=== Let's Drone Out — Episode 348 ===
Title: LDO 348 - With Special Guest Tony Cake Of Immersion RC
Recorded: 2022-04-28
Hosts: Jack "Brightontillifly" Nash, Stephen "Belrik" Howell, Tony "TheTonstar1" Marchant, Andrew "Frank" Hyams
Guest(s): Tony Cake
Total audience: 2,325
Platforms: YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OQk6Ld9_JM); SoundCloud (http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/1259556451-letsdroneout-ldo-348-with-special-guest-tony-cake-of-immersion-rc.mp3)
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Jack - https://www.youtube.com/user/brightontillifly
Stephen https://www.youtube.com/user/ShinyVideoStuff
Tony - https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTonstar1

CurryKitten- https://www.youtube.com/currykitten

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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 helped donate so that we could pay the editor to remove the swear words and silly things we say. Massive thank you to...
[14.0] Jack: Carlos Campos
[16.0] Jack: Art Faulkner
[18.0] Frank: Sam Dahmer
[20.0] Tony: On with the show
[22.0] Tony: Let's Drone Out
[52.42] Jack: Hello and you're listening to Let's Drone Out live on the internet every Thursday night on YouTube. Tonight we are joined by Stephen.
[64.42] Jack: Hello.
[65.42] Jack: My dialing wife.
[67.42] Tony: Dialing wife you've been drinking Jack. Cheers.
[71.42] Jack: Yep. I will refer to you as wifey because we've got two Tonys. We've got Tony Cake from Immersion RC. Hello.
[81.42] Jack: The picturesque background. He's joining us live.
[85.42] Jack: And exciting times for Immersion RC as well.
[89.42] Jack: Lit by street lamp.
[93.42] Jack: With the bells.
[95.42] Jack: Yeah bells.
[97.42] Tony: The bells are signing 8 o'clock.
[99.42] Stephen: I know.
[100.42] Stephen: Without further ado Tony, tell us about the events.
[105.42] Tony Cake: The events.
[106.42] Tony Cake: Well I had a lovely day. Spent a bit of time on the beach. Oh you mean the merger thing.
[113.42] Tony Cake: Tell us about your lunch if you want to. That's fine.
[116.42] Jack: No you've been somewhere cool.
[119.42] Tony Cake: Ended up exploring some tunnels in some underground bunker. So that was lunch.
[126.42] Tony Cake: Awesome.
[128.42] Tony Cake: How long has this been in the offing then?
[132.42] Tony Cake: Actually so I met Serjan, CEO from Orca about three years ago.
[140.42] Tony Cake: And we started chatting and realized that they were a super bunch of guys and decided to build Ghost with their help in Europe which went very very well.
[157.42] Tony Cake: And yeah it kind of went on from there. We realized it was a lot of synergy between the two companies.
[164.42] Tony Cake: And we actually got on a right and didn't want to kill each other after the first year. So we figured out to see where this goes.
[171.42] Tony Cake: That's a good thing.
[172.42] Tony Cake: It's nice when it happens.
[176.42] Jack: The FPV companies working together.
[180.42] Tony: Wow.
[181.42] Jack: That never happened.
[183.42] Jack: How's the supply chain been for you?
[187.42] Jack: Regards the chip shortage and everything.
[189.42] Tony Cake: What's the supply chain?
[191.42] Tony Cake: Yeah I suppose.
[193.42] Tony Cake: No it's been an absolute disaster.
[198.42] Tony Cake: My comment to the production guy today was I feel like in the last year I've spent 99% of my time trying to source components and 1% of my time actually designing stuff.
[213.42] Tony Cake: And it's been horrific.
[216.42] Jack: I know. I've noticed the rapid flies are back in stock.
[224.42] Jack: Yes.
[225.42] Jack: But the VTX is not so much.
[228.42] Tony Cake: No. Luckily we had the hybrids which is where the real interest has been.
[233.42] Tony Cake: But the VTX is they will come back and so we found a source of parts now.
[239.42] Tony Cake: The problem is STMicroelectronics who makes the lovely STM32 basically prioritized all of their newer parts and just haven't been building their older stuff.
[254.42] Tony Cake: And we've used some trusty old parts in things like the Tramp and even in the rapid fire.
[261.42] Tony Cake: And the supply is just not there.
[265.42] Tony Cake: So a part that was a dollar before this crisis is now selling on the Chinese market for 15 bucks.
[273.42] Tony: Which crisis are you talking about? The war? The Covid?
[278.42] Tony Cake: Covid I think is what started it.
[280.42] Tony Cake: But I think what happened is when the supply chain issue started I think a lot of Chinese companies started buying up everything to get their hands on.
[292.42] Tony Cake: Knowing that they'll always be Western companies ready to spend big bucks when they can't find parts.
[299.42] Tony Cake: And luckily so we saw that we could always buy the parts but the prices were just insane.
[306.42] Tony Cake: And now we're finally starting to see some of these suppliers dropping their price a bit.
[312.42] Tony Cake: So maybe it's on its way out.
[316.42] Jack: You know the Atmel 32P, the Pico Farad one, the ones that are usually found on the Arduino Nanos, the chips are almost five pounds.
[331.42] Jack: So that's like about seven dollars odd each.
[337.42] Jack: You can probably get, I think the cheapest you can get was like 30 for four pounds something.
[344.42] Jack: That's a British pound sterling.
[347.42] Jack: And so it's cheaper to buy an Arduino Nano and re-flow the chip off it.
[355.42] Stephen: It's crazy.
[357.42] Stephen: I was just looking at ESCs today.
[359.42] Stephen: There's loads of clones that I've never heard of until recently appearing.
[362.42] Stephen: CKS and Artery I had on an ESC today.
[367.42] Stephen: I thought when it had an F4 it would be an STM32 F4.
[370.42] Stephen: It's an Artery F4 I'd never heard of.
[372.42] Stephen: Yeah.
[374.42] Tony Cake: The STM parts for ESCs are just, you just can't get them.
[379.42] Tony Cake: So there's no choice for that side.
[381.42] Tony Cake: But you say about the price of these parts.
[383.42] Tony Cake: I mean for the lap RS they haven't been able to build them for a while.
[386.42] Tony Cake: The part we used in lap RF, we used to get it for about three bucks.
[390.42] Tony Cake: Right now it's about 78 bucks for the same part.
[394.42] Tony Cake: What?
[395.42] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[396.42] Tony Cake: Oh my God.
[398.42] Tony Cake: So yeah, we could make lap RFs but I don't think anyone would want to pay for them.
[402.42] Tony: No.
[403.42] Jack: That's the problem.
[404.42] Jack: Yeah.
[405.42] Jack: Is it true that you managed to restock the Wands?
[415.42] Jack: No, not the Wands.
[417.42] Jack: The RF meter, yeah.
[419.42] Tony Cake: No.
[420.42] Tony Cake: So there's a couple of things about the last few weeks.
[423.42] Tony Cake: So one is we finally got the PowerPlays back in stock.
[427.42] Tony Cake: PowerPlays is an interesting story because we haven't been building these for probably
[434.42] Tony Cake: a year.
[435.42] Tony Cake: And we had all this demand for them.
[438.42] Tony Cake: And we couldn't figure out why.
[440.42] Tony Cake: Because the FPV world can only absorb so many.
[444.42] Tony Cake: And then we got a call from an old FPV guy who said, yeah, they're actually been using
[449.42] Tony Cake: the tape as camcorder world.
[452.42] Tony Cake: So there are these beautiful old camcorders with amazing optics and zoom lenses and everything.
[458.42] Tony Cake: Right.
[459.42] Tony Cake: This kind of urban grungy kind of palancy effect.
[466.42] Tony Cake: But their heads have worn out and they can't get tapes anymore.
[471.42] Tony Cake: So they're putting a PowerPlay on top of these things and using it to record the camera's
[476.42] Tony Cake: output.
[477.42] Jack: What?
[478.42] Jack: That's genius.
[479.42] Jack: Yeah.
[480.42] Tony Cake: He's mad.
[481.42] Tony Cake: There's this whole community of people doing this.
[484.42] Tony Cake: I mean, I think the video of the guy showing how to do this had like 11,000 views or something.
[489.42] Tony Cake: That's just one of them.
[490.42] Tony Cake: Wow.
[491.42] Jack: Wow.
[492.42] Stephen: That's interesting use of your products.
