=== Let's Drone Out — Episode 375 ===
Title: LDO 375 - This week in Kerberos...
Recorded: 2022-11-03
Hosts: Stephen "Belrik" Howell, Wayne "CurryKitten" Andrews, Jack "Brightontillifly" Nash, Andrew "Frank" Hyams
Guest(s): (none recorded)
Total audience: 1,965
Platforms: YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwmZ1X4l71E); SoundCloud (http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/1377142756-letsdroneout-ldo-375-this-week-in-kerberos.mp3)
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[0.0] Jack: Hello, and you're listening to what 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 to Carlos campos are folk now Sam dharma on with the show.
[51.42] Stephen: Hello.
[52.7] Stephen: Welcome to this week in Kerberos.
[57.98] Stephen: You're listening to let's drone out and maybe this week in Kerberos with extra juicy election algorithms. No, not that type of election. Not even we were joined by everyone's favorite.
[71.84] Curry: I don't know what you're doing, Jack.
[74.52] Curry: Just to explain to people, Jack suddenly come on and now he's just pointing and now he's waiting for people to fill in the blanks without any discussion.
[83.56] Jack: No, I just I'm just having fun with it. All right. Okay, everyone's favorite kuriken.
[90.8] Jack: I'm all their favorites. Yeah, and everyone's favorite man with the mustache. That was why I'm asked to please. Hello, everyone.
[101.48] Jack: Steven and I'm right till I fly. Hello. How you doing?
[109.6] Jack: Caroline, you were amazing. Yes, like last time.
[114.88] Jack: But from a liability standpoint, try and try and discourage people from building their own batteries.
[126.8] Jack: You know what you're doing.
[128.72] Jack: Don't bite by these eat them.
[131.72] Curry: I had an immediate WhatsApp after that from someone saying I watched the tail end of your show. I'm never building a battery. So someone's learned their lesson.
[141.2] Stephen: From what at least unless you already feel that building batteries is something you're capable of. Do not let us talk you into building batteries. We are not a source of advice there.
[151.04] Jack: Yeah, it's just you know, it's just from a liability thing and it just goes wrong so quickly.
[159.48] Jack: Like, you know, and I say that from experience because I had a lot of batteries to play with.
[166.84] Jack: And yes, oh, that's the point. Yeah, after the show, I've got a premiere. I know my my my mate Cole Anderson. He's been editing footage that probably shouldn't have seen the light of day. But I don't know. Afterwards, maybe we can hang out, have a have a little watch party.
[188.96] Stephen: I don't know.
[190.24] Stephen: 2019 and the other times.
[193.92] Stephen: Yes, I know.
[196.0] Curry: I was going to drop a note to you when I saw the premiere and say, hey, who does premieres these days? B, we're normally still chatting away at court past nine. What was your intention here? What are we going to do?
[207.28] Curry: Jack's video.
[208.24] Jack: Yeah, why don't we, you know, if I set up a quick, if I set up a quick Patreon thing, maybe we could just sit there and enjoy it together.
[219.36] Curry: That's what she said.
[220.6] Jack: Yeah, it's like a quick little thing. But yeah, thank you, Richard. All right. Yeah, I don't know. I've been, you know, I've been I've been trying. I've got all this video footage and I can't I just can't edit it myself because it's so cringe. I just hate my laugh. And I'm like, I'm not a very good pilot.
[244.24] Stephen: Look at Cole, he's got the thumbnail with a massive close up on your face. And no one ever chooses a massive close up of their own face unless they've become inured to the terrors of YouTube like Curry.
[257.2] Curry: You might remind me remember me from this thumbnail.
[261.72] Curry: Or other ones similar.
[264.92] Stephen: You manage a slightly different expression each time as well. I know it would be the same horrible gurne if I did it every.
[270.32] Curry: Well, sometimes it's because, oh, man, I forgot to do a thumbnail. Let me find some some clip through it. And generally speaking, you know, if you stop video somewhere, you'll just find yourself looking like you're going to pass out like, or pulling some weird face.
[285.68] Curry: And I was like, having a stroke, having a stroke, that sort of thing happens all the time. That's what you can do. Did you see this has been everywhere lately?
[296.44] Curry: These are now avatar VRX. Any anybody seen that and was tempted. So I was very tempted to use feedback. Oh, no, I don't look at that. That's on Discord, isn't it?
[309.32] Curry: If I've got too many networks and things can't come up with
[317.96] Curry: Anyway, I was gonna say, oh, that looks a good deal, other than the fact that my goggles are 640 by 480. So it's not going to really help me, is it?
[325.68] Curry: It's like I can't do. I can't do it.
[329.08] Stephen: And even if you've got the fanciest of fancy goggles, and you've got the Skyo 4x, like I've got, which I was well chuffed with it, they're still 1280 by 960 at 60 hertz. So that means either I run the low resolution mode, I can't do 1080p, or if I'm in the low resolution mode, I can't go over 60 hertz.
