fun.
[447.11] Stephen: Yeah.
[448.11] Stephen: You've got the fucking motors
[449.11] Stephen: and you've got kind of the lame 1S batteries.
[452.11] Stephen: I've always been a bit down on 1S batteries
[454.11] Stephen: because it's clearly obvious to anyone that knows about electronics.
[459.11] Stephen: If you're running at 1S, you're going to need double the amps,
[462.11] Stephen: but all the 1S plugs are just for shit.
[465.11] Stephen: So if you run 2S, you've automatically got a better plug
[469.11] Stephen: that's not going to kill your voltage
[471.11] Stephen: and you need like half as many amps.
[473.11] Curry: What's that doing?
[474.11] Curry: Like this can run 2S.
[475.11] Curry: They only give you like 300 milliamp hour batteries.
[478.11] Curry: So I made up a little, what is it called?
[483.11] Curry: JST-XE30.
[485.11] Curry: So I had some like 500 milliamp hour batteries.
[487.11] Curry: I thought those does be good.
[489.11] Curry: And of course the props just launched by themselves
[491.11] Curry: and I couldn't fly it.
[492.11] Jack: So that's bored my day.
[495.11] Stephen: Heal.
[496.11] Stephen: I've been following, is it Angry Don or someone
[500.11] Stephen: who's been trying to get lighter and lighter whoops
[503.11] Stephen: to make up for the fact that the batteries absolutely suck.
[506.11] Stephen: And it sounds like he's favoring ever smaller motors,
[510.11] Stephen: like really clawing off every gram of fat from those quads,
[514.11] Stephen: getting them down to 11 grams or something
[517.11] Stephen: and using 07-02 motors.
[519.11] Stephen: And I'm half tempted to buy a set of 07-02s
[521.11] Stephen: and just see if I can go super light.
[525.11] Curry: Did see that, but it kind of looks like if you crashed it,
[529.11] Curry: you would have to have a complete rebuild.
[531.11] Curry: Because everything is just like bare bits of like,
[536.11] Curry: I think the camera is just held on by the solder,
[538.11] Curry: isn't it basically?
[539.11] Curry: No, willpower, purely willpower.
[542.11] Stephen: Just rest the camera there until it's good to say.
[545.11] Stephen: Yeah.
[546.11] Stephen: And the screws are all plastic and God knows what.
[548.11] Stephen: Forget Ali screws, that's not weight saving enough.
[551.11] Stephen: You've got to get these ludicrously expensive plastic screws
[555.11] Stephen: that you can only order in bags of 1000 from somewhere in China.
[559.11] Stephen: And you've got to split them with 20 of your closest friends
[562.11] Stephen: to make it affordable.
[564.11] Stephen: Yeah, it's a mission,
[567.11] Stephen: but it's the only way to get something like that
[569.11] Stephen: down to the point where it's comparable
[571.11] Stephen: to just a regular brushless quad.
[573.11] Curry: I don't know about you guys,
[574.11] Curry: but I took this guy to fly outside
[577.11] Curry: because flying my house these days is absolute pants.
[580.11] Curry: I've got so much noise on 5.8 now
[583.11] Curry: from all my Wi-Fi stuff
[586.11] Curry: and all the surrounding neighborhood.
[588.11] Curry: Whenever they see any DVR from inside my house,
[592.11] Curry: they're like, this is crap.
[593.11] Curry: What's wrong with the camera?
[594.11] Curry: It's like nothing.
[595.11] Curry: It's all this Wi-Fi.
[597.11] Curry: So I have to go outside just to get clear of it.
[600.11] Stephen: I've got a structural wall through the house.
[602.11] Stephen: So if I go down the stairs, I'm fine.
[604.11] Stephen: If I fly one side of the house,
[605.11] Stephen: but if I turn and fly through a door,
[607.11] Stephen: I just lose video.
[608.11] Stephen: Bugle roll, I can do 200 milliwatt
[610.11] Stephen: and I'm like three meters away through a wall.
[613.11] Stephen: I'm screwed.
[615.11] Frank: Wow.
[616.11] Frank: I mean, I have seen sort of the level of WOOP racing
[622.11] Frank: has changed a lot over the last couple of years.
[625.11] Frank: It seems like everyone's in a lot of practice
[628.11] Frank: because it's gone from sort of the level
[630.11] Frank: where I would feel comfortable getting involved in a race,
[633.11] Frank: whereas it's just kind of you're just sort of cruising
[635.11] Frank: between gates, finding the next one,
[637.11] Frank: going around lots of horizon mode
[641.11] Frank: and just sort of generally trying, you know,
[644.11] Frank: a bit of a pace, but a brisk walking speed.
[647.11] Frank: And then now it's just like it's gone like the five inch.
[651.11] Frank: It's just like blurs, like just sixth sense.
[655.11] Frank: Yeah.
[656.11] Stephen: People are like pre-turning two meters before they arrive at a gate.
[659.11] Stephen: You could probably turn the VTXs off
[660.11] Frank: and they'd do just as well.
[662.11] Stephen: I did a meetup at a bar just at the side of Hyde Park
[667.11] Stephen: and hang up with people just having a few beers
[669.11] Stephen: and, you know, crashing in the middle of cat tunnels and stuff.
[672.11] Stephen: I bought some of those tunnels that you give to cats to play with
[676.11] Stephen: and strung them up as WOOP tunnels.
[678.11] Stephen: No one was taking it seriously.
[679.11] Stephen: There were a couple of people who had a new flight
[681.11] Stephen: and were sort of making up for tents at racing,
[683.11] Stephen: but now I look online and it's just insane.
[686.11] Stephen: Like people are taking gates and doing what you do on a five inch
[691.11] Stephen: where you kind of go through and then vertically loop
[693.11] Stephen: and go through the next gate.
[695.11] Frank: Yeah.
[696.11] Frank: It's insane.
[697.11] Frank: Magical pencilers posted in the chat.
[698.11] Frank: Gary Kent has been ripping WOOP tiles
[700.11] Frank: and that was who I had in my head as well,
[703.11] Frank: like for a crazy level of WOOP videos.
[706.11] Frank: And Gary Kent's obviously, you know, basically been the,
[711.11] Frank: I mean, maybe not the fastest, but the most.
[714.11] Frank: I mean, he's been very, very fast at five inch racing
[718.11] Frank: and very, very repeatable, very consistent.
[721.11] Frank: Like he can just fly the course at full speed.
[726.11] Frank: He knows what his full speed is
[727.11] Frank: and he can just do it repeatedly every single time.
[730.11] Frank: And he's obviously been doing a lot of practice as well with his WOOPs
[735.11] Frank: and he's getting just that same level.
[738.11] Frank: He's like, oh, well, this is, that's definitely,
[741.11] Frank: that's out of my realm.
[744.11] Stephen: Would you compare it to motor racing?
[746.11] Stephen: Like if you think back to the kind of twenties and thirties,
[749.11] Stephen: it was just like a bunch of guys with ridiculous hats
[753.11] Stephen: and cars that sort of worked driving as fast as they could.
[757.11] Stephen: And, you know, generally.
[758.11] Frank: That's much more my level.
[760.11] Frank: Yeah.
[761.11] Frank: I mean, you look now, it's like Lewis Hamilton
[763.11] Stephen: and people who are just terminator machines
[766.11] Stephen: just doing laps within 0.1 seconds, 50 times over.
[770.11] Curry: Exactly.
[771.11] Curry: So perhaps in order to get people back to casual,
[774.11] Curry: we have to insist that they are drunk before they start racing.
[778.11] Stephen: Or at the very least, they've got a bottle of champagne in the car.
[782.11] Stephen: I think a lot of the early motorsports were like that.
[785.11] Curry: Or we introduced some sort of handicap system
[787.11] Curry: where if they look too good,
[788.11] Curry: someone stands over them and occasionally punches them in the hands.
[791.11] Frank: I think we just turn the cameras off
[793.11] Frank: and they just have to fly by intuition.
[796.11] Frank: I think that might almost level the playing field.
[799.11] Stephen: Anyone caught flying too seriously gets wedged while flying.
[804.11] Frank: Well, on the topic of boot flying, though,
[810.11] Frank: there's, I don't know if you've seen the post about the race castle.
[817.11] Frank: Drone Junkie and Hearts FPV
[820.11] Frank: have been putting together quietly in the background
[823.11] Frank: and it sounds like they're going to start opening this up.
[826.11] Stephen: Race castle, tell us more.
[829.11] Stephen: It sounds like something that needs photographic evidence, Frank.
[832.11] Stephen: Do you have any to hand?
[834.11] Frank: Not to hand, unfortunately.
[835.11] Frank: But from what I can tell,
[837.11] Frank: it's a kind of very heavily furnished gazebo, marquee rather,
[847.11] Frank: a place called West Mill Farm,
[849.11] Frank: which is in Ware in Hertfordshire.
[853.11] Frank: So about 15 minutes north of the junction 25, the M25, there you go.
[859.11] Frank: And it's on a site where it looks like
[864.11] Frank: they've got a load of brake control cars and things like that as well.
[868.11] Frank: And it seems like a new thing that they're adding on to the side of it,
[872.11] Frank: which is a big marquee full of whoop stuff.