[495.42] Stephen: Makes sense, I guess.
[497.42] Stephen: Can't complain.
[498.42] Jack: Yeah.
[499.42] Stephen: No.
[500.42] Jack: Oh, man.
[501.42] Jack: That is crazy because I know in Japan as well, they've been, you know, the price of actual
[510.42] Jack: video tapes have gone up blank video tapes in Akihabara.
[513.42] Jack: Like they were, you know, there's people like a little market for them and floppy disks
[521.42] Jack: are now like an industry because a lot of like the embroidery machines and the textiles
[529.42] Jack: industry.
[530.42] Jack: Still using them.
[532.42] Jack: Yeah.
[533.42] Jack: Still using them.
[534.42] Jack: You know, you're having to fight for parts.
[539.42] Stephen: What's happening then?
[541.42] Stephen: It's becoming more of an auction for these chips.
[543.42] Stephen: You can't just order.
[544.42] Stephen: You've got to go and bid against other people for them.
[548.42] Tony Cake: For the chips.
[552.42] Tony Cake: So you can't buy them for any of the major suppliers anymore.
[556.42] Tony Cake: And if you ask around on the Chinese markets, there's always somebody who has a reel of
[564.42] Tony Cake: them.
[565.42] Tony Cake: And they're generally marked up by a factor of 10.
[568.42] Tony Cake: I mean, the basic number seems to be let's just add a zero under the price and someone
[573.42] Tony Cake: will buy them.
[575.42] Stephen: Are you going to go the way of the clone chips and learn all the errata and weirdness that
[580.42] Stephen: a clone might have?
[581.42] Stephen: Is that a way to go or are you just going to wait until the price?
[585.42] Tony Cake: I've avoided to be on for something like a rapid fire.
[588.42] Tony Cake: I mean, rapid fire does an awful lot of real time stuff.
[593.42] Tony Cake: And to do that on one of these parts, I think will be almost impossible.
[599.42] Tony Cake: So for that, I've avoided it.
[601.42] Tony Cake: I mean, for ESCs, it's definitely possible.
[603.42] Tony Cake: I mean, BL-Helly32 supports them.
[606.42] Tony Cake: You know, they have their own errata, but it's, you know, they're quite usable.
[610.42] Stephen: Sorry, a little nerd tangent there.
[613.42] Stephen: Just interesting to see if will, as consumers, not be the products coming back to normal
[618.42] Stephen: or if these factors behind the scenes are effectively stopping any sort of innovative
[624.42] Stephen: or innovation or workarounds that might bring the products back to the market.
[629.42] Tony Cake: I mean, some products are just not going to come back for a while.
[632.42] Tony Cake: You know, and some of this stuff is really is insane because, you know, I spent two days
[639.42] Tony Cake: a week trying to find 3.21 regulators.
[644.42] Tony Cake: And you think, okay, these have got to be as common as much.
[647.42] Tony Cake: They're used in just about every consumer electronics product.
[651.42] Tony Cake: And the smaller ones for the, you know, the handheld devices, you just can't buy them.
[659.42] Tony Cake: You know, and then yesterday, we thought we'd actually found a stock of, you know, 20,000 parts.
[664.42] Tony Cake: We're all excited about it.
[666.42] Tony Cake: We got to order a bunch.
[668.42] Tony Cake: And we get a warning now, which is something these suppliers are doing.
[673.42] Tony Cake: Basically, you can only order these 200 parts at a time.
[678.42] Stephen: These are not parts that people order 200 at a time, right?
[682.42] Stephen: You would never order less than a thousand of these normally.
[684.42] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[685.42] Tony Cake: Normally, it's a reel of 3,000.
[687.42] Tony Cake: But I think in order for somebody like Mauser-Dijiki to keep these parts in stock,
[694.42] Tony Cake: they're actually having to limit it.
[696.42] Tony Cake: Wow.
[697.42] Tony Cake: Crazy.
[699.42] Jack: One reel per customer.
[702.42] Stephen: It's insane.
[704.42] Stephen: It's insane.
[705.42] Stephen: So I don't think the team's had you on in a while.
[708.42] Stephen: I certainly haven't been on the show when we've talked to you.
[712.42] Stephen: You've had a lot of new products in the intervening period.
[716.42] Stephen: There's been a new radio that's working with the Emotion RC Ghost that's come out.
[722.42] Stephen: You're the only ones shipping this new specialist module form factor.
[726.42] Stephen: All very exciting.
[728.42] Stephen: Some new kind of hybrid video and RX solutions that you're pioneering.
[735.42] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[737.42] Tony Cake: Yeah, it's been a busy time.
[740.42] Stephen: Yeah.
[741.42] Stephen: This new module form factor, is that going to be the way that you go forward,
[745.42] Stephen: or is that just another type of ghost product that people have?
[750.42] Tony Cake: Well, the problem with this, people have said, oh, the module form factor is not standard.
[754.42] Tony Cake: Well, the only real standard in the industry is the old JR module.
[760.42] Tony Cake: And that's only because it was kind of stolen from JR many years ago.
[765.42] Tony Cake: And so that's kind of the standard.
[768.42] Tony Cake: But that's not really compatible with a small device.
[773.42] Tony Cake: And then there's the X-Lite style module, which technically, FRSky kind of owns that standard,
[782.42] Tony Cake: and I think has to approve who actually uses it.
[786.42] Tony Cake: So there is no standard for the smaller radios.
[791.42] Stephen: It's just the ghost of previous manufacturers who've left their imprint on it.
[795.42] Tony Cake: Exactly.
[796.42] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[797.42] Tony Cake: I mean, this whole world is very much like that.
[799.42] Tony Cake: I mean, the Taranis was basically, I think, even used the tooling shells from the JR radio that preceded it.
[811.42] Tony Cake: So yeah, so we wanted a module that was super simple that could support a double stack if we needed it.
[818.42] Tony Cake: So it's got kind of an open back.
[820.42] Tony Cake: We could support an OLED on there if we wanted to.
[823.42] Tony Cake: But this first one is just super simple.
[826.42] Stephen: So it's more flexible.
[828.42] Tony Cake: Yeah, it's flexible.
[830.42] Tony Cake: We can do whatever we want with it, basically.
[832.42] Stephen: So it gives you a bit more depth to work with than the existing nano FRSky version?
[839.42] Tony Cake: Yeah, it's a wider module, and actually, it fits in the radio.
[844.42] Tony Cake: It's not kind of a bag on the side or a bag on the back.
[848.42] Tony Cake: It can actually be recessed into the radio, and there could be more than one of those in the same radio.
[854.42] Tony Cake: So there's all kind of possibilities there.
[858.42] Stephen: In terms of the connection to the radio, have you made any changes there in terms of the way it talks to the radio?
[865.42] Tony Cake: No.
[866.42] Tony Cake: In that module right now, it only supports a ghost protocol, basically, just to keep things simple.
[873.42] Tony Cake: I mean, the FPV control is a low-end radio.
[877.42] Tony Cake: It's designed to get people in through the simulator and then flying from that.
[884.42] Tony Cake: So it's just designed to be super simple.
[887.42] Tony Cake: Don't need any setup other than to hit the bind button.
[890.42] Tony Cake: Nice.
[892.42] Tony Cake: The idea was, if you look through the eyes of a newcomer to our world, it's a minefield.
[902.42] Tony Cake: It's totally nice.
[904.42] Tony Cake: You've got to go in, okay, what version of OpenTX do you have?
[908.42] Tony Cake: Let's go get the bill for your radio.
[910.42] Tony Cake: Let's install it.
[911.42] Tony Cake: You can configure all these menus to make sure you've got a protocol that works with the module that you've got in there.
[917.42] Tony Cake: Then you pop over to the other side of the link, and you have to worry about the whole flight controller stack and the firmware and the ESC firmware compatible.
[928.42] Tony Cake: And it really is a minefield, and I think it puts off a lot of newcomers to this hobby.
[934.42] Stephen: Once upon a time, you're in the business of making quads as well.
[937.42] Stephen: Have you considered reviving that to have the immersion or solution, radio, goggles, quad?
[945.42] Stephen: Only one package.
[947.42] Tony Cake: To be honest, I would love to.
[950.42] Tony Cake: In fact, this came up in a thread recently.
[952.42] Tony Cake: I would love to revive the Mojo with some more recent electronics.