[350.16] Stephen: So it's a nice touch. But you are limited, you are not going to get the full ability of the system, you're going to get the light version of avatar.
[360.28] Curry: You may think I think I don't think you need to run 720.
[367.84] Stephen: Yeah, but they do 120 hertz and HDMI panels, HDMI inputs on every goggle that I've ever seen is 60.
[375.72] Stephen: One second.
[379.72] Jack: Yeah, they've done something weird with the sequencing or something in there.
[386.92] Jack: Don't know.
[388.04] Stephen: Not particularly, it's just a higher refresh signal, mate. And most goggles only support 60 hertz. So they're going through a scalar onto the onto the displays. But even if, yeah, the displays might be good for more than 60 hertz, but the scalar that's in the goggles ain't driving them any faster than 60 hertz. So 60 hertz is what you get.
[408.62] Stephen: Which has a that's not end of the world. But it basically means you've got a frame queued up that you can't see. And you've got to wait for it to be timed for the next frame to come around before the goggles draw you a frame.
[420.54] Stephen: So I think 16 milliseconds is is like likely add on delay. And then you've got the fact that it's outside of the goggles. So it's going out into HDMI along a wire and then going through trying to out of HDMI and into a frame buffer.
[437.34] Stephen: Whereas if it's internal to the goggles, it's going straight from the video decoder onto the onto the frame.
[446.22] Curry: There is that I can't necessarily agree with the 60 versus 120 argument, because it's hard for me to tell the difference if I play a game in 60 versus 120.
[456.5] Curry: I do get the extra extra scale of things back and forth is going to do it. There's there's not much love for it in the chat.
[466.14] Curry: We've got too much crap to hang on.
[468.38] Stephen: Not a good price. So if you look at it, 200 bucks and I went on to the avatar site, put an order and it comes out about 190 UK pounds GBP.
[478.78] Stephen: Yeah, but what about the import costs, then, you know, I've never I've never been I've never been stung with anything off Cadex. I say that I think they I think they are including duties or they're they're being lucky.
[493.22] Stephen: And if you look at the individual components there, that mini VTX, I think is going for upwards of 100.
[499.14] Stephen: So you're getting that module for basically less than you pay for a rapid fire, which is a good deal. There's no arguing about that being a good deal.
[507.78] Stephen: If it's what if you want to get into HD and you're not worried about latency and you're not worried about the ragged edge of the system's potential, it's a good deal.
[517.22] Jack: Yeah.
[519.7] Jack: Cadex.
[521.42] Jack: Yeah, like the other thing is like Cadex is sat there on its own and, you know, it's like with with Walksnail and then the HD zero. Is that more of an open source solution?
[537.9] Jack: Should we say more people making it than just one place?
[543.5] Curry: I mean, yes, I keep doing nothing truly open source in this and there's still control through the hardware to a certain extent.
[553.34] Curry: It's just you've got more parties able to produce the hardware, but they still have to buy in chips from a single person to do so through HD zero.
[561.42] Curry: So it's a question of like I had high hopes walks now because they come from Cadex and they're not DJI, which is a good start.
[573.22] Curry: So they were in bed with them and then they had a little lavas tiff and this has happened.
[580.26] Curry: But I kind of it's it's I suppose it's still a slightly exciting time to see what's going to happen because there seems to be people really love the DJI goggles and the stuff.
[591.3] Curry: But there still seems to be this general sort of distrust of what might happen in the future.
[596.66] Curry: They might pull the plug any time they feel like it and they might decide that the next thing is not going to be compatible with the other stuff.
[603.34] Curry: And it's like, oh, and I still I still don't like the fact you have to activate things, which just seems a bit rough stuff.
[611.54] Stephen: That's another thing that put me off here, because if you get this VRX with Walksnail, it's still got to be paired to your receiver.
[621.06] Stephen: So I might have wanted to get a VRX and then upgrade to the full blown goggles later if I liked how the VRX worked and then I could like give the VRX to my mate or have it rigged up to a monitor or like, you know, use it in other ways.
[635.62] Stephen: But you still got to pair them or use audience mode.
[638.78] Stephen: So in audience mode, you get a bit of a poopy signal compared to the primary device and it's just not as useful.
[646.86] Stephen: I wouldn't be able to swap between a pair of full Walksnail goggles and the VRX.
[652.06] Stephen: Like if I was out there and wanted to just carry around my analog goggles with a module on them because they're lighter and then swap to my Walksnail goggles if I'm taking my big bag of all the junk, you can't swap between them.
[662.7] Stephen: You could do that.
[663.26] Curry: So there's always like a one to one pairing with these guys.
[666.1] Stephen: Yeah, I think so.
[667.06] Stephen: Yeah, like with DJI.
[668.58] Stephen: And that's where HD zero wins out because it's a dumb system.
[673.58] Stephen: You're just tuning into a frequency and pulling data off the air.