[877.11] Frank: So it looks like they're quietly opening that up
[880.11] Frank: and been quietly running a couple of events
[884.11] Frank: and starting to get word out.
[887.11] Frank: And there's now, as of the weekend,
[889.11] Frank: a Facebook group and a Facebook page and things going around.
[892.11] Frank: So I imagine that'll probably get a bit louder
[895.11] Frank: as they get into the stride of things with that.
[899.11] Frank: But as we're getting into winter, there'll be some more whooping, I'm sure.
[906.11] Stephen: On the subject, someone's posted something that's pretty awesome.
[909.11] Stephen: Richard Warwick from the chat has let us know
[912.11] Stephen: that there are 1S batteries with XT30s.
[915.11] Stephen: And the crucial part is you can buy them from the UK.
[917.11] Stephen: Previously, these were only available on FPV cycle in the US.
[921.11] Stephen: With ludicrous shipping, like $17 or $18 shipping,
[925.11] Stephen: and then you'd probably get stung for tax going through customs as well.
[929.11] Stephen: But now you can get these.
[931.11] Stephen: They've only got the 660 milliamp power in stock.
[934.11] Stephen: It looks like people already grabbed the actual one that's in the link there.
[938.11] Stephen: There's a 530 and a 660, both with XT30s on.
[942.11] Stephen: So it might make your whoops suck a little less if you're on 1S.
[946.11] Stephen: I still say just go 2S.
[949.11] Curry: Cut yourself some slack. It's easier.
[951.11] Curry: BETA FPV thought they were bringing out this new thing with their,
[955.11] Curry: I think they called it the BT connector, which looks like a miniature XT30.
[959.11] Curry: BT2.
[960.11] Curry: Yeah, the BT2.
[961.11] Stephen: There was never a BT1, interestingly enough.
[963.11] Curry: No, never called anything 1.0 because it won't work.
[968.11] Curry: People won't trust it.
[969.11] Curry: But yeah, the batteries just suck.
[971.11] Curry: 1S is like trying to keep 1S's in good condition.
[975.11] Curry: It's awful because they're so small.
[978.11] Curry: And you can't fly them.
[980.11] Curry: If you dawdle the barrel, yeah, they'll probably last.
[983.11] Curry: But you can't fly them hard.
[985.11] Curry: Everyone flies them down to like 2.8, 2.9 volts all the time.
[990.11] Stephen: And then they just won't recover.
[992.11] Stephen: Yeah, it's a pain.
[994.11] Stephen: Yeah, they're not great.
[995.11] Stephen: I've got a little cable I used to have where I've got a 1 to 3S charger.
[1000.11] Stephen: And so it's got like a 1S balance port, which, okay,
[1003.11] Stephen: it's not a balance port, it's a PH2 port.
[1005.11] Stephen: But you could just plug in all your 1S batteries.
[1008.11] Stephen: And then you'd have to like jump the 1S port over to the XT30 to link it up.
[1015.11] Stephen: And then the charger would be like, hey, yeah,
[1017.11] Stephen: I've got a 1S with a balance connection.
[1019.11] Stephen: So they're all just connected together.
[1021.11] Stephen: And that would charge.
[1022.11] Stephen: And then you could do a storage charge on them,
[1024.11] Stephen: but it was just a phenomenal pain in the butt.
[1027.11] Stephen: And even then, they didn't last particularly well.
[1029.11] Curry: Oh, yeah, I've got a board that will storage charge 1S batteries.
[1034.11] Curry: They're still like a couple of seconds.
[1036.11] Stephen: You have to go out of your way there.
[1037.11] Stephen: You have to like get your charger and connect in your special 1S board.
[1040.11] Stephen: And then remember to take it out before you plug in more batteries
[1043.11] Stephen: or spark since you.
[1045.11] Frank: I did because I was an old job,
[1049.11] Frank: and I had a fairly big building with not a lot in it.
[1053.11] Frank: So I was whipping around that quite a bit.
[1055.11] Frank: And so I did by myself a little wall charger
[1058.11] Frank: that was six dedicated channels of 1S charging.
[1063.11] Frank: And that definitely made sessions of whipping much more bearable.
[1069.11] Frank: I bet it didn't do storage charging, did it?
[1072.11] Stephen: I can't remember.
[1073.11] Stephen: I have Google it like hell.
[1074.11] Stephen: I'm pretty sure they don't.
[1075.11] Stephen: The only way you can storage charges to jack it into a regular charger
[1078.11] Stephen: and fanny around and like connect up the balance port
[1081.11] Stephen: to the actual charge port.
[1083.11] Curry: This will do it.
[1086.03] Curry: This is something from a guy called a flying sandal,
[1089.03] Curry: which will basically use a balance lead and lots of 1S connections,
[1094.03] Curry: which tends to be a 4S battery.
[1096.03] Curry: But Vifly, I just saw her bringing out some multiple battery 1S.
[1103.03] Curry: I think they haven't got an A for it yet,
[1105.03] Curry: but they're calling it like a care thing
[1107.03] Curry: where you can storage charge and multiple charge
[1111.03] Curry: and discharge batteries on it.
[1113.03] Stephen: Yeah, I've got one of those octopus cables
[1115.03] Stephen: that like breaks out a 6S into 6 1S, and you can do that.
[1120.03] Stephen: Although, annoyingly, you've got to do them six at a time.
[1123.03] Stephen: There was one whoop fusion or something who did a board
[1129.03] Stephen: which was jumper selectable from one to 6S,
[1132.03] Stephen: so you could plug it in and then choose how many batteries you wanted
[1135.03] Stephen: to charge with a little jumper.
[1137.03] Stephen: But it was one of those only available in the US
[1139.03] Stephen: and shipping costs as much as the product type of deals.
[1143.03] Frank: Still waiting for the wireless power.
[1146.03] Frank: Wireless power seems like it would be more feasible for a whoop
[1150.03] Frank: than anything else.
[1151.03] Frank: I mean, sort of controllable space vaguely.
[1154.03] Frank: Why don't you just have wired power?
[1155.03] Curry: We just attach a little power cable to them.
[1158.03] Curry: Just don't fly them through any gates, and we're good.
[1161.03] Stephen: I'm sure you can do that.
[1162.03] Stephen: You just disassemble a microwave and you get out.
[1166.03] Stephen: Nothing can go wrong.
[1167.03] Stephen: It's going to be fine.
[1168.03] Stephen: It's going to be fine.
[1170.03] Frank: Maybe somewhere in between the two, you have a little
[1173.03] Frank: scale-electric track.
[1175.03] Frank: It's just like a trolley bus in reverse.
[1178.03] Frank: You're sort of flying around with the wipers.
[1180.03] Stephen: The goal is to stay on the track
[1181.03] Stephen: because the instant you go more than six inches away
[1183.03] Stephen: from the racing line, you lose power.
[1185.03] Stephen: Yeah, exactly.
[1187.03] Stephen: How many laps can you do?
[1189.03] Frank: Yep.
[1190.03] Curry: These are all good ideas.
[1192.03] Curry: Let's make it happen.
[1194.03] Stephen: Speaking of scale-electrics and cars, I got keen.
[1199.03] Stephen: I tried to run my car, and it wasn't going fast enough,
[1202.03] Stephen: so I kept putting higher-voltage batteries in.
[1205.03] Curry: That sounds like it went perfectly and nothing bad happened.
[1208.03] Stephen: I learned something this week.
[1212.03] Stephen: I learned that the racer-style motor I got works just fine
[1217.03] Stephen: on 5S, even though it says 2S.
[1221.03] Stephen: None of the rest of the gears do, though.
[1223.03] Stephen: None of it.
[1226.03] Stephen: I think it's cooked from the inside out now,
[1228.03] Stephen: so I have friction.
[1231.03] Frank: They decided to have a particular powertrain
[1235.03] Frank: and built the gearbox to suit that powertrain.
[1238.03] Frank: Isn't that what you just got?
[1240.03] Stephen: I thought the stock motor was lame,
[1243.03] Stephen: and because I don't understand cars, I was just like,
[1245.03] Stephen: oh, come on, it's got a metal drivetrain.
[1248.03] Stephen: It'll be fine without realizing exactly the type of metal
[1252.03] Stephen: that can be used in RC car drivetrains,
[1254.03] Stephen: which appears to be actually worse than your typical
[1257.03] Stephen: Saturday night takeaway container.
[1260.03] Stephen: It's all just gone to crap.
[1262.03] Stephen: It's all just seized up like so much multiclasticine.
[1265.03] Stephen: It's not great.
[1267.03] Stephen: New diffs and everything are in the post,
[1269.03] Stephen: and diff upgrade gear sets and gearbox upgrade gear sets.
[1273.03] Stephen: I'm going to tear it down, put a bunch of metal in it,
[1276.03] Stephen: and then strip it all over again.
[1278.03] Frank: You'll find something else that can't cope with that.
[1280.03] Frank: That is the entire story of radio-controlled cars
[1283.03] Frank: as far as I can tell.
[1284.03] Frank: Whenever you upgrade,
[1286.03] Frank: it'll just expose something else is the weak point.
[1289.03] Frank: It's too many moving parts.
[1291.03] Stephen: The trouble is, also, if you fly quads,
[1293.03] Stephen: everything else is really slow.