[961.42] Tony Cake: I think that would be an awesome little quad.
[964.42] Tony Cake: I don't know, no decisions yet, but some possibilities there.
[967.42] Jack: I think Jack could go for that.
[974.42] Jack: Is there any new updates for Ghost coming soon?
[979.42] Jack: Because at last I saw you worked on getting all the Lua telemetry working for Beater Flight.
[989.42] Tony Cake: Yes, it's in testing now.
[993.42] Tony Cake: We've got a bunch of stuff going on behind the scenes in Ghost World,
[999.42] Tony Cake: and we needed to go and do some restructuring and some cleanup and support some new stuff, which I won't go too much into.
[1009.42] Jack: Can I put you in touch with Alex because we still haven't got Lua working with Kiss?
[1020.42] Tony Cake: Alexander Fedoroff.
[1024.42] Tony Cake: Thank you.
[1027.42] Tony Cake: Which side of Kiss is split?
[1030.42] Tony Cake: I'm so confused as to what Kiss is these days.
[1034.42] Jack: Well, Alexander Fedoroff's Kiss Ultra and FetTech is Felix.
[1045.42] Jack: Which is also Kiss.
[1047.42] Jack: Yeah, which is Kiss-ish, but they're FetTech now.
[1052.42] Jack: They've dropped the sort of Kiss name.
[1056.42] Tony Cake: Yeah, I'd be happy to work with them.
[1058.42] Tony Cake: On Beater Flight, it works pretty well.
[1062.42] Tony Cake: We've been playing around with that and quite happy with it.
[1065.42] Tony Cake: But the other Ghost products you mentioned, the hybrid has been doing amazingly well.
[1071.42] Tony Cake: Super happy to see it being used in Mayhem.
[1076.42] Tony Cake: It's getting a bit live here. Is this background audio too bad?
[1080.42] Tony Cake: It's actually not too bad.
[1083.42] Tony Cake: I think there's a million people walking by the shore here.
[1087.42] Tony Cake: It's a very picturesque location we've got you in now.
[1091.42] Tony Cake: The other side is more interesting.
[1093.42] Tony Cake: This island is spectacular.
[1095.42] Tony Cake: It's the first time I've been here and it's just absolutely amazing.
[1099.42] Tony Cake: But yeah, the hybrids...
[1101.42] Stephen: Which of the world are you joining us from?
[1103.42] Tony Cake: So this is, let me get this right, the easternmost island of Croatia.
[1110.42] Tony Cake: This is called Vis.
[1113.42] Tony Cake: It's a little tiny place, which I think up until 1991, foreigners couldn't travel here.
[1122.42] Tony Cake: Because it was a Yugoslavian military base with its own rocket port and bunkers and all kind of fun stuff.
[1133.42] Tony Cake: That's great for a longer coaster.
[1136.42] Stephen: I've been down to Korshula and Dubrovnik and beautiful places.
[1140.42] Tony: Dubrovnik split as well. Lovely areas.
[1144.42] Tony Cake: Well, this is a two hour ferry ride from Split.
[1148.42] Tony: Are you doing any flying?
[1150.42] Tony: I've not been to Leper Island yet then.
[1153.42] Tony Cake: No, no, no.
[1156.42] Tony Cake: I've been exploring these bunkers here. It's absolutely unbelievable.
[1160.42] Tony Cake: You climb up a hill, you climb behind an old gun emplacement and there's just tunnels that just run on for miles.
[1169.42] Tony Cake: Fascinating.
[1170.42] Tony Cake: But yeah, back to the hybrid.
[1172.42] Tony Cake: Sorry.
[1174.42] Tony Cake: The hybrids are doing well.
[1176.42] Tony Cake: It makes setup an awful lot easier.
[1179.42] Tony Cake: And they're used by a lot of racers, so I'm really happy with that.
[1184.95] Tony Cake: And there will be some more products coming along those lines relatively soon.
[1189.95] Stephen: Yeah, you seem to kickstart something pretty big then and others were soon following suit, I noticed.
[1195.95] Stephen: Yeah, it's always the way, isn't it?
[1199.95] Stephen: Yeah, it's definitely a nice idea.
[1204.95] Jack: Well, you got Trappy screaming, you guys don't know what you want.
[1210.95] Jack: So I think that was a little win.
[1215.95] Jack: It's always funny seeing Trappy on his toes.
[1220.95] Tony Cake: This competition has always been good.
[1223.95] Tony Cake: If we lose it, then I think we'll all get a bit complacent and lazy, so it's a good thing.
[1229.95] Tony Cake: Oh, absolutely.
[1230.95] Jack: Yeah, I just hope that Trappy doesn't get rid of his R&D side because the Express LRS is probably hurting him in a way.
[1247.95] Tony Cake: I mean, it's hurting all of us, but it is bringing in more people to the hobby, so I think that's a good thing.
[1255.95] Jack: You're going to make it easier.
[1257.95] Jack: Yeah, because they're flashing your modules and receivers, aren't they?
[1262.95] Tony Cake: Yeah, that's okay.
[1264.95] Tony Cake: That's fine.
[1265.95] Jack: They still have to buy it.
[1267.95] Tony Cake: They still have to buy it.
[1269.95] Tony Cake: And I've never done anything to prevent that, so why not?
[1275.95] Tony Cake: The rising tide and all that.
[1277.95] Tony Cake: We've even had a few cases where somebody's done that, regretted it and sent it in to be re-flashed with Ghost, so that's fine too.
[1284.95] Jack: Nice.
[1285.95] Jack: I like that.
[1286.95] Jack: You can actually do that.
[1288.95] Tony Cake: Yeah, I suppose bootloader, isn't it?
[1290.95] Tony Cake: Yeah, we can re-flash.
[1292.95] Tony Cake: There's some calibration stuff in there as well that gets blown away when you flash it, so we just re-calibrate it and it's fine.
[1301.95] Stephen: Yeah, so the option bites again.
[1303.95] Stephen: Everyone's happy.
[1304.95] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[1305.95] Tony Cake: Yeah, no, that's okay.
[1307.95] Stephen: Yeah, I think bootloader says what a refreshing thing to hear.
[1311.95] Stephen: It's nice to hear that it's not all kind of this vindictive sniping on one another.
[1315.95] Stephen: And to some extent, if people are taking more interest in the hobby as a whole, that is more money coming into the hobby for everyone, not just the person who's made a bit of news lately.
[1325.95] Tony Cake: Yeah, no, I think it's a good thing.
[1330.95] Tony Cake: Talking about the money, I think a lot of the money went out of this hobby a long time ago, it's still a tiny niche.
[1336.95] Tony Cake: And luckily, we have people, I think myself included, who are crazy enough to still hang around in it just because it's fun.
[1345.95] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[1346.95] Tony Cake: I think that's a good thing.
[1350.95] Tony Cake: Have you been flying yourself lately?
[1353.95] Tony Cake: Actually, I was last week, we had some new stuff to try.
[1359.95] Tony Cake: There's a beautiful, abandoned university building in a place called Osjek, it's where the Orca HQ is.
[1369.95] Tony Cake: And I went up there with some cool pilots and that was fun.
[1376.95] Jack: Were you still flying wings or were you flying a quad?
[1380.95] Tony Cake: Hello, I mainly fly fixed wing these days.
[1385.95] Tony Cake: Just super long range stuff and proximity at range, just some challenging RF stuff.
[1393.95] Tony Cake: But I got some quad flying in last week.
[1397.95] Tony Cake: It's a nice part of the world to fly up there.
[1402.95] Stephen: Failsafe linked a video over in Madstech the other day showing a bando that he was going to go visit in Croatia.
[1408.95] Stephen: That guy travels insane distances to fight.
[1412.95] Stephen: He was on a six hour train ride to fly around an abandoned building in the UK.
[1416.95] Stephen: And now he's going to mission it over to Croatia to fly some abandoned site he's been invited to.
[1423.95] Tony Cake: There's an abandoned, partly finished hospital in Zagreb.
[1429.95] Tony Cake: I think it's one and a half kilometers long and there's a tunnel that runs straight to the middle.
[1435.95] Tony Cake: And a couple of years ago we actually managed to power loop the thing.
[1440.95] Tony Cake: Which is pretty interesting.
[1443.95] Tony Cake: That's a good radio test, I should think.
[1447.95] Tony Cake: This place is superb.