[676.66] Stephen: Whereas with this, there's actually a handshake and you're linking the quad to a receiver.
[683.9] Stephen: And once that link is established, you press buttons on both ends.
[687.54] Stephen: It's like Bluetooth.
[688.42] Stephen: Those two are paired together and you can listen in on that, but you don't get the retransmit data.
[694.26] Stephen: So you get the kind of crappy image that might include a bunch of garbage on the screen and it doesn't look as nice.
[701.58] Stephen: If you run that and it's not really flyable in the audience mode, the non-paired mode.
[708.18] Curry: I think it's interesting that the split in digital seems to come down to if you want HD zero, you want low latency, you probably want to be racing.
[717.1] Curry: And if you want to do freestyle and look really pretty, you want the DJI Walksnail stuff.
[721.58] Curry: Perhaps stuff will change.
[723.78] Curry: And we're still waiting, of course, to get the HD zero goggles to arrive.
[730.98] Stephen: I heard someone was investigating other options.
[735.14] Curry: Other options are available.
[737.02] Curry: Unfortunately, one thing that's not very available are Raspberry Pi's these days.
[741.58] Curry: I don't know if anybody's tried to buy one lately.
[743.46] Curry: If you don't want to pass scalper, huge amounts of money, 2023 is when it looks good for them.
[751.86] Curry: I need I need a pi zero two at this point.
[756.7] Stephen: Do any of the clone pies work or have they stuck just to the pies?
[761.1] Curry: At the moment, they're saying no, but I don't think they've been heavily tested.
[765.18] Curry: I don't know how hardware compatible the clones are.
[770.26] Curry: I mean, it's generally the same sort of chipset and stuff, but do they work exactly the same?
[774.86] Curry: Don't know. I don't think many people are willing to sort of risk putting something in the air with it and see how it works.
[781.66] Jack: It's a gamble for sure.
[782.9] Jack: It's bizarre, isn't it?
[784.42] Jack: Because I was like looking at all the different colored pies.
[788.46] Jack: There was like a blue one that was made in Brazil and the red Chinese ones.
[797.26] Jack: And am I right in thinking like all the like green pies are made in Wales, the pies that we used to be.
[806.54] Stephen: Yeah, I think demand might have outstripped the Welsh production capacity a while ago, but they originally were.
[813.58] Jack: Yeah. Yeah.
[815.22] Stephen: So you've got like orange pie, banana pie.
[817.74] Stephen: There's some rock chip based ones, right?
[821.02] Curry: That's the chief competitor and the army certainly had the banana pies.
[828.18] Curry: But no, anyway, that was that was my interesting news item this week.
[832.22] Curry: I just wondered if you guys seen that because I didn't have to.
[834.94] Curry: I apologize. I did not have time to look at the discord.
[838.54] Curry: As I've said before, I can only deal with about free social media, social networks at a time and discord.
[845.62] Stephen: I mean, I don't do Facebook, so I can't lay claim to being completed either.
[851.62] Jack: To be fair, you're amazing on the discord, Stephen.
[857.18] Stephen: You know, if I cover that, someone else can cover Facebook.
[860.42] Jack: Yeah.
[862.42] Jack: Yeah, I don't know, like other than like when like reblogging stuff and maybe you get the odds post by Richard Warwick, not much I don't think happens on our.
[877.02] Jack: You know, Facebook, I'm not too sure.
[880.98] Stephen: So should we do a quick rundown of the stories of the week, if you will.
[884.78] Stephen: So where we are now on the third of November.
[889.18] Stephen: So since we last spoke, there was a bit of wiffle and waffle.
[892.7] Stephen: One thing we didn't call out in the last show was this weird system where people were talking about using express LRS to run of all things.
[906.34] Stephen: Evil noise.
[911.34] Stephen: Yeah, so there was this concept here of running express LRS and it was going to be.
[919.06] Stephen: And big and big and and it was going to be running math link protocol too big.
[925.66] Stephen: Can't win. You guys will turn up monitor.
[930.66] Stephen: Big and.
[932.7] Jack: So we're looking at a diagram.
[936.22] Stephen: We're looking at a diagram and the diagram is showing us a bunch of links.
[942.42] Stephen: It's got arrows in each direction and it shows you can run your regular express LRS at the top.
[948.06] Stephen: So you've got your transmit to the receiver and the receiver sends back telemetry.
[953.9] Stephen: And then you take exactly the same hardware and flash a different version of the express LRS firmware to it.
[961.02] Stephen: And you can hook the ground station up via USB to a laptop.
[965.14] Stephen: So if you've got a USB port in your TX module, instead of putting it in your open TX radio, you plug the USB into the port you use for flashing and you plug the other end into a laptop.
[977.34] Stephen: And then on the the air side, you take your RX and TX and just feed them into a UART and then you can run any serial protocol over this.
[987.78] Stephen: So you could run math link and things like this.