[1295.03] Stephen: You're like, all right, I'll get this RC car.
[1298.03] Stephen: It's big, it's got chunky batteries.
[1300.03] Stephen: It's going to fly over that field,
[1302.03] Stephen: except it doesn't really, does it?
[1304.03] Stephen: My little three-inch quad's able to zoom straight past it,
[1307.03] Stephen: so I'm like, oh, I'll just put bigger batteries in it,
[1310.03] Stephen: bigger motors,
[1311.03] Stephen: but it's never going to be as fast as a quad,
[1313.03] Stephen: and I think I just need to be realistic about it
[1315.03] Stephen: and treat it as a different thing.
[1317.03] Stephen: I've got a bit carried away.
[1319.03] Stephen: Put wings on it.
[1320.03] Stephen: Have a hybrid car that flies.
[1324.03] Stephen: Yeah.
[1325.03] Stephen: Actually, I was interested to see that,
[1327.03] Stephen: and I'm just ripping stuff from Bardwell at this point,
[1330.03] Stephen: but I was interested a couple of weeks ago
[1332.03] Stephen: because I thought, I'd like to get involved in wings.
[1334.03] Stephen: I saw all your wing stuff,
[1336.03] Stephen: but I've never really been a wing pilot,
[1338.03] Stephen: and I find servos frustrate me.
[1342.03] Stephen: I don't feel I can trust them.
[1344.03] Stephen: I don't feel they have not got my best interests at heart.
[1348.03] Stephen: I think they're fighting me,
[1350.03] Stephen: and so I was thinking, wouldn't it just be easier
[1353.03] Stephen: if you used differential thrust
[1355.03] Stephen: and just got rid of all these control surfaces
[1357.03] Stephen: because what are they even there for?
[1359.03] Stephen: I mean, just put a quad on the front
[1361.03] Stephen: and put a wing behind it.
[1363.03] Stephen: In fact, just get a wing and then tape a quad
[1365.03] Stephen: straight on the front of a wing at right angles,
[1368.03] Stephen: and you can pivot how you want here.
[1371.03] Stephen: Turn and pivot.
[1372.03] Stephen: You can stop and turn.
[1375.03] Curry: So you're talking about that little wing he featured
[1379.03] Curry: where he uses whoop-style stuff,
[1384.03] Curry: but it's got some motors at bizarre angles.
[1387.03] Curry: There was that, but I was thinking maybe
[1389.03] Stephen: just a lot more power and a bigger wing.
[1394.03] Stephen: Or maybe a kind of 50-centimeter wing,
[1397.03] Stephen: and like 22-08 motors.
[1402.03] Stephen: No, I don't trust them.
[1405.03] Stephen: They hum and they're whispering things about me.
[1408.03] Stephen: I don't like them.
[1409.03] Stephen: What I do trust are brushless motors,
[1411.03] Stephen: and I think they're going to be just fine.
[1413.03] Stephen: We just put a flight controller on it.
[1415.03] Stephen: We put four brushless motors on the front
[1417.03] Stephen: and just tweak the mixer a bit,
[1419.03] Stephen: and then you'll be able to stop your wing
[1421.03] Stephen: and then turn around a tree
[1423.03] Stephen: without getting it stuck in the tree.
[1426.03] Curry: That's what you want.
[1427.03] Curry: So what you've basically come up with a way of doing
[1429.03] Curry: is getting a wing that is not very complicated,
[1432.03] Curry: because it only has one motor,
[1434.03] Curry: and putting three extra motors on it,
[1436.03] Curry: which doesn't sound like the most efficient thing.
[1439.03] Stephen: It's not complicated if you build quads all the time though,
[1441.03] Stephen: is it, Currie?
[1442.03] Stephen: That's the most natural thing in the world.
[1444.03] Stephen: Servos, servos, they're unnatural.
[1446.03] Stephen: There's about a million of them.
[1447.03] Stephen: They're all different bloody sizes.
[1449.03] Stephen: There's no standard mounting pattern,
[1451.03] Stephen: buzz, chatter, act funny.
[1454.03] Frank: I'm not bothered by servos.
[1457.03] Frank: It's the connection between the servos
[1459.03] Frank: and the control surfaces,
[1460.03] Frank: and that's what gets me.
[1462.03] Frank: Oh yeah, they can come out all the time.
[1464.03] Curry: Well, this isn't steering very well.
[1467.03] Curry: Oh, control surface fell out.
[1468.03] Stephen: Compare that to four motors on a sheet of carbon
[1471.03] Stephen: stuck on with maybe some tape
[1473.03] Stephen: or a 3D print onto the front of a wing.
[1475.03] Stephen: I mean, you've got less moving parts.
[1477.03] Stephen: You've got more reliability.
[1479.03] Stephen: No servo horn is going to shake itself loose.
[1482.03] Frank: I mean, the shaking itself loose doesn't even bother me.
[1485.03] Frank: What bothers me is you just have it in the boot of the car
[1490.03] Frank: or you just got it strapped to your backpack or something
[1493.03] Frank: and it just snags on one little thing
[1496.03] Frank: and that's just totaled it.
[1498.03] Frank: And you've just spent an hour driving to a field
[1500.03] Frank: big enough to fly a wing.
[1502.03] Frank: The trimming as well,
[1504.03] Stephen: you've got to line everything up and have it trimmed.
[1506.03] Stephen: That was the bit that really kicked my butt
[1509.03] Stephen: when I tried to get a little wing up
[1511.03] Stephen: that I'd get everything so it was fine
[1513.03] Stephen: and then I'd have to take the wings off to transport it
[1516.03] Stephen: and then all my calibration was just for crap
[1519.03] Stephen: by the time I got to the field.
[1522.03] Stephen: I thought with a quad and a flight controller,
[1524.03] Stephen: oh, that's out of the window.
[1526.03] Stephen: Well, why don't you do what Frank has done?
[1529.03] Stephen: You'd benefit from the wide ratio.
[1531.03] Curry: Frank has got his special VTOL.
[1533.03] Curry: Your VTOL. Show us your VTOL.
[1535.03] Curry: That's only got two motors and it can do everything
[1538.03] Curry: because he's got servos moving his motors around.
[1541.03] Curry: He's got 30 servos.
[1543.03] Frank: I don't know actually where I...
[1545.03] Frank: I guess it's probably in there somewhere.
[1547.03] Frank: I can't see it. Hold on.
[1549.03] Stephen: All right.
[1551.03] Frank: Let's crawl into Narnia.
[1554.03] Stephen: Right, Frank has gone spelunking.
[1556.03] Curry: I can't see it.
[1558.03] Curry: I think the one problem about having all motors on a wing
[1562.03] Curry: is when inevitably you have a problem
[1564.03] Curry: and the motors stop,
[1566.03] Curry: then it's quite hard to glide it down
[1568.03] Curry: because you've got no control surfaces anymore.
[1571.03] Stephen: What do you mean when the motors stop?
[1573.03] Stephen: Why would the motors stop?
[1575.03] Curry: Because they always go wrong at some point.
[1577.03] Curry: I can't remember flying something
[1579.03] Curry: where I haven't had the dead stick land it at some point.
[1582.03] Stephen: Like a quadcopter, you mean?
[1585.03] Curry: Well, quadcopters...
[1586.03] Curry: If we're dead stick landing motors...
[1588.03] Stephen: That many quads left, would we?
[1591.95] Stephen: So if I get a quad, it literally attaches to the front of a wing.
[1595.95] Frank: It is going to be entertaining.
[1597.95] Stephen: I've got to keep the wiring more condensed, I think.
[1599.95] Stephen: Lots of people... I see the wiring for wings
[1601.95] Stephen: and they're like, put the ESC over here
[1603.95] Stephen: and then they'll run the motor wire up to Narnia and back
[1606.95] Stephen: and throw a double helix around the VTX and out to the motor.
[1610.95] Stephen: And it's all just kind of condensed together,
[1612.95] Stephen: so it doesn't get tangled and messy.
[1616.95] Stephen: And then just sort of, you know, just get an X frame
[1618.95] Stephen: and plonk it on the front of a wing.
[1620.95] Curry: I think we should have a wing race.
[1622.95] Curry: You make one by strapping a quad to the front.
[1624.95] Curry: I use a regular wing.
[1626.95] Curry: We'll test it for speed and how long each battery goes.
[1629.95] Curry: Agility.
[1631.95] Curry: Agility, yeah. Fair enough.
[1633.95] Stephen: And ease of takeoffs as well.
[1637.95] Stephen: We'll see how easy...
[1639.95] Stephen: It's everybody's technique.
[1641.95] Stephen: Can nobody throw a wing.
[1643.95] Stephen: Can you do a standing takeoff with a wing?
[1645.95] Stephen: I'll be able to just like, just gun it on the floor
[1648.95] Curry: and then stand it straight up. Off it goes.
[1652.95] Stephen: Okay. Why do people not do that with wings more often?
[1655.95] Stephen: They always find some mug to hold it
[1657.95] Stephen: and then slam it into the ground for them.
[1660.95] Curry: Well, it kind of depends on your thrust ratio, of course.
[1663.95] Curry: And a lot of these really fast wings generally have quite small props
[1666.95] Curry: which take a little while to sort of like get that thrust going.