[1449.95] Tony Cake: The watchmen now, the security guards are pretty relaxed.
[1454.95] Tony Cake: Seems to be well tolerated.
[1458.95] Stephen: What's the preferred currency for bribing your way into abandoned buildings in Croatia?
[1464.95] Tony Cake: I don't know what they're doing.
[1466.95] Tony Cake: This island here, I wish I brought more gear right here because there's some beautiful places to fly.
[1475.3] Tony Cake: Yeah, I don't know.
[1477.3] Tony Cake: They're pretty relaxed about it right here, which is really good.
[1480.3] Jack: Yeah, I suppose they haven't had the sort of hassle and, you know, gatwick over here.
[1487.67] Jack: No.
[1490.67] Jack: No, AudioGeek asks an interesting question.
[1493.67] Jack: I've always wondered why analog FPV has limited resolution.
[1498.67] Jack: Isn't it possible to double the bandwidth like DJI did with the 50-bit mode?
[1503.67] Jack: Not that easy, I get it.
[1505.67] Jack: But what's the actual problem in the end?
[1508.67] Jack: I'll do it again.
[1510.67] Tony Cake: So the problem is, so we all base this stuff on standards.
[1515.67] Tony Cake: And the standards are PAL and NTSC.
[1518.67] Tony Cake: Never the same color.
[1520.67] Tony Cake: Yeah, never the same color.
[1522.67] Tony Cake: So they, you know, these are age-old standards.
[1526.67] Tony Cake: And it turns out that when you FM modulate these things and put it on our 5.8 gig band,
[1532.67] Tony Cake: you end up with, let's say, roughly a 20 megahertz wide band.
[1538.67] Tony Cake: The problem is, you know, if you double that, now you've got, you know, a 40 megahertz wide channel.
[1547.67] Tony Cake: And if you take raceband, which is what's required to get eight legal channels in the US,
[1553.67] Tony Cake: they're only 37 megahertz apart.
[1556.67] Tony Cake: And then you need a guard band of, you know, 5 or 10 megahertz between them.
[1561.67] Tony Cake: So, you know, you could do it, but you'd end up with not many channels.
[1566.67] Tony Cake: Do you think you'd get a decent image out of it if you were to do it?
[1570.67] Tony Cake: I don't know. I mean, I think people have tried it in the past.
[1573.67] Tony Cake: I mean, it's, because anything is possible.
[1576.67] Tony Cake: It becomes a system that's a bit difficult to sell because there are also,
[1580.67] Tony Cake: I mean, there are European regulations on the channel width, which I think that would violate.
[1585.67] Tony Cake: Right, okay.
[1587.67] Tony Cake: Yeah, anything's possible.
[1590.67] Stephen: Yeah, because you've got different regulations when you use a digital signal, right?
[1594.67] Stephen: And you don't have a constant analog carrier.
[1596.67] Tony Cake: Yeah, plus the digital stuff, the guard band between channels can be much narrower, which helps a lot.
[1605.67] Jack: All right, we've got another question here.
[1608.67] Jack: Tribal asks, now HTCero is going open source.
[1613.67] Jack: Can we tempt Tony in building a VTX with the DiviMath chip?
[1618.67] Jack: No.
[1619.67] Jack: I suppose you can get hold of him.
[1621.67] Tony Cake: No, I posted something about this yesterday, the day before.
[1625.67] Tony Cake: So it's not really going open source.
[1628.67] Tony Cake: Okay.
[1629.67] Tony Cake: If you take something like Betaflight or you take something like OpenTX,
[1636.67] Tony Cake: the IP value in these systems is in the open source code, right?
[1640.67] Tony Cake: So you can take an STM32 off the shelf and you can take the reference design for a radio
[1647.67] Tony Cake: and you can shove in OpenTX and you've got an open source radio.
[1651.67] Tony Cake: And if it wasn't an STM32, if it was one of these artery or whatever they called,
[1658.67] Tony Cake: or a CKS processor, that worked just fine as well.
[1665.67] Tony Cake: The problem with HTCero stuff is the ASIC itself is not being open sourced.
[1669.67] Tony Cake: It's just kind of the fluff around it.
[1672.67] Tony Cake: And the problem with that is it means that everyone is tied to a single source
[1677.67] Tony Cake: and single source pricing for the actual IP, which is this chip.
[1683.67] Stephen: What about people who would say it's the same as buying those RichWave chipsets that most of the animals face around?
[1689.67] Tony Cake: Well, it's very, very different because RichWave, I mean, I've been working with RichWave now for close to 10 years.
[1693.67] Tony Cake: RichWave don't compete with manufacturers.
[1696.67] Tony Cake: You know, RichWave, they make chips which have always cost about the same.
[1703.67] Tony Cake: They've never made a product for FPV space. They're just a chip supplier.
[1708.67] Tony Cake: The difference with Divimath is, you know, if you look at the history,
[1712.67] Tony Cake: we had Fat Shark, which, you know, made the first Divimath systems.
[1717.67] Tony Cake: And then the Divimath products then competed with the Fat Shark products
[1722.67] Tony Cake: and basically put them out of, put them off the market.
[1726.67] Tony Cake: So, you know, it's a bit different.
[1729.67] Stephen: That's a chilling effect, unfortunately.
[1732.67] Stephen: The HD0 ownership, creating reference designs and essentially competing with people
[1738.67] Stephen: who would use their own products to make their designs.
[1741.67] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[1742.67] Tony Cake: And the other thing, I did reach out to Carl because, you know, behind the scenes,
[1745.67] Tony Cake: I was working with Carl and with Greg, you know, for a few years now
[1749.67] Tony Cake: when he came to Fat Shark with this concept.
[1755.67] Tony Cake: But, you know, the problem is to be tied to a single source is an issue.
[1762.67] Tony Cake: You know, I'm not super happy with the performance of it.
[1765.67] Tony Cake: You know, it's not something I fly myself.
[1769.67] Tony Cake: And I think, you know, we're in a situation where in order to basically kill analog,
[1775.67] Tony Cake: the margins that retailers are being asked to take for these products are so slim
[1782.67] Tony Cake: that retailers are basically losing money when they sell them.
[1786.67] Tony Cake: And that's not sustainable.
[1787.67] Tony Cake: I mean, the FBV world has always supported the retail channels with some, you know,
[1794.67] Tony Cake: some margins which allow them to pay their salaries and put food on the table.
[1798.67] Tony Cake: Right, right.
[1800.67] Tony Cake: So it just doesn't seem to be the right way to do it for me.
[1804.67] Jack: I also worry about like, you know, the whole of where the UK kind of fits in on all of this
[1811.67] Jack: because, you know, we've had Brexit, we've had Covid, you know,
[1816.67] Jack: I just think that, you know, we're sort of like a bit screwed ourselves.
[1823.67] Tony Cake: Well, I mean, yeah, Brexit I think screwed everyone.
[1827.67] Tony Cake: I mean, I used to have, as you know, the European Repair Centre was in the UK,
[1833.67] Tony Cake: has been for many years.
[1835.67] Tony Cake: I run by a good friend of mine, Dave.
[1839.67] Tony Cake: And, you know, Brexit came in and it's just not possible to ship stuff in an eight anymore.
[1846.92] Tony Cake: Yeah, we've got our nose off despite our face there, unfortunately.
[1850.92] Tony Cake: Yeah, it was just crazy shit.
[1853.92] Tony Cake: Which is a real shame.
[1855.92] Tony Cake: And I think that has tentacles which are long and will take a while for them to be really fully understood.
[1864.92] Tony Cake: You know, even here, you know, I've been in Croatia and I've been travelling in and out for a number of years.
[1871.92] Tony Cake: And, you know, I'd love to buy an apartment here.
[1874.92] Tony Cake: It used to be before Brexit as a British passport holder.
[1877.92] Tony Cake: No problem.
[1878.92] Tony Cake: You know, just sign here.
[1880.92] Tony Cake: Here's your apartment, you know, move in tomorrow.
[1883.92] Tony Cake: And, you know, since Brexit, it's just not possible anymore.
[1887.92] Frank: This episode was recorded in front of a live online audience,
[1891.92] Frank: downloaded and edited to make sense when it played audio only,
[1894.92] Frank: censored to please the iTunes people, hosted on the internet,
[1897.92] Frank: forwarded through to your podcast provider,
[1899.92] Frank: downloaded, playing on your device and is now playing in your ears.