[990.14] Stephen: And if you're running a two point four gig system and you've got like five hundred Hertz capable hardware, you can get a good board rate.
[996.02] Stephen: You basically you're running modem data over the telemetry and control link.
[1003.66] Stephen: So you probably want to be using two four.
[1006.14] Stephen: You could run the nine hundred stuff, but it's going to be lower bit rate.
[1009.9] Stephen: But you can get kind of I think they said nineteen two hundred board is perfectly achievable and higher borders is probably possible too.
[1018.14] Stephen: So you can get like basic math link control of a UAV and you could do it at, you know, ten twenty k range.
[1026.3] Curry: So is this diagram suggesting you have two receivers, one for controlling, one for math link, or is it just saying here's one way to do it?
[1034.46] Curry: Otherwise, you can use math link all the way for control as well.
[1038.38] Stephen: Oh, yeah, I guess you could run math link all the way for control if you were you had autonomous takeoff and you didn't need to kind of manually take off on land.
[1047.86] Stephen: You could absolutely just use the single one.
[1050.1] Stephen: Yeah, they're just saying the hardware that they've got for Express LRS is absolutely repurposeable as a modem device instead of a regular receiver.
[1060.3] Curry: You can put a control signal through math link as well, I believe.
[1064.74] Stephen: Yeah, I mean, that is kind of a control protocol, but it's just higher latency.
[1069.34] Stephen: It's more like, hey, hey, go over there rather than left a bit right a bit up a bit down a bit.
[1074.9] Jack: Make me laugh, wouldn't plain old silk radio modules be much do not know what a silk radio is.
[1081.7] Stephen: It's a fair bit cheaper than dragon length, though.
[1083.66] Curry: And he's talking about the four, three, three telemetry radios, which is what you'd normally have.
[1088.26] Curry: So you'd have basically four, three, three to one of your MSP ports or something on your flight controller, which would normally be cheap.
[1099.86] Curry: It's the silk board.
[1103.02] Curry: Not not too expensive, about 20 quid either side.
[1108.14] Stephen: Yeah, so this is under 20 quid on the quad side or the wing side and probably about 20 quid on the ground side.
[1116.58] Stephen: They've got some good economies of scale.
[1118.62] Stephen: So the happy model module that you'd be using on the ground side, you can get one of those for a hair over 20 quid.
[1126.26] Stephen: F R Sky do one that's even cheaper, I believe, on about 15 quid.
[1130.54] Stephen: And then on the wing or quad, you'd want something around the 15, 17 pound mark.
[1138.3] Stephen: So it's competitive, I think.
[1139.86] Stephen: I don't know if you're on four, three, three, you're going to get longer range, but obviously you're going to be bandwidth compromised.
[1147.82] Stephen: I'm assuming you'd be able to run slightly higher board rates if you're on a 2.4 system and you're running Laura on it.
[1155.86] Curry: I mean, usually the reason you're running this sort of telemetry radio, as you might call it,
[1161.9] Curry: is because you've got it plugged into your computer and you're looking at like a live map about what's happening and where your next way point is.
[1169.34] Curry: And you might want to drag something over and say fly there instead.
[1172.46] Stephen: You're uploading entire missions at the time, things like that.
[1175.3] Curry: Yeah, so it's not really, you know, where latency is usually a problem because you're like, go over there, come on, hurry up, go over there, press the button again.
[1185.5] Curry: Sort of thing.
[1187.26] Curry: Yeah, it's cool to have, I think.
[1190.54] Stephen: And it could work on four, three, three hardware as well.
[1193.38] Stephen: Express LRS actually started on four, three, three hardware.
[1196.42] Stephen: That was that was the origin of it.
[1198.82] Stephen: So, yeah, that was one.
[1200.18] Stephen: And then we had some pretty crazy footage, which I'm not sure about showing, but like drone attacks by the Ukrainians on battleships in Crimea, which was kind of insane to watch.
[1213.22] Stephen: Sea and air vehicles, basically overcoming battleship defenses by weight of numbers and just sending explosives into battleships.
[1222.38] Stephen: That was pretty intense.
[1225.9] Stephen: It might stay away from the war stuff here because it's very much not a violent space podcast, but it did make for some interesting viewing.
[1233.7] Curry: We're about the love and peace, but it's all about love and peace.
[1236.86] Stephen: And then we had a weird little bug, which has surfaced and people have drawn a bit more attention to recently.
[1242.62] Stephen: I caught this when Chris Rosser actually highlighted it and posted about this and he posted the fact that there's not the same talk response in Beel Heli 32 as there is in, well, ideal conditions or in other firmwares too.
[1262.14] Stephen: And this is a funky little thing that's come up recently and some hay has been made over this recently with Chris coming out with a video and let's just enhance, enhance, enhance, enhance and get just certain size smaller anyway.
[1275.22] Stephen: So what you want is as you increase RPM, you want a small, a smooth talk curve, you want talk to like go up and follow a consistent pattern.