[1672.95] Curry: But I'm...
[1674.95] Curry: A lot of quad people don't like the look of wings
[1678.95] Curry: because it all looks a bit shaky in the air,
[1680.95] Curry: which is a bit of a shame
[1682.95] Curry: because you have to sort of think about
[1684.95] Curry: really you're sort of surfing through the air currents,
[1686.95] Curry: which is a bit shaky, instead of just ignoring them.
[1690.95] Curry: Pretty much you can...
[1692.95] Curry: The aerodynamic brick that a quad is can just cut through air.
[1696.95] Curry: But a wing sort of dances and skips along it,
[1699.95] Curry: which is all a bit different.
[1701.95] Stephen: I thought I could cut out all the dancing and skipping
[1704.95] Stephen: if I just put a lot of motors on it
[1706.95] Stephen: and make it a lot heavier.
[1709.95] Stephen: And take the wings off.
[1711.95] Stephen: Yeah.
[1712.95] Stephen: Well, the wing will be there.
[1713.95] Stephen: It'll be along for the ride.
[1715.95] Stephen: And if I feel like it, you know,
[1716.95] Stephen: just kind of punch it up into the sky
[1718.95] Stephen: and do a little bit of gliding.
[1720.95] Frank: I'm looking forward to seeing you attempt to glide it.
[1727.95] Frank: I'm also interested to see where you end up putting your CG.
[1730.95] Stephen: I guarantee it will glide better than a quad.
[1734.95] Stephen: That's the baseline.
[1736.95] Stephen: Okay.
[1737.95] Stephen: How well do my quads glide?
[1739.95] Stephen: Can I improve on that by adding a wing?
[1742.95] Frank: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[1744.95] Frank: Yeah, yeah.
[1746.95] Frank: But yeah, it's also where are you going to put your CG?
[1749.95] Frank: Because if you've just got all your motors
[1751.95] Frank: at the front of this wing...
[1753.95] Frank: I'll put the battery at the back.
[1754.95] Stephen: Obviously, the battery's got to go somewhere, hasn't it?
[1756.95] Stephen: So the battery will go where your fuselage
[1758.95] Stephen: would be on a regular plane or out the arse of it.
[1761.95] Frank: Does that mean it will actually glide?
[1765.95] Frank: I mean, if you get the CG there,
[1767.95] Frank: and then if you manage to eject a battery or something...
[1771.95] Frank: You'd want a very narrow arm frame.
[1773.95] Stephen: I think that's the thing I've got to look for.
[1775.95] Stephen: I've got to find a frame that's got dead, spindly arms, quite strong.
[1779.95] Stephen: So the arms need to be of a thick sheet,
[1783.95] Stephen: but they need to be quite narrow profile.
[1786.95] Frank: You need more of the kind of fossil stuff with his vertical arms.
[1790.95] Stephen: Yeah, that type of deal would be perfect, yeah.
[1793.95] Frank: Mm-hmm. And be entertaining.
[1795.95] Stephen: And then obviously, if the battery's out the back,
[1797.95] Stephen: I guess the wing would need to be able to bear some kind of force along that axis,
[1802.95] Stephen: which it wouldn't normally do.
[1804.95] Stephen: Wings would normally kind of go wingtip to wingtip.
[1806.95] Stephen: They'd have their strength.
[1808.95] Stephen: But if you were to stick a quad on the front and have the battery on the back,
[1811.95] Stephen: you're going to need a bit more strength along the fuselage axis
[1815.95] Frank: Are you going to do... Would you do X or would you do plus?
[1821.95] Stephen: That's interesting, isn't it? I think...
[1825.95] Stephen: I honestly don't know.
[1828.95] Stephen: The mixer would be a doddle for a plus, wouldn't it?
[1831.95] Stephen: That'd be very straightforward.
[1833.95] Stephen: You realise you're committed to building this now.
[1835.95] Curry: We're holding it to it.
[1837.95] Stephen: What I'm going to need from the wing experts is a cheap,
[1840.95] Stephen: because I will smash it to pieces,
[1842.95] Stephen: a smaller wing, thinking something 45 to 50 centimetres,
[1847.95] Stephen: answers on the back of a postcard.
[1849.95] Curry: None of the wing experts are talking to you because you slagged off all servos.
[1853.95] Stephen: Yeah, they just stink. Don't like them.
[1856.95] Stephen: But you were just saying the other week that you never buy good servos.
[1859.95] Stephen: You just buy the 99p store ones.
[1863.95] Curry: In my original Falcon wing, I got servos,
[1866.95] Curry: which were the cheapest of chips on Hobbyking.
[1868.95] Curry: I think they were like £1 something.
[1870.95] Curry: And they have flown for like 50, 60 hours somehow.
[1875.95] Curry: Since that time, I was like, oh, these are crap servos.
[1878.95] Curry: I'll get better ones for the next planes.
[1880.95] Curry: But those are still in that plane.
[1882.95] Curry: And that plane has done so much.
[1885.95] Curry: But I have literally made planes before out of cardboard.
[1889.95] Curry: Let's try this.
[1890.95] Curry: It had one little tiny crash and literally stripped the servos bare.
[1894.95] Curry: So there's literally no teeth at all.
[1896.95] Stephen: The only servos I've bought so far have been heli servos.
[1900.95] Stephen: So that's kind of where I've started on.
[1903.95] Stephen: They just buzz a lot.
[1904.95] Stephen: But I wanted 330 hertz servos.
[1908.95] Stephen: I suppose if anyone's going to be keen about servos,
[1910.95] Stephen: it's the heli people who have much more rigorous quality standards, I think.
[1915.95] Frank: Yeah.
[1916.95] Frank: When one of their servos goes wrong,
[1918.95] Frank: that's a very expensive little twitch, isn't it?
[1921.95] Frank: Yeah.
[1923.95] Stephen: Yeah.
[1924.95] Frank: This episode was recorded in front of a live online audience,
[1927.95] Frank: downloaded and edited to make sense when it played audio only,
[1931.95] Frank: censored to please the iTunes people,
[1933.95] Frank: hosted on the internet,
[1934.95] Frank: forwarded through to your podcast provider,
[1936.95] Frank: downloaded, playing on your device,
[1938.95] Frank: and is now playing in your ears.
[1940.95] Frank: All thanks to our Patreons.
[1942.95] Frank: Consider joining them and you'll also get other online benefits.
[1945.95] Frank: Find out more at patreon.com forward slash let's drone out.
[1950.95] Stephen: That was just an interesting experiment,
[1952.95] Stephen: because I saw that the ones that have been on show so far looked a lot
[1955.95] Stephen: just like a quad with some very, very minute fins on it.
[1961.95] Stephen: And I thought, why not just take a regular big foam wing
[1964.95] Stephen: and see how it goes?
[1965.95] Stephen: So I'll give it a shot.
[1966.95] Stephen: Big fins in a minute quad.
[1968.95] Frank: There's the tiny wing as well.
[1973.06] Frank: That's a thing.
[1975.06] Stephen: Yeah.
[1976.06] Stephen: I have one of those somewhere.
[1978.06] Stephen: They look curious.
[1979.06] Stephen: Have you built it yet?
[1980.06] Stephen: No.
[1982.06] Frank: Okay.
[1983.06] Stephen: That was wrong with the woop, right?
[1985.06] Frank: It's one of my collection of wings that I've bought,
[1988.06] Frank: or I have, but I have not built.
[1992.06] Stephen: You see Andy's paper airplane one.
[1994.06] Stephen: That was kind of cute.
[1995.06] Stephen: Yeah.
[1996.06] Stephen: That was pretty cool.
[1997.06] Stephen: They were asking quite a lot for it though.
[1999.06] Stephen: It looked neat.
[2000.06] Stephen: But I think it was 50 or 60 quid.
[2004.06] Curry: That's a bit much.
[2005.06] Curry: Oh, there's been proper product release this week, hasn't there?
[2009.06] Curry: That we forgot to mention.
[2010.06] Curry: This is the DJI Action Cam 2.
[2014.06] Curry: Yeah.
[2015.06] Curry: Which looks a little bit like a thin session.
[2018.06] Curry: And my research involved having to watch the Rotoright episodes.
[2023.06] Curry: Obviously after I'd taken a shower afterwards,
[2025.06] Curry: because I felt dirty watching it,
[2027.06] Curry: I got some reasonably good information from it,
[2030.06] Curry: which is the fact that I did see just a couple of times
[2034.06] Curry: I saw a little bit of jello on their footage,
[2037.06] Curry: the proper wobbly stuff,
[2038.06] Curry: which I thought they were managing to mostly avoid.
[2041.06] Curry: So it's almost like it doesn't have the,
[2046.06] Curry: like if you look at a GoPro and you wiggle it around,
[2049.06] Curry: it's still very smooth.
[2050.06] Curry: But on their default setting, it was a bit wiggly.
[2052.06] Curry: And then they've got two different stabilization modes.
[2055.06] Curry: One is called Rock Steady, which looks pretty nice.
[2058.06] Curry: And the other one's called Horizon Steady,
[2060.06] Curry: which I think literally steadies to horizon.
[2062.06] Curry: But it's like it goes from here
[2064.06] Curry: and crops down to here to do that.