[1903.92] Frank: All thanks to our Patreons.
[1905.92] Frank: Consider joining them and you'll also get other online benefits.
[1908.92] Frank: Find out more at patreon.com forward slash let's drone out.
[1912.92] Frank: Alexander Fedorov is here.
[1914.92] Jack: Hello, hello.
[1916.92] Jack: We were talking about you.
[1917.92] Jack: So yes, Alexander, he's the guy who's doing the kiss ultra.
[1921.92] Jack: So please can we work on getting ghost and allure talking and everything?
[1928.92] Jack: Yes.
[1929.92] Jack: Thank you.
[1930.92] Jack: I would be very happy to.
[1932.92] Jack: I will forward you his email.
[1935.92] Stephen: Well, apparently, according to Krunks, there is.
[1940.92] Stephen: It is implemented.
[1942.92] Tony Cake: Oh, thank you.
[1943.92] Jack: Send me a PDF.
[1945.92] Tony Cake: The ghost protocol is supported in Kiss, I think, in both flavors.
[1950.92] Tony Cake: Yeah, works pretty nice.
[1952.92] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[1954.92] Tony Cake: But yeah, it's to be honest, it's been something that a few people have been working on in the background.
[1960.92] Tony Cake: I've been so busy with this, you know, getting the merger sorted out and everything kind of behind the scenes here.
[1965.92] Tony Cake: I haven't had much time to work on it, but I should be able to do that fairly soon.
[1970.92] Jack: Yeah, you're fixing the email support and everything, weren't you?
[1976.92] Tony Cake: Yeah, that was fun.
[1979.92] Stephen: So it looks like you've got a new position as CTIO, was it after the merger?
[1984.92] Stephen: Yes.
[1985.92] Stephen: So are you going to change what you're doing day to day now?
[1990.92] Stephen: Not really.
[1991.92] Tony Cake: It's what I've already done.
[1994.92] Tony Cake: So we joke about it with the other founders.
[1996.92] Tony Cake: But basically, my job is to come up with ideas.
[2000.92] Tony Cake: The CTO's idea is to reject those ideas.
[2006.92] Tony Cake: No, it's very good.
[2012.92] Tony Cake: Orca is a company where innovation is, I think, highly respected.
[2017.92] Tony Cake: And it's amazing being around a really smart team where you can throw around ideas and they build on each other.
[2030.92] Tony Cake: And you eventually hopefully turn into some pretty cool products.
[2033.92] Tony Cake: So pretty happy with it.
[2036.92] Stephen: Excellent.
[2037.92] Stephen: Well, we look forward to seeing fascinating new ideas come out of your brain and be made into reality.
[2043.92] Tony Cake: Yeah, excellent.
[2044.92] Tony Cake: Hope so.
[2045.92] Jack: What is the FPV control that you were talking about, the FPV.CTRL firmware has been identified?
[2057.92] Tony Cake: It's a remote with full-size kind of hall gimbals.
[2065.92] Tony Cake: Stupidly long battery life.
[2067.92] Tony Cake: In fact, it's something that hasn't been published very well.
[2069.92] Tony Cake: But without the Uber Lite module in, this thing can run for about 78 hours nonstop on one charge.
[2080.92] Tony: That's good.
[2081.92] Tony Cake: And even with the Uber Lite in, I think the battery life is about 40 hours.
[2085.92] Tony Cake: But it's a nice little simple radio designed to get cheap.
[2092.92] Tony Cake: It's designed to help people come in through simulators.
[2097.92] Tony Cake: And then once they want to fly, they just pop in the Uber Lite and go fly.
[2103.92] Jack: MadTech asks, Tony, when is the IRC power meters be available again?
[2112.92] Jack: I need a new one after an incident.
[2117.92] Tony Cake: So good news there.
[2120.92] Tony Cake: This was another part that had gone out of stock.
[2123.92] Tony Cake: Actually, several parts that went out of stock.
[2126.92] Tony Cake: We've located everything.
[2127.92] Tony Cake: We're in the middle of testing.
[2129.92] Tony Cake: One of our critical suppliers who makes the attenuator decided that they do a Rev-A of their product
[2139.92] Tony Cake: and completely screwed up the performance below six gigahertz.
[2143.92] Tony Cake: So we basically had to beg them for reals of the original parts that we used, which now they found.
[2151.92] Tony Cake: And we're a few weeks out.
[2153.92] Tony Cake: I think maybe four weeks with that right to see those on the shelves again.
[2157.92] Tony Cake: And they're now in a new white case with a funky new logo on there.
[2162.92] Tony Cake: So they've had a bit of a facelift as well.
[2166.92] Tony: Nice.
[2167.92] Jack: Like the right ones in the white case.
[2171.92] Jack: Was that white or black?
[2173.92] Jack: Yeah, maybe it's white.
[2174.92] Jack: I can't remember.
[2175.92] Jack: I think it was white, weren't it, with black tails?
[2177.92] Jack: I can't remember.
[2179.92] Tony Cake: It could have been.
[2180.92] Tony Cake: That was a while ago.
[2181.92] Tony Cake: Yeah, I know.
[2182.92] Tony Cake: I'm trying to remember.
[2184.92] Tony Cake: That's coming.
[2185.92] Tony Cake: It's a long-range wing pilot.
[2187.92] Stephen: Road is shy.
[2190.92] Stephen: We don't talk about roads are right.
[2192.92] Stephen: Well, unless we're in a time warp.
[2195.92] Stephen: So as a long-range wing pilot, have you had a look in open HD at the other kind of more experimental HD solutions?
[2203.92] Tony Cake: I haven't, to be honest.
[2205.92] Tony Cake: And I'll be honest with you.
[2206.92] Tony Cake: I'm still very much a vinyl guy.
[2208.92] Tony Cake: I'm still flying 100% analog.
[2211.92] Tony Cake: And the kind of performance that we can get out of analog these days with some decent antennas is fantastic.
[2220.92] Tony Cake: I'm pretty happy flying 10, 20, 30 kilometers out with a link that I know is going to degrade relatively gracefully,
[2230.92] Tony Cake: which I haven't really seen yet with any of the digital solutions.
[2235.92] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[2236.92] Tony Cake: Are you using the full 3.3?
[2241.39] Tony Cake: No, no, no.
[2242.39] Tony Cake: This is all on goes to four.
[2244.39] Jack: Oh, OK.
[2245.39] Jack: Sorry.
[2246.39] Jack: Sorry, Stephen.
[2247.39] Stephen: I cut you off.
[2248.39] Stephen: I was just saying digital can be a bit stop start.
[2250.39] Stephen: I do appreciate that.
[2251.39] Stephen: I don't fly far, but I fly through dense undergrowth.
[2254.39] Stephen: And every now and then, it's just like, oh, there we go.
[2257.39] Tony: Yeah, it literally just stops.
[2259.39] Jack: Yeah.
[2260.39] Jack: No, you're right.
[2261.39] Jack: It is black, dark gray, the row right case.
[2265.39] Jack: Yeah.
[2266.39] Jack: Thank you, Mad Meg.
[2268.39] Tony Cake: I was wrong.
[2269.39] Tony Cake: I'm sorry.
[2270.39] Tony Cake: But even, you know, even Bando flying last week.
[2273.39] Tony Cake: I mean, one of the guys is flying and he's like two stories underground or something.
[2278.39] Tony Cake: And he's still flying this thing.
[2281.39] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[2282.39] Tony Cake: You have to watch a video and think, well, where is he actually taking this thing?
[2285.39] Tony Cake: And he's still flying merrily with just a couple of omnis on his goggles.
[2289.39] Tony Cake: Jeez.
[2290.39] Tony Cake: That's incredible.
[2291.39] Tony Cake: A bit old school, but I still very much value that.
[2295.39] Jack: So with this new partnership with Orca, what can we expect?
[2300.39] Jack: Is there anything you can leak or...
[2302.39] Jack: Expect the unexpected.
[2304.39] Jack: I thought you were going to do that.
[2307.39] Jack: I think the quote was to be a European powerhouse.
[2315.39] Tony Cake: Well, you know, these guys, it's a pretty amazing team and they've got their fingers
[2322.39] Tony Cake: in all kinds of pies, including multi-emission headsets for the defense side,
[2327.39] Tony Cake: which are pretty cool.