[1283.3] Stephen: But as you can see with Beel Heli 32, it jumps around like a drunk man weaving down an alley.
[1290.06] Stephen: What you were talking about your Beel Heli deep dives.
[1296.54] Jack: Yeah, I was like, oh, I am 32.
[1298.42] Jack: It just feels smoother and I don't know why and whatever.
[1301.18] Stephen: It's probably just me like confirmation bias and then I was like, oh, well, that's nice to know it's not confirmation bias and they're actually not confirmation bias, but they're not confirmation bias.
[1313.46] Stephen: It actually just is smoother and that's why I feel smoother.
[1316.7] Stephen: So that's what was going on when you're in Beel Heli 32 and you crank up the RPM, it kind of rushes to certain RPMs faster than other RPMs.
[1327.5] Stephen: It doesn't have a smooth increase of talk, whereas if you look at AM 32 that the talk response follows a much smoother plot and he tried a whole bunch of scenarios.
[1336.7] Stephen: Try different ESCs.
[1337.86] Stephen: You see the Holy Bro Techo 32 puts in a good showing and it's clearly aiming for a certain curve, but it can't quite hit it.
[1344.7] Stephen: It's like just going into a low power state or something that's making it judder.
[1350.38] Stephen: So that's interesting.
[1352.3] Stephen: And I'm not I don't want to be down on Beel Heli 32, but they need to like develop this.
[1360.1] Stephen: They need to actually put some time into it.
[1363.1] Stephen: People are paying money for the product here and it'd be nice to know that money was going into making it better.
[1368.5] Stephen: Whereas it just looks like the money is going into, you know, someone's little nest egg.
[1374.3] Jack: I wonder I wonder how QCSEs fare up on this.
[1380.8] Jack: Yeah, I wonder like Q32s.
[1384.4] Curry: That would be very interesting to see.
[1386.3] Curry: Maybe this could do a little demo.
[1388.8] Curry: A very interesting thing to recognize because if I had a slightly different response from one quarter to the other, I would kind of think this is all about like the overall bill because it's not very often I'd have sort of similar hardware running.
[1402.5] Curry: It would all be different and I'd just be like, this is better than that one and stuff.
[1405.7] Curry: So to recognize this, I suppose it's pretty easy if you build sort of let's build the same sort of quads and put different ESC firmwares on and see how it responds would be a decent one.
[1416.3] Curry: I've never even thought about it.
[1418.3] Stephen: Apparently, it's being influenced by the low power, low RPM power protection.
[1422.1] Stephen: Like some of this, it's trying to save your FETs from blowing, but it does it in a very on-off, like non-smooth way.
[1430.3] Stephen: It just goes protection mode, not protection mode, protection mode, not protection mode, instead of slowly easing you out of protection mode as you go up.
[1439.7] Stephen: So you get these kind of sense that maybe there should be a peak around here, but it's just crushed the peak, except it hasn't uniformly crushed it or smoothly crushed it.
[1449.7] Stephen: It's just kind of gone, oops, limit, and then no, it's okay, oops, limit, and smooshed it down again.
[1455.9] Stephen: It's like an audio stuff really like overly aggressive noise gate or something and people are just like losing fragments of words out of the middle of sentences, if you see what I mean.
[1466.0] Stephen: Another stuff, interesting, interesting.
[1470.84] Jack: Yeah, I mean, like showing my age now, but do you remember the TBS Power Cube or whatever it was with like the, the, you could build up and up and up.
[1486.24] Stephen: I think they're still selling them.
[1489.34] Jack: Yeah, and like, I think one of their power rails runs through like the brass standoffs or something, but Mr. Steel said to Trappy, like, oh, I want like, you know, lower like idle speeds and stuff.
[1506.24] Jack: And that's really the only time that anything got implemented.
[1510.94] Jack: You remember like BL Heli, it was, you know, it was quite a fast startup rather than like a, you've got things like Smooth Start and stuff now and, you know, nothing's really been sort of like done with that since.
[1527.54] Jack: Like, I'm wondering if it like, you know, it's progress just stopped.
[1532.04] Stephen: Where's the feedback, you know, other than this ticket was kind of unique because I really don't see anyone at all actually providing feedback
[1540.64] Stephen: to BL Heli.
[1544.54] Stephen: I've got Bluejay doing their thing and AM32 kind of doing their thing.
[1548.24] Stephen: AM32 is kind of weird because people use it a lot in crawlers and crawlers are obsessed with like smooth running motors at low RPMs.
[1556.34] Stephen: So I do wonder if they got a lot of their attention to that detail through the crawler community and not quads at all.
[1563.04] Stephen: Crawler guys really don't like it when they get these like jerky motions.
[1566.54] Stephen: They want that slow application of force.
[1569.24] Stephen: And if the wheel sticks, then they don't want it to just suddenly like burn rubber.
[1573.64] Stephen: They want it to slowly just increase the torque until it creeps its way out of the obstacle.