[2066.06] Curry: But it was nice and small,
[2068.06] Curry: and it had some weird quirks,
[2070.06] Curry: like the fact like it's onboard memory and onboard battery,
[2074.06] Curry: and you can't directly get to any of that.
[2076.06] Curry: You have to fit it on this little screen thing,
[2078.06] Curry: which then you get like ports and chargeable things.
[2082.06] Curry: So the battery only goes for like 30 minutes,
[2084.06] Curry: unless you keep recharging it.
[2087.06] Frank: And it's, yeah, like you said,
[2089.06] Frank: you can't put like a micro SD in it or anything.
[2092.06] Frank: It's just purely the internal memory, which is weird.
[2096.06] Frank: It seems very strange.
[2098.06] Curry: Well, it's weird.
[2099.06] Curry: And we were all a little bit concerned about the fact that,
[2102.06] Curry: Stephen, you mentioned like it had all aluminium around the lens.
[2105.06] Curry: So if you just cracked a little bit of it,
[2107.06] Curry: then the lens is probably going to go.
[2109.06] Stephen: And if you dent the casing, but don't even break the casing,
[2113.06] Stephen: then of course, it's just going to compress that screen.
[2116.06] Stephen: It's going to distort it in some way, isn't it?
[2118.06] Stephen: Blowing a screen out, yeah.
[2120.06] Curry: But I think from it looked quite good.
[2123.06] Curry: It's just like, there's just a couple of things that seem like,
[2126.06] Curry: well, they could have done that a little bit better to,
[2129.06] Curry: to a little bit odd.
[2131.06] Curry: And like, if you attach the little screen to it,
[2133.06] Curry: it's a forward facing screen.
[2135.06] Curry: So you can film yourself.
[2136.06] Curry: I like what if you want to film something else, but look at it.
[2138.06] Curry: I don't think you can flip it up the other way,
[2140.06] Curry: which seemed odd for sort of general action camera.
[2145.06] Frank: I was having a look at the size and weight.
[2149.06] Frank: Just because it looks like a very session five type form factor.
[2154.06] Frank: And yeah, it's only, it's a mil wider and a mil taller than the session five.
[2160.06] Frank: And then it's...
[2161.06] Stephen: It's deep as a session five.
[2163.06] Stephen: I have again been copying the same size as established products.
[2167.06] Stephen: It's like manufacturers feel they're breaking the law
[2169.06] Stephen: if they use the same size as a popular product.
[2173.06] Curry: That's because I think RunCam fell foul of that,
[2176.06] Curry: literally because it was the same size as a session.
[2179.06] Curry: They had to withdraw one of their cameras.
[2181.06] Frank: I can imagine GoPro and DJI are probably not on the best of terms.
[2186.06] Stephen: US patent law is bloody stupid.
[2189.06] Stephen: For my day job, I have to read a lot of patents
[2191.06] Stephen: and I'm familiar with the process and it is bloody stupid.
[2195.06] Stephen: It is a stupid system.
[2198.06] Frank: Yeah, then it's, so it's,
[2201.06] Frank: it's twice the weight of the Insta360 Go 2,
[2204.06] Frank: and session five is like three times the weight of the 360 Go 2.
[2209.06] Frank: So it's, you know, it's still well in quads type weight,
[2213.06] Frank: especially when you consider like the latest Go Pros or anything like that.
[2217.06] Frank: What is it in grams?
[2219.06] Frank: It's in a GoPro now.
[2220.06] Frank: So the action two is 56 grams.
[2223.06] Stephen: Oh, that's perfectly good. Yeah.
[2225.06] Frank: Yeah, so Insta360 Go 2 27 grams, session five 74 grams.
[2230.06] Frank: Yeah, it's well in the right zone now.
[2234.06] Stephen: I'm using a Smoke 4K, but every time I fly with that, I worry about smashing it.
[2238.06] Stephen: There's not a lot to it.
[2240.06] Frank: And it's two thirds the depth of a session five and it's basically the same height and width.
[2246.06] Frank: So yeah, it's definitely quad friendly size.
[2251.06] Stephen: I had to post this one from Shady because I do feel this.
[2256.06] Stephen: It's nice to record your flights, but unless people are obsessed with FPV,
[2261.06] Stephen: you're not going to get your nan to watch it, are you?
[2264.06] Stephen: If you're inverted your spins over something.
[2268.06] Frank: Shady's comment was, why is everyone obsessed with filming their flights?
[2272.06] Frank: Nobody ever watches the footage unless you force them to.
[2276.06] Frank: Can't force my family to.
[2279.06] Stephen: I have to say, I've got a bit ground down with the flippy floppies.
[2283.06] Stephen: I appreciate the skill that you've got to practice for hours.
[2286.06] Stephen: You've got to wreck tens of motors and untold numbers of frames to get them down.
[2291.06] Stephen: But the trouble is, once you've got really good at it, it's just really tiring to watch
[2297.06] Stephen: because someone will just do nothing but aggressive stick moves for three minutes.
[2302.06] Stephen: And it's just like slam, slam, slam, slam, slam, slam.
[2305.06] Stephen: And it's exhausting.
[2308.06] Curry: Since we're getting over pet thieves, I'm a bit annoyed now with the amount of the Silly Whoop set up stuff.
[2315.06] Curry: It's a bit like people walking along.
[2317.06] Curry: Do you remember those chase scenes where people used to be walking some glass along and it's going to hit them?
[2321.06] Curry: Now it's like, oh, I'm just going to hold my arm up so the quad can fly through it.
[2326.06] Curry: Or I'm just washing out this t-shirt so a quad can fly through it.
[2330.06] Stephen: I just stand like this normally. That's what I do most days.
[2334.06] Curry: I'm just seeing if I can make an O-shape with my hands.
[2337.06] Curry: And it goes on and on.
[2339.06] Curry: It's just like, oh, let's do a lap.
[2341.06] Curry: The bowling alley footage one was the thing that went big.
[2344.06] Curry: I thought he did about two laps.
[2346.06] Curry: Let's jump the shark a bit.
[2347.06] Curry: To be honest, I feel it could be shorter and tighter.
[2352.06] Curry: And there were some scenes in these things.
[2354.06] Curry: It's like you could walk along with a camera.
[2356.06] Curry: When stuff's done good for a general advertisement, it's not just all drone footage.
[2363.06] Curry: It's a mix of stuff that you have.
[2366.06] Curry: The trick is if you mix drone stuff in with the regular stuff, you don't really notice.
[2370.06] Curry: It doesn't stand out.
[2371.06] Curry: And I think that's where it works better.
[2373.06] Curry: Quite like you said, the bowling alley one.
[2375.06] Stephen: And I think there was a NERC who did a video of an arcade.
[2381.06] Stephen: And they were really nice.
[2382.06] Stephen: But I think there's a lot of pilots who are not quite as good as those people.
[2387.06] Stephen: And they've seen the video and they're trying to copy it.
[2389.06] Stephen: And it's just like saturated.
[2391.06] Stephen: It's kind of like what cinema was like for a couple of years after Matrix was released,
[2396.06] Stephen: when it was just constant ripoffs.
[2398.06] Stephen: And it's a bit like that now, with FPV footage, where everyone's trying to get on it.
[2402.06] Curry: I am very impressed with the, I call them the actors in these things.
[2408.06] Curry: Because I think we've all been around citywoops.
[2412.06] Curry: And it sounds like a truck's driving at you.
[2415.06] Stephen: And they'll be playing some ambient soundtrack that's like whale song or something.
[2420.06] Stephen: But you know it's going to be like...
[2423.38] Curry: It's horrendous.
[2425.38] Curry: A hundred meters away from the one I was flying the other day, I was like,
[2428.38] Curry: Jesus, this is loud.
[2429.38] Curry: And it was in the next field.
[2431.38] Frank: So that's not in an enclosed space either.
[2434.38] Frank: Yeah.
[2435.38] Frank: Yeah.
[2436.38] Frank: But, you know...
[2438.38] Frank: Good off to the actors.
[2440.38] Frank: Yeah.
[2441.38] Frank: You know, you can get some interesting shots of some interesting things.
[2445.38] Frank: But yeah, if you're just kind of flying around a field,
[2448.38] Frank: no one really needs to see that.
[2451.38] Stephen: I think what we're reaping now is the backlash of the fact that all of those cinequads
[2459.38] Stephen: were sold as beginner quads.
[2461.38] Stephen: Like, oh, it's got ducts on.
[2463.38] Stephen: You can put a camera on it.
[2465.38] Stephen: It's a beginner quad.
[2466.38] Stephen: And they never really were.
[2467.38] Stephen: It was more like it's got ducts on.
[2469.38] Stephen: It's going to break a lot more.
[2471.38] Stephen: It's still going to hurt like hell because it's a heavy quad.
[2474.38] Stephen: It weighs as much as a five inch.
[2477.38] Stephen: Ducts or no ducts.
[2478.38] Stephen: Like, you fly this at someone, you're going to cut them.
[2480.38] Stephen: Like, it's going to get caught in people's hair if you fly past, if they have hair.
[2484.38] Frank: But I think the other thing is that, like, a cine swoop, like you say,
[2488.38] Frank: if people go out and buy a cine swoop, they're going to film something with it
[2493.38] Frank: and they're going to post a video everywhere.