[2329.39] Tony Cake: And there's all kinds of stuff that publicly they've said they're doing.
[2336.39] Tony Cake: And, you know, I think, you know, I can't say much about where it's going,
[2341.39] Tony Cake: but partly because I think we're not sure yet.
[2344.39] Tony Cake: But I think there's an awful lot of potential there.
[2351.39] Stephen: I'm really looking forward to seeing a full solution from you guys,
[2355.39] Stephen: you know, just a big, big old box with everything in it you need to fly.
[2359.39] Tony Cake: Well, I think this is what I'm looking forward to because I don't think there's a European company
[2365.39] Tony Cake: which has this yet.
[2368.39] Tony Cake: I think when you do that, you can make things an awful lot easier to use.
[2373.39] Tony Cake: I know there were a lot of complaints when the Uber Lite came out.
[2376.39] Tony Cake: I think it's just because we're kind of trained to look for that.
[2381.39] Tony Cake: I think people coming into this hobby, they don't want any of that shit.
[2384.39] Tony Cake: They want to pick this thing up.
[2386.39] Tony Cake: You know, they want to turn it on and go fly.
[2390.39] Stephen: You only want all those features if your intention is to fly like six different quads with one radio.
[2395.39] Stephen: If you just have to fly a single quad, it can be configured perfectly for that quad from the factory.
[2400.39] Stephen: Oh, yeah. I mean, I've got one.
[2402.39] Tony Cake: Actually, I've got two models on my, actually three models I do like on my TX16.
[2408.39] Tony Cake: You know, one for INAF stuff, one for beta flight quads and one for planks with no flight controller.
[2415.39] Tony Cake: That's all I need.
[2416.39] Tony Cake: Most of the features are just not touched.
[2419.39] Stephen: So I guess, you know, you've made a few quads in your time, right, Tony?
[2423.39] Stephen: If you're going to make one with kind of what you know now and what you've seen over the past few years,
[2428.39] Stephen: what kind of what would that look like?
[2432.39] Tony Cake: So it's interesting that you ask because I had before this trip, actually for this trip,
[2440.39] Tony Cake: I had to bring a quad that I could give to somebody who had just started flying, basically learned on the simulator,
[2450.39] Tony Cake: had a few flights around, and I have a collection of quads hung on the wall, as I'm sure.
[2457.39] Tony Cake: All of you do.
[2459.39] Tony Cake: And you ask yourself the question, which one would you bring for a beginner that actually wants to have a bit of fun?
[2467.39] Tony Cake: So you want something that's, you know, it's fairly agile, but something that if you smash into a wall, it doesn't need repair.
[2477.39] Tony Cake: And to be quite honest, the one I'd love to build right now would be a Mojo with some decent electronics in.
[2484.39] Tony Cake: Kind of an up-to-date flight controller with the latest beta flights and decent ESCs.
[2490.39] Tony Cake: And I think that would be a fun little thing, even just a handful.
[2495.39] Tony Cake: Mojo 2022.
[2497.39] Tony: Yeah.
[2499.39] Tony Cake: Yeah, no, I think that when I look at that platform, you know, it kind of arrived at the end of the kind of the vortex era
[2507.39] Tony Cake: where people are starting to build their own, which is all good.
[2512.39] Tony Cake: But man, I just wish I had a box full of these things that, you know, when I want to either give one to somebody or I want to go out and fly myself, I can just grab one.
[2521.39] Tony: It's gone back around from people who would like to just buy a ready-made quad or kit.
[2530.39] Tony Cake: Yeah, I think on the race side, I think when you look at the amount of effort that Eraser puts in before and during a race,
[2540.39] Tony Cake: just to build his system, it's just crazy.
[2544.39] Tony Cake: I think they would.
[2545.39] Tony Cake: I do like the idea of the freedom spec kind of stuff, wherever it gets a bit simpler.
[2551.39] Stephen: Also, the 230 mil version.
[2554.39] Tony Cake: Yeah, that's the puppy.
[2557.39] Jack: Also, I'd like to see the guns versus drones with the Mojo because it was even smaller.
[2566.39] Tony Cake: Yeah, that was a fun episode there.
[2570.83] Jack: Oh, God, I miss Final Glide so much.
[2575.83] Tony Cake: I haven't heard from him all the time.
[2579.83] Jack: Well, he was over, you know, he's doing something with drones commercially, but he basically, you know, this is all hearsay.
[2592.83] Jack: You know, someone had it in for him and Cassel were basically, I believe, harassing him in some respect.
[2602.83] Jack: I don't fully know.
[2603.83] Jack: This could be all theoretically hypothetical.
[2607.83] Tony Cake: No, some of this stuff went on.
[2609.83] Tony Cake: It was all of it nuts.
[2612.83] Jack: Yeah, sorry.
[2615.83] Tony Cake: That's a shame.
[2616.83] Tony Cake: That was fun times.
[2617.83] Tony Cake: I would ride around with Tommy and him and Sharpe.
[2622.83] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[2623.83] Jack: Dug a dive and all the Ukrainian sort of stuff, you know.
[2629.83] Tony: It was the best time.
[2631.83] Tony: Oh, my God.
[2632.83] Tony Cake: Yeah, that was in many ways.
[2634.83] Tony Cake: It was a shame that that couldn't continue.
[2638.83] Stephen: It was when it caught the public's imagination, I think, and had its moment in the limelight.
[2644.83] Tony Cake: They wanted a team.
[2645.83] Tony Cake: They were all amazing on camera.
[2649.83] Tony Cake: And they all had their own kind of quirky personalities, and it just meshed well together.
[2657.83] Tony: Yeah.
[2658.83] Tony Cake: See, I do miss that.
[2660.83] Tony: I know.
[2661.83] Tony: Yeah.
[2662.83] Tony: I do.
[2663.83] Tony: We all do.
[2664.83] Stephen: They've all got serious jobs now.
[2665.83] Stephen: They're all working in Hollywood and doing car commercials and thought knows what.
[2669.83] Tony Cake: I do keep in touch with Luke Bannister.
[2672.83] Tony Cake: He passes down through Europe every once in a while.
[2674.83] Tony Cake: He's doing some pretty cool stuff on the professional side.
[2678.83] Tony Cake: Have you guys seen the wingsuit videos with Kolas?
[2682.83] Tony: We've seen them, yeah.
[2685.83] Tony Cake: That stuff is absolutely nuts.
[2688.83] Stephen: Thank you, Namaskal.
[2689.83] Stephen: I think that the Evoque, the iFlight Nazgol Evoque might have been stealing a trick from
[2697.83] Stephen: your vortex there with the reemergence of plastic side panels.
[2701.83] Stephen: I think both that and the latest diatone have included clip-on plastic side panels
[2706.83] Stephen: to protect the electronics.
[2708.83] Tony Cake: What a constant.
[2709.83] Tony Cake: There you are.
[2710.83] Tony Cake: Where do they get these ideas from?
[2712.83] Tony Cake: Leaving electronics to hang out in the breeze is not a good idea.
[2716.83] Tony Cake: They work better when they've got cut grass stuck to them.
[2719.83] Jack: Everyone knows that.
[2722.83] Jack: Mate, I've still got a set of sunny skies, like 22, 36 or whatever, in the hope that
[2731.83] Jack: one day you might be here, have a Shugon Pro.
[2738.83] Tony Cake: Shugon.
[2739.83] Tony Cake: I was looking at those lately.
[2740.83] Tony Cake: That was a funny thing.
[2741.83] Jack: I know.
[2742.83] Jack: You should have patented the folding arms, mate.
[2745.83] Jack: You would have made so much money.
[2749.83] Tony Cake: You've got to leave something on the table for everyone else.
[2752.83] Tony Cake: Yeah, that's true.
[2753.83] Tony Cake: That's true.
[2754.83] Tony Cake: It was Greg from Fat Shark who actually tried to convince me to do that.
[2759.83] Tony Cake: I said, why the hell would anyone care about this stuff?
[2762.83] Jack: Was I wrong?
[2764.83] Stephen: Yeah, I know.
[2765.83] Stephen: You wouldn't have got anywhere with DJI because they've just been like, yellow in China.
[2769.83] Stephen: Patents don't apply.
[2773.83] Tony: Smokebob.
[2774.83] Tony: What's the pattern?
[2777.83] Tony Cake: No, it's all good.
[2778.83] Stephen: It's all good.
[2781.83] Stephen: They just call it something else.