[1579.84] Curry: I guess that's the difference because for most people flying quads, there's not much consideration about what the ESC is doing other than like, what do I set it to?
[1590.04] Curry: D-Shot 600, does it fly?
[1592.14] Curry: Yes.
[1592.94] Curry: And unless you get into the sort of minutiae of tuning and thinking, oh, this throttle response is a bit weird.
[1598.34] Curry: What's going on there?
[1600.64] Curry: I feel I feel it's unlikely to come up unless something is more obviously wrong when it's something quite subtle and small and it's just like this doesn't feel quite as good as my other quad does.
[1609.64] Curry: Why is that?
[1610.64] Curry: It's really hard to pin down and you've really got to make the effort to hunt that sort of stuff down, haven't you?
[1615.64] Curry: It's not it's not something you could like, listen to this, it's not like, you know, something horrendous is happening.
[1622.24] Stephen: It's kind of a nice sign of software maturity that we are getting to the point where people are looking for those those smaller gains now.
[1628.84] Stephen: It's not the kind of broken, not broken.
[1630.94] Stephen: It's like, let's just make it a little bit nicer.
[1634.44] Stephen: I'm going to feel like there's a bit of maturity there, which is nice.
[1638.24] Frank: This episode was recorded in front of a live online audience, downloaded and edited to make sense when it's played audio only.
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[1658.84] Frank: Find out more at patreon.com forward slash let's drone out.
[1663.74] Stephen: I had a question in the chat, which I feel like an answer and I'm sorry, I'm sorry for tailspin for being a big nerd and being sciency.
[1672.54] Stephen: I apologize, but I'm just going to ask this one science related.
[1675.44] Jack: Curry's a default scumbag as well.
[1679.74] Stephen: The tyranny of the default.
[1681.24] Stephen: That's what they call it.
[1683.34] Curry: Yeah, default apart from the rates.
[1685.14] Curry: That's it.
[1685.94] Curry: It's like, does it fly?
[1687.24] Curry: Great.
[1687.84] Curry: Let's do it.
[1688.64] Curry: I haven't got time for this tuning, lark.
[1691.44] Stephen: So I'll see link negotiation because I happen to have like put my or in here.
[1699.34] Stephen: So I feel I should talk about it.
[1701.84] Stephen: I'll see link negotiation handshake bug.
[1704.04] Stephen: So this was the thing where crossfire was they tried to move from crossfire to crossfire V2 to CRSF V3.
[1712.14] Stephen: Better, faster, more precision, super deluxe.
[1716.94] Stephen: Yeah, great.
[1717.94] Stephen: Except crossfire V3 implemented some auto negotiation stuff and that auto negotiation stuff backfired a wee bit because it turned out that things kind of got stuck in an auto negotiation loop without settling on either
[1730.94] Stephen: state, which meant that you are flying along and your receiver was busy not sending data to the flight controller, but trying to decide with the flight controller what speed it should communicate at.
[1742.44] Stephen: And you really didn't want this to be happening while you were flying, but it tended to happen a couple of releases back.
[1750.74] Stephen: It happened largely because there wasn't a sufficient number of test pilots running the CRSF V3 stuff before it got thrown out to the wider community.
[1759.24] Stephen: So it has got looked at now.
[1761.04] Stephen: It has been studied.
[1762.14] Stephen: People have been flying at a while.
[1764.44] Stephen: And if you move up to the latest crossfire firmware, then it should negotiate correctly.
[1770.74] Stephen: That's not to say it's a perfect state.
[1774.04] Stephen: I think really people want the negotiation to be something that users have to actually enable because a lot of the time for GPS and stuff you negotiate to make it easier to set up.
[1785.74] Stephen: Well, your crossfire wasn't broken to start with.
[1788.24] Stephen: So why are you negotiating anything, right?
[1790.54] Stephen: It should just fall to the working state.
[1793.64] Stephen: And if you want to tweak and optimize and noodle at it, that should probably be something you actively enable.
[1799.64] Stephen: But a lot of users seem to have seen success with it that way.
[1803.64] Stephen: So for the most part, I think if you're running it now, you run B to flight four, four nightlies, or you hit the four, four RCs that are about to drop.
[1813.34] Stephen: You should have no issues with that.
[1815.14] Stephen: But you do want to be careful on older releases because there definitely was some problem where you enable CRSF V3 to get some other benefits, but you've got auto negotiation and auto negotiation just caused everything to blow up on you.
[1829.44] Stephen: End of story.
[1830.54] Stephen: Enough nerding.
[1831.94] Jack: No, no, it's cool.
[1833.84] Jack: It's cool.
[1834.24] Jack: I did wonder about crossfire V3.
[1841.22] Jack: You know, I think we had enough trouble with crossfire V2 at one point.
[1847.62] Stephen: You know, it just felt like there was a select group of pilots who knew exactly what they were doing and they got it to work in their use case.