[2495.38] Frank: And so you're going to see loads of cine group stuff.
[2497.38] Frank: Like, people that just buy, like, your model spitfire down the field that's not FPV,
[2503.38] Frank: just line of sight or whatever, they're not going to post any footage of that.
[2506.38] Frank: So you're not going to see that on social media anywhere.
[2509.38] Frank: Or, you know, generally a tiny loop or anything like that
[2513.38] Frank: isn't going to be visible as much.
[2516.38] Frank: And that's actually, you know, a long standing criticism of, like,
[2520.38] Frank: from all the socks and sandals.
[2522.38] Frank: It's like we've been doing dodgy shit for decades
[2527.38] Frank: and we've not had any problems with doing it
[2530.38] Frank: because we don't post it anywhere.
[2532.38] Frank: No one sees it.
[2533.38] Frank: We just do it away from everyone.
[2535.38] Frank: We don't tell anyone about it.
[2537.38] Frank: And that's why it hasn't been a problem.
[2539.38] Frank: And is that the official BLFA line for the process?
[2542.38] Stephen: I think so, yes.
[2544.38] Stephen: We don't do YouTube.
[2547.38] Stephen: Fireworks strapped to everything.
[2549.38] Stephen: Everyone pissed.
[2551.38] Stephen: It's fine.
[2552.38] Stephen: Don't film it.
[2553.38] Frank: The BLFA videos, you know, just describing the guides to, like, the assets and stuff.
[2561.38] Frank: You can tell they've not watched a lot of YouTube.
[2565.38] Frank: They've seen instructional videos from the 80s.
[2569.38] Frank: There's a lot of...
[2572.38] Frank: It feels like a videotape that's been sort of, you know,
[2575.38] Frank: putting a TV that's wheeled into the room, you know, on the park or flooring.
[2581.38] Stephen: The excellent guy of the video of I flew FPV in the 80s
[2585.38] Stephen: and he's got, like, a full-size TV set in the back of a transit van
[2589.38] Stephen: and somewhere in America.
[2591.38] Stephen: That was pretty epic.
[2593.38] Stephen: That was proper stuff.
[2595.38] Stephen: Speaking of FPV, Currie, did you see the distance record for Open HD
[2599.38] Stephen: that appeared a week or two back?
[2601.38] Stephen: Did you catch that one?
[2603.38] Curry: No, no, I haven't seen it.
[2605.38] Curry: Did someone do a... I saw a 100K video somewhere or something.
[2609.38] Stephen: They knocked over 100 kilometers on Open HD.
[2614.38] Curry: That is very interesting because to get that sort of thing,
[2617.38] Curry: you're talking about parabolic antennas
[2620.38] Curry: you're sort of dealing with the curvature of the Earth
[2623.38] Curry: and trying to...
[2625.38] Stephen: The horizon line is, what, like 14 miles away?
[2628.38] Stephen: Something like that, 14, 16 miles to the horizon.
[2631.38] Stephen: So, yeah, intense stuff.
[2635.38] Frank: Yeah, I mean, were they doing it from, like,
[2638.38] Frank: the top of a mountain to another mountain?
[2640.38] Frank: Like, how were they managing that?
[2642.38] Stephen: Well, they only posted the video of the quad kind of ticking over
[2647.38] Stephen: and they posted kind of 40 and 60 kilometer videos a while before.
[2651.38] Stephen: Sorry, it was on a quad.
[2653.38] Stephen: Well, probably a wing, actually. Sorry, not quad.
[2656.38] Curry: Yeah.
[2658.38] Stephen: That sounds like the Gatwick quad, if it can fly for that long.
[2661.38] Stephen: Mysterious.
[2663.38] Stephen: We found it.
[2665.38] Stephen: For all we know, they could have just strapped the system to a Cessna
[2667.38] Stephen: and f***ed off, but I'm assuming that it was an RC aircraft
[2671.38] Stephen: carrying this thing on board.
[2673.38] Curry: I thought... I haven't watched it.
[2675.38] Curry: I thought I saw a video title pop up in, like, social media somewhere
[2679.38] Curry: saying it was a mini Talon or Talon or something like that,
[2682.38] Curry: which would kind of make sense,
[2684.38] Curry: because you can stick an awful lot of battery in those
[2686.38] Curry: and they're pretty efficient.
[2688.38] Stephen: Yeah, so, I mean, people have been kind of,
[2691.38] Stephen: I'm in an errand, should we use Wi-Fi?
[2693.38] Stephen: And I think that kind of cements some of the credentials there.
[2695.38] Stephen: Like, this thing has got the guts to do the distance.
[2699.38] Stephen: I mean, you wouldn't expect it to be otherwise if you kind of work in IT,
[2703.38] Stephen: because, you know, the amount of tinkering that's gone into Wi-Fi
[2706.38] Stephen: to make it robust.
[2708.38] Stephen: It's not like there's a lot of change that's been left lying around,
[2712.38] Stephen: room for improvement.
[2713.38] Stephen: People have grabbed every little bit they can out of that system.
[2717.38] Stephen: But if we can get the latency down, it's potentially a contender.
[2722.38] Curry: So, in order to get that, do you happen to know
[2725.38] Curry: what hurts rate are they flying?
[2727.38] Curry: Because I'm figuring you lower the hurts,
[2729.38] Curry: you're going to get better distance because you don't...
[2733.38] Frank: Are you suspecting it might just be on autopilot,
[2736.38] Frank: just posting back a picture every couple of minutes?
[2740.38] Stephen: Well, what is the packet rate?
[2742.38] Stephen: If you're using OpenHD for the control link,
[2745.38] Stephen: which I'm assuming they must have been doing,
[2747.38] Stephen: because, well, they could have been using some 900 megahertz system, I suppose,
[2751.38] Stephen: but do you know what packet rate you get out of OpenHD?
[2757.94] Curry: Sorry, I thought you said it was, was it OpenHD that did this?
[2761.94] Curry: Yeah, OpenHD 100k.
[2763.94] Curry: I thought you missed it, I thought it was Express RS.
[2765.94] Curry: Oh, right.
[2766.94] Stephen: Yeah, that's the impressive thing, wasn't the fact, like,
[2769.94] Stephen: you probably realise, yeah, if you can get the video link to go that far,
[2772.94] Stephen: you could push it with the system like that,
[2774.94] Stephen: just put a 10-more amplifier on it and call it good on the ground.
[2778.94] Stephen: But this was pushing the signal from the aircraft,
[2781.94] Stephen: a video signal in digital back to the ground at 100k.
[2785.94] Stephen: That's pretty impressive.
[2786.94] Curry: Yeah.
[2787.94] Curry: I mean, people have been messing around on that project.
[2791.94] Curry: Some are doing antenna trackers, some are doing different diversity things
[2795.94] Curry: and obviously different types of antennas and stuff.
[2797.94] Curry: But that is interesting, isn't it?
[2799.94] Curry: Browsers.
[2800.94] Curry: Because I've seen a lot of flights between 20 and 30k looking quite good,
[2805.94] Curry: having the odd bit of break up along the way.
[2807.94] Curry: But that is just, it's interesting as well, isn't it?
[2809.94] Curry: Because it's like, when you get to sort of 50k after like, you know,
[2814.94] Curry: half an hour or so long, it's like, how are you doing?
[2817.94] Curry: About halfway there.
[2818.94] Curry: It's like, I'll be there in a second.
[2821.94] Curry: How much battery do you use?
[2822.94] Curry: Like, 5000 milliamps.
[2824.94] Curry: I'll be, I'm fine.
[2825.94] Curry: I'm good, I think.
[2826.94] Curry: It's just, uh, incredible stuff.
[2829.94] Stephen: I don't think he made it a public video, unfortunately.
[2832.94] Stephen: I think I did, uh, I think I did pop it on our Discord a while back,
[2835.94] Stephen: but I'm not sure.
[2836.94] Stephen: Check the Telegram group, see if it's in there.
[2839.94] Curry: I have been messing around with OpenHD.
[2842.94] Curry: Should I show you the latest hideous ranking quad we've got now?
[2846.94] Curry: Do it.
[2847.94] Curry: Can you tell where the OpenHD bit might be?
[2851.94] Frank: Uh, I think it's neatly, uh, underneath one of the carbon arms.
[2858.94] Frank: I think that's where it is.
[2859.94] Frank: Can't tell, can you?
[2860.94] Frank: I don't think it's the giant green box strapped to the side at all.
[2865.94] Curry: Is that a full size pie on there then?
[2870.19] Curry: No, that's a pie zero.
[2871.19] Curry: That's, that's, that's a small pie.
[2874.19] Curry: Here's the thing.
[2875.19] Curry: Um, big shout out to a guy called Mario FPV who's been putting together
[2880.19] Curry: some really good, uh, content on OpenHD on quads.
[2884.19] Curry: And he built a three inch quad with a pie zero and took it to like 6k, um,
[2891.19] Curry: on iNav, which is pretty impressive if you think about how it all fits in.
[2896.19] Curry: But what he did is he, he chose the right components.
[2900.19] Curry: And because this stupid pie zero is actually quite long and reasonably wide
[2905.19] Curry: and the base of this is actually quite short, I couldn't,
[2909.19] Curry: I tried to stick it at the front and the props would hit it
[2912.19] Curry: and I couldn't stick it on top because I have to put something else on top.