[2783.83] Stephen: That's how you work around patterns.
[2784.83] Stephen: You make it look almost identical to the pattern, but with one tiny little difference.
[2788.83] Tony Cake: Yeah, yeah.
[2789.83] Tony Cake: The trouble is, in FBV land, is by the time the pattern is issued, for most stuff, it's
[2796.83] Tony Cake: obsolete already.
[2797.83] Tony: Yeah, I'd die here.
[2799.83] Tony: Go on.
[2800.83] Jack: So you haven't heard from Greg at all from Fat Shark?
[2805.83] Tony Cake: I actually spoke to him recently.
[2808.83] Tony Cake: Obviously, his home base was in Shengzhen.
[2811.83] Tony Cake: Obviously, with all these crazy Chinese restrictions and border controls and all this stuff, he
[2819.83] Tony Cake: was having problems getting out of there, but I think finally he escaped.
[2824.4] Tony: I think you're still good.
[2827.4] Tony: Get out and stay out.
[2831.03] Tony Cake: Yes, my brother-in-law has actually been stuck out there now for three years without being
[2836.03] Tony Cake: out of trouble.
[2838.03] Stephen: So what's your analog goggle?
[2840.03] Stephen: What are you flying with then?
[2842.03] Stephen: You've been an orca all the way for a while now?
[2845.03] Tony Cake: I switched to the first orcas, and my 50-plus-year-old eyes kind of begged for some kind of focus
[2855.03] Tony Cake: adjust, so then the new ones came out.
[2857.03] Tony Cake: I've got to be honest, when I put these new ones on, I haven't looked back.
[2864.03] Tony Cake: The image, for me, is absolutely bloody perfect.
[2867.03] Tony Cake: I can dial these things in exactly as I want them.
[2870.03] Tony Cake: I love it.
[2871.03] Tony Cake: The DVR, for me, is second to none, and I make power play.
[2879.03] Tony Cake: It really is fantastic.
[2883.03] Tony Cake: For longer-range flights, when you don't have an onboard recorder, it's super nice to have
[2891.03] Tony Cake: a high-resolution, upscaled 60Hz DVR footage at the end of the flight, whether or not you
[2897.03] Tony Cake: get the quad back or the plane back.
[2900.03] Tony: Sometimes not.
[2904.03] Stephen: But now I'm pretty happy with those.
[2907.03] Stephen: Are there any kind of interesting features that you can see that the rapid fire adopting
[2912.03] Stephen: now?
[2913.03] Stephen: You've got this synergy with orca where you can sort of influence each other?
[2918.03] Tony Cake: Well, we already had the automatic channel change stuff, but quite frankly on that, I'm
[2923.03] Tony Cake: waiting to hear from the community what they want to do with it.
[2926.03] Tony Cake: There's been some suggestion, like, for example, tie the arm switch through so we can start
[2935.03] Tony Cake: recording, start the DVR on arm and stop it on this arm, which would be kind of nice.
[2942.03] Tony Cake: There's a few little things like that.
[2947.03] Tony Cake: Whatever people are interested in.
[2950.03] Stephen: The risk with that is when you disarm because you're about to hit something, you don't find
[2954.03] Stephen: out in the DVR where it actually landed.
[2957.03] Tony: Never disarm.
[2962.03] Stephen: I think I'm going to be attacked by a two-hour animal.
[2965.03] Stephen: Tony clearly spends way more on ESCs than I do.
[2968.03] Stephen: I just buy the cheap ones.
[2970.03] Stephen: I disarm real quick.
[2974.6] Tony Cake: Yes.
[2976.6] Tony Cake: I mean, I think anything is possible there.
[2981.23] Tony: I'm looking forward to some new stuff then.
[2984.23] Tony: Keep growing the hobby, keep coming.
[2986.23] Tony: Let's hope they're trying to get back to work.
[2991.23] Tony Cake: Yes, I think they will.
[2995.23] Tony Cake: On the chip shortage, I think what's going to happen is they built a whole bunch of new
[3000.23] Tony Cake: fabs.
[3001.23] Tony Cake: I think there's going to be kind of an overshoot now where we're going to reach a point where
[3005.23] Tony Cake: there's going to be just too much of everything.
[3007.23] Tony Cake: Prices will drop back to below where they were before.
[3010.23] Stephen: The question is when, I guess, isn't it?
[3014.8] Stephen: It's going to happen and it looks like another joltage has hit.
[3018.8] Tony Cake: I think we're at least a couple of years out.
[3020.8] Tony Cake: I mean, this whole Ukraine thing doesn't really help, especially since all of the rail routes
[3028.8] Tony Cake: from Shenzhen into Europe all go through either Russia or Ukraine.
[3036.59] Tony Cake: That doesn't help with the whole shipping crisis.
[3040.59] Stephen: Yes.
[3041.59] Stephen: I noticed for a while, all the flight controllers were out of stock.
[3045.59] Stephen: No, all the F-411s had gone.
[3047.59] Stephen: You can't get F-405.
[3048.59] Stephen: Then all of a sudden, there was a burst of F-722s and H-743s that were, while expensive,
[3057.59] Stephen: not more expensive than the F-405s had been.
[3062.59] Stephen: That looked kind of rosy for a while, but it looks like those are becoming a bit harder
[3067.59] Stephen: to come by now.
[3068.59] Tony Cake: Well, the F-7 is dead, and the F-7 was never really useful anyhow because they never made
[3073.59] Tony Cake: only enough flash space.
[3076.59] Tony Cake: F-765, which no one used.
[3078.59] Tony Cake: So I've been working on a couple of flight controller designs with Orca, and that's fairly
[3084.59] Tony Cake: public knowledge, and they are very, very close to being produced.
[3091.59] Tony Cake: What's the unique selling point of those then?
[3095.59] Tony Cake: So the analog one is just designed to be simple.
[3098.59] Tony Cake: It's an H-7 2020, a nice clean design, which has a single cable one-to-one pinmap straight
[3108.79] Tony Cake: onto the hybrid.
[3110.47] Tony Cake: So for analog use, you basically just have the two boards, a short cable between them,
[3116.83] Tony Cake: plug a camera in.
[3117.83] Tony Cake: So you'd have a JST on each end?
[3120.43] Tony Cake: Yeah, very simple.
[3122.35] Tony Cake: But that's the analog version.
[3124.35] Tony Cake: The analog version has got the OSC chip.
[3126.35] Tony Cake: The digital version is kind of cool.
[3127.35] Tony Cake: It doesn't have the OSC chip, but it's got Ghost on board.
[3132.35] Tony Cake: So for anyone flying HD0 or DJI, all they need is this one flight controller with Ghost
[3139.35] Tony Cake: on, and it's ready to go.
[3141.35] Stephen: That's good.
[3142.35] Stephen: Excellent.
[3143.35] Stephen: Excellent.
[3144.35] Stephen: It's a nice direction.
[3145.35] Stephen: Yeah, fancy tricks like Hydra was doing, like Dominic was doing with his trying to run the
[3150.35] Stephen: OSC on the H-7 as well and all that.
[3153.35] Tony Cake: For now, no.
[3155.35] Tony Cake: For now, we haven't done that.
[3159.35] Tony Cake: It gets tricky to do that.
[3161.35] Tony Cake: One way to do it is just use a little tiny external STM32.
[3165.35] Tony Cake: And what happened over the last year is that these little tiny external STM32s became more
[3171.35] Tony Cake: expensive than the original OSC chip.
[3174.35] Tony Cake: So why bother?
[3176.35] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[3177.35] Stephen: Right.
[3178.35] Stephen: Well, that sounds like an excellent little product.
[3180.35] Stephen: I look forward to seeing that released.
[3182.35] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[3183.35] Tony Cake: So yeah, they're pretty close.
[3185.35] Stephen: They're going to be called the Scream series, I believe.
[3187.35] Stephen: Scream.
[3188.35] Stephen: All right.
[3189.35] Stephen: Well, we'll look out for that in the stores.
[3191.35] Stephen: Excellent.
[3192.35] Tony: Yeah.
[3193.35] Tony: Exciting stuff.
[3194.35] Tony: Yeah.
[3195.35] Tony: Yeah.
[3196.35] Stephen: It's going to be interesting to see now we do get this critical mass of H-7s out there
[3201.35] Stephen: that have a ton more memory, a ton more flash, and a ton more CPU speed.