[1855.12] Stephen: But when it went out to the wider crowd, it became clear that hadn't really been tested enough.
[1862.42] Jack: I don't.
[1862.92] Jack: Yeah, I know.
[1864.42] Jack: Do you think that's only going to get worse from Express LRS being even more popular now?
[1870.72] Stephen: I think Express LRS are absolutely aware of those protocols and what they're trying to do is enter into a better dialogue with TBS so that they can pile some of their communities experience into TBS's products as well.
[1886.82] Stephen: And not just with TBS, they obviously they're testing in secret because they're a private company and then they have to kind of announce public.
[1896.92] Stephen: It's done, right?
[1897.82] Stephen: Everyone go use this.
[1899.52] Stephen: Whereas with Express LRS, the testing is in public so they can take that public testing and say, look, yeah, these people ended up in trees or had flyaways or whatever because don't work and they can provide that feedback to TBS.
[1915.02] Stephen: I don't think there's a question of right and wrong here.
[1918.92] Stephen: It's just, you know, people should knowledge share and help each other out.
[1923.62] Curry: It's quite nice to Express LRS isn't a commercial entity because they have no problem sort of sharing their experiences with commercial entities.
[1930.82] Curry: So this work, this didn't work for us.
[1934.42] Curry: Go with it what you like.
[1937.12] Jack: Carl C's got another question for you.
[1939.12] Curry: Is ELRS running at full strength or is it still settling in?
[1943.62] Curry: Ask Carl C.
[1946.42] Stephen: With regards to what?
[1947.62] Stephen: I mean, this board rate negotiation thing, there's room.
[1951.52] Stephen: So TBS runs 400 K, 420 K by default.
[1955.52] Stephen: If you run KISS, it does it down to 400 K.
[1958.72] Stephen: CRS-FV3 negotiates up to two megabits, two megaboard, right?
[1964.52] Stephen: But the ELRS kit has the ability to run up to like 5.25 megaboard.
[1970.12] Stephen: So it can kind of go a bit faster than some of the legacy crossfire receivers just got newer hardware.
[1975.52] Stephen: So it's able to do that.
[1976.92] Stephen: So I think there's the opportunity to run a little bit farther.
[1982.42] Stephen: It's in an incremental gains now for the most part.
[1985.32] Stephen: It's good.
[1986.32] Stephen: It works pretty well for PWM use cases.
[1989.42] Stephen: I've got six channel PWM receiver.
[1993.42] Stephen: I've got a wing that I'm going to be putting a PWM receiver into, which is interesting.
[2000.12] Stephen: So yeah, I think it's looking fairly mature.
[2003.92] Stephen: How it integrates stuff like this airport stuff where you're running a modem is still kind of a dangling thread that needs to be answered,
[2012.32] Stephen: because people have been asking for MavLink since forever.
[2018.02] Stephen: It's not done, done, but it feels like most of the low-hanging fruit is grabbed at this point.
[2026.72] Curry: It is interesting that MavLink comes up just given that I don't want to go on and on about a single point,
[2035.82] Curry: but I'll mention this bit because they didn't want to do S-Bus because S-Bus is like done technology.
[2041.42] Curry: But one might say that MavLink is a bit old and funny-duddy.
[2046.02] Curry: It's a bit wordy.
[2047.52] Curry: It's a very, I think, over-engineered protocol, which is just like here's loads of stuff.
[2053.02] Curry: It's almost too much to fit into the idea of low-latency, high-speed.
[2058.82] Curry: Does it have an XML schema?
[2061.62] Curry: Possibly, yeah.
[2062.62] Curry: It's definitely got a schema of some sort, doesn't it?
[2065.02] Curry: It's of that generation, yeah.
[2066.52] Curry: It's a great big document, I think, yeah.
[2069.82] Jack: So it's interesting.
[2071.82] Jack: Has Trappie done that on purpose, 420?
[2075.72] Jack: Yeah.
[2076.32] Stephen: 420k.
[2077.92] Jack: It could all be.
[2079.62] Stephen: Kiss doesn't run at 420k.
[2081.42] Stephen: Kiss is 400k because it's a good boy.
[2087.02] Jack: I thought you'd enjoy that little.
[2088.72] Jack: That's what I was running through my mind when you said it.
[2091.72] Stephen: TBS, the only vendor to include weed grinders in their repertoire, I mean.
[2097.62] Stephen: Hey, man.
[2098.12] Stephen: Ever sense of humour?
[2098.92] Stephen: Kudos to them.
[2100.22] Jack: Yeah, I just think it's probably, yeah.
[2104.32] Jack: We've made this.
[2105.02] Jack: We're running at 400k.
[2106.82] Jack: We're like, can you do 420?
[2109.22] Jack: You know.
[2113.02] Stephen: Why not?
[2113.52] Stephen: Hey, Clive, how are you doing?
[2115.12] Stephen: If you can fit a pun in, do it.
[2118.12] Curry: Very bad weather this week.