[2915.19] Curry: And it's like, oh Jesus Christ.
[2917.19] Curry: I had to end up fixing my printer just to print a bit to try and put it on the side.
[2921.19] Curry: But he managed to fit the pie underneath the top of his frame,
[2928.19] Curry: his Wi-Fi adapter on the top.
[2930.19] Curry: And because he picked, I think he picked a Roma frame
[2933.19] Curry: and I think that's built for DJI.
[2935.19] Curry: So, you know, the DJI things typically have like two stacks,
[2938.19] Curry: one for the flight controller and one for the air unit.
[2940.19] Curry: That allowed him to get all his bits in there on a three inch quad
[2944.19] Curry: and he did really good job.
[2945.19] Curry: And I was like, I'm scrapping the big quad.
[2947.19] Curry: Let's try it on a smaller quad.
[2948.19] Curry: But yeah, it's a massive pain in the ass.
[2950.19] Curry: Wowzers, look at that.
[2952.19] Stephen: I've just dug out the video.
[2954.19] Stephen: It's not got the greatest of signals, as you can see,
[2956.19] Stephen: but there he is breaking the 100 kilometer mark.
[2958.19] Curry: The fact he's got a signal at all is pretty amazing.
[2961.19] Stephen: He's up high.
[2962.19] Stephen: He's up high.
[2963.19] Stephen: He's got some height there.
[2964.19] Curry: He might be up to 400 feet, yeah.
[2967.19] Stephen: Yeah, I estimate that's almost exactly 399 feet.
[2971.19] Stephen: Yeah.
[2972.19] Frank: Well, I was just having a look and you've got to be 780 meters high
[2980.19] Frank: to have the horizon 100 kilometers away.
[2983.19] Stephen: Yeah, so joking aside, it looks like he's got 1150 meters there.
[2989.19] Stephen: So he's technically probably got line of sight in that case.
[2994.19] Stephen: It's fine.
[2995.19] Stephen: Not a problem.
[2996.19] Stephen: He hasn't gone over the horizon.
[2998.19] Stephen: It's all good.
[3000.19] Stephen: The spot is there with a telescope.
[3003.19] Curry: Is this the US?
[3004.19] Curry: Do we think or some other place?
[3006.19] Curry: I take it he's not got the lat long on there.
[3010.19] Stephen: He's decided not to publish that.
[3013.19] Stephen: Yeah, it's 2% something.
[3015.19] Stephen: And we were trying to figure out what the 2% was.
[3018.19] Stephen: I suggested it was remaining nerve.
[3020.19] Stephen: And when that reaches 0%, you just vomit on your shoes or your radio.
[3025.19] Curry: That might be the LQ.
[3026.19] Curry: I've seen the LQ listed before as a single percentage figure.
[3031.19] Curry: And the ones he's got up the top there, those DVM things,
[3034.19] Curry: are the signal to the Wi-Fi.
[3036.19] Curry: He's still getting 6 megabit of video though.
[3038.19] Stephen: That's mental.
[3039.19] Stephen: 6 megabit.
[3042.19] Curry: To be fair, that's all Open HD does.
[3047.19] Curry: It's between 5 and 7 megabits.
[3050.19] Curry: You can't do 50 megabits.
[3053.19] Stephen: But it would be less...
[3054.19] Stephen: I thought it would be consistently lower than 6 megabits.
[3057.19] Stephen: It's just 0.1.
[3062.19] Stephen: The boys are crazy for that.
[3064.19] Stephen: Kudos to him.
[3066.19] Stephen: Impressive.
[3067.19] Curry: Most impressive.
[3070.19] Curry: Everybody else give up.
[3071.19] Curry: Yeah.
[3072.19] Stephen: Give up.
[3073.19] Curry: Go home.
[3074.19] Curry: He's done it.
[3075.19] Curry: That's it.
[3076.19] Curry: It's all about getting the latency down now.
[3077.19] Curry: I saw some stuff earlier about using H.265.
[3079.19] Stephen: From now on, it's 1000K or GCFO.
[3081.19] Stephen: That's it.
[3082.19] Stephen: I'm not interested.
[3083.19] Stephen: I've done 100.
[3085.19] Stephen: We're only doing base 10.
[3087.19] Stephen: Yeah.
[3088.19] Stephen: You've got to roll another digit to impress anyone now.
[3090.19] Curry: Aside from the guys trying to develop a standalone board for it,
[3094.19] Curry: there's talk of using H.265.
[3096.19] Curry: I don't know if that improves the encoding rate.
[3098.19] Curry: I noticed the Pi02 with a quad core processor has just come out.
[3103.19] Curry: Perhaps that helps because it's like H.265 is not available on the regular zero.
[3110.19] Curry: I think it's a bit heavy.
[3111.19] Curry: It's like the Pi compute module I've got in the wing I'm building can handle.
[3118.19] Curry: So it's open H.265 then?
[3120.19] Curry: It's H.264 at the moment.
[3122.19] Curry: But they're talking about using H.265.
[3125.19] Curry: That gives you the same image quality.
[3127.19] Stephen: If my video ripping knowledge is anything to go by,
[3131.19] Stephen: at about 70% of the data rate, just through more complex encoding,
[3136.19] Stephen: effectively representing spikes and more complex details.
[3140.19] Curry: But that might improve latency.
[3143.19] Curry: So it does funny things.
[3145.19] Stephen: Instead of just doing block encoding with H.265,
[3148.19] Stephen: it can track like this is an object,
[3151.19] Stephen: and then just like this is an object that's moved over here.
[3156.19] Stephen: And instead of re-encoding a bunch of pixels,
[3159.19] Stephen: it actually kind of says, yeah, there's the object.
[3161.19] Stephen: And it quantizes, moves it over there and transforms it.
[3165.19] Stephen: And it kind of does that on the fly, I think.
[3168.19] Stephen: SharkBite, take note.
[3169.19] Stephen: Did you get a SharkBite system, Stephen?
[3171.19] Stephen: I did get a SharkBite system.
[3173.19] Stephen: And I got to my own cameras in the post,
[3176.19] Stephen: but I got to fly another guy's quad with SharkBite on it a couple of weeks ago.
[3181.19] Stephen: And I got to experience the huge variety of cameras
[3184.19] Stephen: because the basic camera is just not even an upgrade on analog.
[3190.19] Stephen: The basic camera looks a lot worse than my analog.
[3193.19] Stephen: I took an analog setup with, okay, it's a ritelle.
[3199.19] Stephen: I think it's a ritelle on the one I took with me.
[3202.19] Stephen: And it was just much more color-accurate, much clearer.
[3207.19] Stephen: The basic, I think it was a basic run-can nano or something
[3212.19] Stephen: that came with SharkBite.
[3213.19] Stephen: It's very purple-y and green, and it just looks wrong.
[3217.19] Stephen: But the HD0 camera, because he had one of these betas,
[3220.19] Stephen: that looked really, really great.
[3222.19] Stephen: Very color-accurate, wonderful quality image, properly in focus.
[3227.19] Stephen: What really gets me is they were trying to publicize a new video system
[3231.19] Stephen: and they went out the gate with a camera that had a terrible quality image
[3236.19] Stephen: and a plastic lens.
[3237.19] Stephen: And it was just showing the system that it's worse.
[3240.19] Stephen: This HD0 camera, it looks like a completely different video system.
[3245.19] Stephen: It's still not high-res, though.
[3247.19] Stephen: I'm used to flying DJI a bunch, and I've got, I think,
[3251.19] Stephen: four or five quads on DJI here.
[3253.19] Stephen: So I've got every DJI camera.
[3256.19] Stephen: Now I think, yeah, including it's got the Polar, the Runcam Mipi,
[3261.19] Stephen: the Runcam HD that just came out, which is less grainy than the Mipi.
[3265.19] Stephen: It's got a nicer lens on it, I think.
[3267.19] Stephen: And the original DJI camera, I've got a couple of those.
[3270.19] Stephen: And the Nebula Pro and the Nebula Nano, which is pants.
[3274.19] Stephen: And I would rate the basic shot by camera as actually a downgrade
[3277.19] Stephen: from the Nebula Nano.
[3279.19] Stephen: It is pretty atrocious.
[3281.19] Stephen: But when you get to the HD0 camera, it's competitive.
[3285.19] Stephen: It's not as sharp as the DJI cameras, but with all these systems,
[3290.19] Stephen: it's hard to tell what that sharpness is,
[3292.19] Stephen: really showing you measurable resolution
[3295.19] Stephen: or whether they've tweaked it with a sharpening filter.
[3298.19] Stephen: It's definitely a softer image than DJI.
[3301.19] Stephen: It wasn't like I had an eye test card up to compare it,
[3305.19] Stephen: but I was flying around a load of rugby goals.
[3307.19] Stephen: And I did notice, you know, when you go like a little bit of an angle
[3311.19] Stephen: with a nice vertical line, you start to get that aliasing
[3314.19] Stephen: and you get the jaggies on the diagonal.
[3316.19] Stephen: And it was obvious on DJI, which I wasn't getting on.
[3320.19] Stephen: It was obvious on SharkBite, which I wasn't getting on DJI.