[3206.35] Stephen: What uses people put that to?
[3209.35] Stephen: Because it's capable of doing a heck of a lot more than we're doing in beta flight right
[3213.35] Stephen: now.
[3214.35] Jack: Yeah.
[3215.35] Jack: Oh, no.
[3216.35] Jack: We got the bells again.
[3217.35] Jack: That's it.
[3218.35] Tony: It's saying it's the end of the show.
[3219.35] Tony: We're going for an hour.
[3220.35] Jack: It's arrived.
[3221.35] Jack: Yeah.
[3222.35] Jack: The end is nigh.
[3223.35] Stephen: I think Tony was about to drop some little bits of wisdom on us there.
[3230.35] Tony Cake: I was going to say the funny thing about the H-7s is, for us, it was one of the only processors
[3234.35] Tony Cake: that we could get old off, which is crazy.
[3238.35] Tony Cake: No one wants them.
[3240.35] Tony Cake: Well, no, but a bunch of them came on the market.
[3242.35] Tony Cake: You can't get F7s anymore.
[3245.35] Tony Cake: F7s are designed with an older process, which I think ST is not bothering to build anymore.
[3253.35] Tony Cake: You got a choice for an F4 and an H-7.
[3258.35] Tony Cake: It's not a hard choice.
[3259.35] Jack: But I now have dropped support for H-7s, I think, didn't I?
[3264.35] Jack: Yeah.
[3265.35] Stephen: Are you sure, Jack?
[3267.35] Jack: I don't know.
[3269.35] Stephen: No.
[3270.35] Stephen: H.
[3271.35] Stephen: H is the newest one.
[3272.35] Stephen: That's like the 480 megahertz, 2 mega flash.
[3275.35] Jack: No, sorry.
[3276.35] Jack: My mistake.
[3277.35] Jack: The F7.
[3278.35] Jack: Yeah, I think maybe.
[3279.35] Jack: The F411, I think they stopped.
[3282.35] Jack: F3 for the win, says Richard Warwick.
[3285.35] Jack: Sorry.
[3286.35] Jack: Yeah, my mistake.
[3287.35] Jack: Yeah.
[3288.35] Tony Cake: Yeah, the F7s were a problem with that because they just don't have enough memory.
[3292.35] Jack: Yeah, it's good to hear that you've been running iNav next to your planks.
[3299.89] Jack: They're in no flight controller.
[3302.89] Jack: Sorry, I love that term.
[3305.89] Jack: That was quite funny.
[3307.89] Tony Cake: Thanks.
[3308.89] Tony Cake: There we go.
[3309.89] Tony Cake: There's the bells again.
[3310.89] Tony Cake: That's it.
[3311.89] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[3312.89] Tony Cake: The lovely old clock on a Ford.
[3317.74] Stephen: Nice.
[3318.74] Stephen: I just want to look and see what iNav is dropping support for.
[3322.74] Stephen: I think Jack may have been voicing some fever dream or nightmare that he had.
[3328.74] Stephen: I can't see.
[3329.74] Stephen: I can't see these deprecations.
[3331.74] Jack: Yeah, they dropped F3.
[3333.74] Jack: I know, but.
[3335.74] Stephen: Yeah, that was a while ago, I think.
[3339.74] Stephen: I thought the thing with F7 is you want the F765, which no one uses because that's the
[3345.74] Stephen: one that's got one meg or two mega flash, and the F722 is the one that's only got half
[3350.74] Stephen: mega flash.
[3351.74] Stephen: Yeah.
[3352.74] Tony Cake: Yeah, you just can't get any of them.
[3356.74] Tony Cake: It's a problem.
[3357.74] Stephen: A bit of a drape.
[3358.74] Stephen: What iNav have done, they've actually reduced the available features for F4.11 and F722.
[3364.74] Stephen: There's a feature reduction.
[3366.74] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[3367.74] Stephen: So you now have a whole bunch of features you cannot get, which are the Furious FPV
[3373.74] Stephen: VTX, virtual pilot, a servo driver, some D, some H, Xbus, and HOTT telemetry.
[3382.74] Tony Cake: So nothing that anyone cares about these days.
[3385.74] Stephen: Really, yeah.
[3386.74] Stephen: Yeah.
[3387.74] Stephen: This is like Betaflight saying that they're not going to be supporting PWMRXs, which they
[3391.74] Stephen: haven't done yet.
[3392.74] Jack: Yeah.
[3393.74] Jack: That's all we've got time for.
[3394.74] Jack: Listening to Let's Drone Out, and it's been amazing having Tony on again.
[3403.74] Jack: Tony Cake, the man before you.
[3405.74] Tony Cake: Good pleasure.
[3406.74] Tony Cake: It's been a while.
[3407.74] Jack: Immersion RC, you know, for the experience.
[3411.74] Jack: Thanks, Dave.
[3412.74] Jack: That's good.
[3413.74] Tony Cake: It's been a real pleasure.
[3415.74] Tony Cake: Don't do this very often, and this has always been a pleasure.
[3418.74] Tony Cake: Yeah.
[3419.74] Tony Cake: So sorry for the background noise.
[3422.74] Jack: I was really upset not having you on when you released Ghost.
[3425.74] Jack: I really wanted to get you on, but you just didn't get back to me.
[3431.74] Tony Cake: It's been a bit like running on a treadmill for a while, but now things will be a little
[3438.74] Tony Cake: easier.
[3439.74] Stephen: Thank God.
[3440.74] Stephen: Congratulations on all the best for the future.
[3443.74] Tony Cake: Thank you very much.
[3444.74] Tony Cake: And yeah, as soon as some more fun stuff happens, let's do this again.
[3448.74] Stephen: Yeah, we'll do, man.
[3449.74] Stephen: Thank you.
[3450.74] Stephen: If a new mojo appears, we have to have you back because we all want to see the mojo from 2022.
[3457.74] Tony Cake: I think anything is possible.
[3458.74] Tony Cake: That'd be a nice little platform.
[3460.74] Tony Cake: Let's see what happens.
[3461.74] Jack: You still owe a viewer a giveaway for a mojo.
[3465.74] Jack: I can't remember who it was.
[3466.74] Tony: Mikey Dred, I think.
[3468.74] Tony: Yeah, Mikey Dred.
[3469.74] Jack: Yeah.
[3470.74] Jack: He won one, and you never sent it out.
[3473.74] Jack: That's bad.
[3474.74] Tony Cake: The crazy thing is I think there's still some stuck in the Hong Kong free trade zone.
[3480.74] Tony Cake: Because when Hong Kong went crazy a couple of years ago, they banned anything shipping
[3485.74] Tony Cake: that had the word drone in from the warehouse there.
[3488.74] Tony Cake: Oh, dear.
[3490.74] Tony: There it is, Mikey Dred.
[3493.74] Tony: It's in Hong Kong.
[3495.74] Jack: Yeah, if you want it, it's there.
[3497.74] Jack: I'll see if I can unstick it.
[3499.74] Jack: Yeah.
[3500.74] Jack: Maybe get your brother-in-law to hop over.
[3502.74] Jack: Yeah, go out there with a heavy mob.
[3505.74] Jack: Yeah.
[3507.74] Jack: Massive shout out to all our Patreons.
[3510.74] Jack: Guys, if you listen to this on audio podcasts, we're live on YouTube every Thursday,
[3517.74] Jack: and all the donations help to pay our editor and get everything neat enough.
[3522.74] Jack: We still need to pay for our website.
[3526.74] Jack: We owe Wix some money.
[3528.74] Jack: So if you can become a Patreon, that would really help.
[3532.74] Jack: We'd love to have our website back so people can buy a match, buy a t-shirt or something.
[3539.74] Jack: You've been joined by Tony Cake from Urgent R.C.
[3544.74] Jack: Steven.
[3545.74] Stephen: Cheers.
[3546.74] Stephen: Thanks, everyone.
[3547.74] Jack: My darling wife, the other Tony.
[3550.74] Tony: I don't know why.
[3552.74] Jack: He's my FPV wife.
[3554.74] Jack: And I've been bright until I fly.
[3556.74] Jack: Thank you, Patreons.
[3557.74] Jack: We love you.
[3558.74] Jack: Good night.
[3559.74] Jack: Thank you so much.
[3560.74] Jack: Thanks, guys.
[3561.74] Jack: Thank you so much.