[3324.19] Stephen: But it's a nice little system for micros, I think.
[3327.19] Stephen: If you're flying anything below a three inch,
[3330.19] Stephen: I don't see how you can get DJI on it.
[3332.19] Stephen: It's just too much of a struggle.
[3335.19] Curry: So I wonder what Frank would make of it,
[3337.19] Curry: because he looked at DJI goggles and said,
[3339.19] Curry: looks like good analogs to me.
[3341.19] Frank: I mentioned this after the show last week with the mention on stream.
[3344.19] Frank: But yeah, I've looked through DJI goggles before
[3348.19] Frank: and always been like, oh, wow, this is amazing.
[3350.19] Frank: But I had a go actually flying it.
[3353.19] Frank: And as soon as you're more than, you know, as soon as you're taken off,
[3357.19] Frank: everything's far enough away that it didn't feel like HD.
[3361.19] Frank: It just felt like a good analog signal.
[3365.19] Frank: It wasn't like, oh, my God, I can see.
[3367.19] Stephen: If you've got a very good analog image, it can look great.
[3370.19] Frank: Yeah, I mean, it just looked like a normal analog image
[3373.19] Frank: that wasn't breaking up.
[3375.19] Frank: That was my impression of it.
[3377.19] Frank: It just sort of lost the glossy feel that you get
[3382.19] Frank: when you're just kind of holding it and pointing at each other
[3385.19] Frank: and going, oh, look, it's so clear.
[3387.19] Frank: I can see the blades of grass.
[3390.19] Stephen: What really works for me is flying through woods.
[3392.19] Stephen: And I've got analog systems up to sort of 400-milliwatt, 500-milliwatt.
[3397.19] Stephen: And if you fly in the woods like literally,
[3400.19] Stephen: not just around a couple of trees,
[3402.19] Stephen: but like I'm flying in the woods where there's a footpath
[3405.19] Stephen: that runs through a couple of kilometers of trees.
[3409.19] Stephen: And I fly down those footpaths with DJI quads, and they're okay.
[3412.19] Stephen: But if I try and do it on analog, I get a lot of break up
[3415.19] Stephen: and I get a lot of break up very quickly.
[3419.19] Stephen: Whereas if I fly DJI, I get enough signal
[3422.19] Stephen: that I can still see where the branches are
[3424.19] Stephen: and I can dodge around like holly branches and things
[3427.19] Stephen: and avoid scraggle.
[3429.19] Stephen: And I've done it on analog, but with analog,
[3432.19] Stephen: it feels like I'm competitive racing the whole time
[3435.19] Stephen: and I can't kind of relax into it
[3437.19] Stephen: because I only know something's going to hit me
[3440.19] Stephen: when it's practically hitting me.
[3443.19] Stephen: And then I have to like cut, throttle, or punch
[3446.19] Stephen: and really aggressively move.
[3448.19] Stephen: With DJI, I get a bit more warning because the break up isn't there.
[3452.19] Stephen: But yeah, it is an expensive system.
[3455.19] Stephen: And it's a treat.
[3457.19] Stephen: It's a treat.
[3459.19] Stephen: I held off buying this thing for about six months.
[3463.19] Stephen: I knew I wanted it and I didn't buy it.
[3465.19] Stephen: And I went on a holiday when I wished I had it
[3468.19] Stephen: and flew a bunch of analog quads
[3470.19] Stephen: and kind of just got knocked and then eventually took the plunge.
[3475.57] Stephen: I won't say it's the best thing ever.
[3477.57] Stephen: I don't think they're a great company.
[3479.57] Stephen: I get pissed off that Canvas mode isn't here
[3482.57] Stephen: and the software ecosystem is kind of awful
[3486.57] Stephen: and they've been really slow to actually innovate
[3488.57] Stephen: now the system's out there.
[3490.57] Stephen: It's been out for a couple of years
[3492.57] Stephen: and if you compare it to a lot of other systems
[3494.57] Stephen: that have been through relentless progression
[3496.57] Stephen: since their release, DJI has done practically nothing.
[3500.57] Stephen: But it's definitely better than shot by Annette.
[3504.57] Stephen: And for the type of flying I do at least,
[3506.57] Stephen: it really outstrips analog
[3508.57] Stephen: because I just can't do the type of flying I'm talking about with analog.
[3515.39] Curry: You've gone too early.
[3516.39] Curry: You just want to just trap a computer on the side of your quad.
[3518.39] Curry: That would be it.
[3519.39] Curry: You can SSH into it and run Linux commands.
[3522.39] Curry: Yeah, that'd be fine.
[3523.39] Curry: Yeah, I can just H-top.
[3525.39] Stephen: Run all my backups, you know.
[3527.39] Stephen: R-sync my holiday snaps onto it.
[3531.39] Stephen: Keep it safe.
[3532.39] Stephen: One backup off-site carry.
[3533.39] Stephen: That's what you want.
[3534.39] Stephen: Fifty foot away, across the road, hovering.
[3537.39] Stephen: That's where your backup is.
[3538.39] Curry: Are you flying a quad there?
[3539.39] Curry: I was like, no, I'm doing my off-site backups, thank you.
[3541.39] Stephen: That's my email server, do you mind?
[3546.39] Frank: Closable deniability, yeah.
[3549.39] Frank: Decentralized email.
[3553.39] Frank: Is the cloud, or at least, close to it?
[3556.39] Frank: Yeah, exactly.
[3559.39] Curry: This is literally a cloud server.
[3561.39] Frank: Yeah.
[3563.39] Frank: Just a matter of time, I'm sure.
[3565.39] Frank: That's something I feel like we should do.
[3567.39] Stephen: Yeah, the new pirate radio, you know.
[3570.39] Stephen: The Renaissance.
[3571.39] Frank: We should host a video feed via something just...
[3577.39] Stephen: Via a relay that is flying around in a quad.
[3581.39] Curry: That's technically what they do, albeit with full-size helicopters.
[3584.39] Curry: In events like the Tour de France, where you've got cameras on bikes going through mountains,
[3589.39] Curry: they can't beam the signal back, they beam the footage up to a helicopter,
[3592.39] Curry: the helicopter gets it back to the studio, basically.
[3595.39] Curry: We could do that, but on a smaller scale.
[3598.39] Stephen: My company did some sponsorship tour de France
[3601.39] Stephen: and insisted on driving around a truck full of datacenter equipment.
[3606.39] Stephen: The engineer who did this has since left,
[3609.39] Stephen: but he informed me that while it was a very expensive sponsorship deal,
[3613.39] Stephen: the data they were collecting could have been handily processed
[3616.39] Stephen: by a Raspberry Pi in someone's backpack
[3618.39] Stephen: without the need for a full truck of datacenter equipment
[3620.39] Stephen: driven around after the bikes.
[3623.39] Stephen: Sounds about right.
[3624.39] Stephen: Sounds fun to drive it around.
[3625.39] Stephen: Yeah, they look great on posters.
[3628.39] Frank: About time to wrap it up.
[3631.39] Frank: Anyone's got anything else they want to chuck in at the end?
[3635.39] Frank: Anyone in the chat got anything they've spotted, anything they're planning to do?
[3639.39] Frank: Anyone seen any events lined up?
[3642.39] Frank: Any ideas for things that we should do in future shows?
[3646.39] Curry: I did notice that Caroline's gone over to the dark side
[3648.39] Curry: and she's now bought a DJI system, so that's another one has succumbed.
[3653.39] Stephen: It's not bad, and for all of those who fly it,
[3656.39] Stephen: I have actually hacked in LQ and RSSI DBM into my own Betaflight build.
[3662.39] Stephen: If you would like to use that,
[3664.39] Stephen: I think I've punted around the link regularly.
[3666.39] Stephen: I've currently got a build of Betaflight 4.3,
[3669.39] Stephen: which I run most of my DJI systems,
[3671.39] Stephen: and in place of the craft name, it shows LQ and RSSI DBM,
[3676.39] Stephen: and also flashes up warnings as well as you've got any warnings,
[3679.39] Stephen: so it kind of alters.
[3680.39] Stephen: You know, the warnings normally flash on, off, on, off.
[3683.39] Stephen: Well, it'll show your LQ,
[3685.39] Stephen: and when the warnings flash, it overwrites the LQ,
[3687.39] Stephen: and then back to LQ, and then boring.
[3689.39] Stephen: That seems to work okay.
[3691.39] Stephen: That's pretty cool.
[3693.67] Stephen: As a stopgap.
[3694.67] Stephen: Mm.
[3695.67] Stephen: Yeah.
[3696.67] Frank: Well, thank you to all our patrons
[3699.67] Frank: and thank you to everyone listening and watching.
[3702.67] Frank: You have been listening to Let's Drone Out.
[3705.67] Frank: We have been.
[3707.67] Frank: Curry.
[3708.67] Frank: Goodbye.
[3709.67] Frank: Stephen.
[3710.67] Frank: Goodbye.
[3711.67] Stephen: I've been Angela Frank.
[3713.67] Frank: Join us next week where hopefully Jack will be up and about.
[3716.67] Frank: I'm back with us.
[3718.67] Frank: See you next week, and good night.
[3720.67] Frank: Bye.
[3721.67] Frank: Take care.
[3722.67] Frank: Telemetry lost.