[2120.22] Curry: So instead of flying because it wasn't able to, I found an interesting
[2124.82] Curry: video which I'd like to share with you guys who here has been fascinated
[2129.22] Curry: by ornithopters because I know I have and I saw this one this week.
[2132.82] Curry: This is actually from a couple of months old and it's just so good.
[2136.82] Curry: This actually properly looks like a bird.
[2139.22] Curry: If you do a close-up of its wings, which is going to show you, it has
[2142.72] Curry: this kind of unique folding wing thing, which is very much like a proper
[2147.52] Curry: falcon just flying.
[2148.72] Stephen: Oh, wow.
[2149.92] Stephen: It feels like it's grabbing can of air.
[2153.92] Curry: Yeah, it shows this rapid turning test.
[2156.82] Curry: This guy's written like a paper on it, which I couldn't even access
[2160.32] Curry: because you have to be like, are you a member of the university?
[2163.92] Curry: It just looks absolutely special.
[2166.02] Curry: And I've always been fascinated by these guys, but the skills of
[2173.12] Curry: building one seems very, very well, very awkward.
[2178.92] Stephen: Very responsive.
[2180.72] Stephen: A lot of them, the old ones, they just be robotically hammering
[2184.32] Curry: their wings up and down, just hammering their wings and just moving
[2187.82] Curry: their tail around.
[2188.42] Curry: But this thing looks like it's a proper bird.
[2190.82] Stephen: It looks like every stroke of the wings is considered and is responding
[2195.52] Stephen: to the flight dynamics.
[2196.72] Stephen: Like it's grabbing the air and moving through it.
[2200.22] Jack: Oh, and it tucks one side to sink.
[2202.92] Jack: Did you notice?
[2203.72] Jack: That's what you mean by tuck.
[2208.12] Curry: You can just probably put it in a glide and stuff.
[2213.13] Jack: Oh, mate.
[2214.33] Jack: Look at that.
[2214.73] Jack: That's some batwack man right there.
[2217.73] Jack: Good.
[2218.03] Jack: All you need is a bird poop dispenser, paint this single color and
[2223.43] Jack: you can just do some terrorizing.
[2225.83] Jack: Pull a tepex on people from 200 feet.
[2229.03] Curry: I've always like said, oh, I'm going to build one of these and
[2232.33] Curry: then I tried looking for documentation.
[2234.03] Curry: I was like, whoa, this is really complicated.
[2237.23] Curry: It's like, I have to say, if you've ever heard one, it sounds like
[2242.33] Curry: something's going to die because it's literally this circular motion
[2247.73] Curry: converted into flapping wings.
[2249.83] Curry: But that's got some proper intelligence behind it.
[2252.33] Jack: Open dog, you know, like, oh, yeah, James Brutton or something.
[2259.83] Curry: He tried to build one.
[2261.53] Curry: He didn't get, he didn't have that much success.
[2263.83] Curry: He managed to get the thing flapping and throwing it into the ground.
[2266.23] Stephen: It doesn't do dynamic gate, does it?
[2268.03] Stephen: Have you spelled or no?
[2269.33] Stephen: It does static gate.
[2271.33] Jack: Oh, hang on.
[2275.73] Curry: Let me type it in the comment for you.
[2278.93] Stephen: Yeah, cheers, right?
[2281.13] Stephen: Yes.
[2281.53] Stephen: Oh, it's Bruton, not Burton.
[2284.23] Stephen: I just rephrase that in my head.
[2286.03] Stephen: I noticed with his walking robots, the one thing that they didn't
[2290.13] Stephen: do was they have like a statically stable gate, but they don't do
[2295.13] Stephen: like a dynamically stable gate, which means it's like a drunk person
[2299.83] Stephen: walking where you move one leg and then you make sure you haven't
[2303.03] Stephen: fallen over and then you move the other leg and make sure you
[2305.23] Stephen: haven't fallen over, whereas what real people do when they move
[2310.23] Stephen: is they kind of preserve momentum while you're walking, right?
[2314.93] Stephen: And you're falling forward continually.
[2316.83] Stephen: Basically, you're never stable.
[2318.33] Stephen: If you stop walking, you would fall over.
[2324.06] Jack: Sorry.
[2326.46] Jack: I mean, if he can't do it and he's a genius, he's good at making
[2331.46] Curry: but I do wonder about making certain things.
[2334.56] Curry: He's really good at inverse kinetics, which I saw his video and
[2339.26] Curry: I was like, man, I haven't done this much trigonometry since O-levels.
[2344.56] Curry: This is so hard.
[2345.56] Stephen: I can't look back around this.
[2347.26] Stephen: That's a horrible word for something that is really simple.
[2350.06] Stephen: It's like, how do you get from point A to point B with an arm?
[2353.96] Curry: Exactly, but he hasn't really done any flying stuff before.
[2357.46] Curry: So maybe it's not too soon, but he went with a very simple approach
[2362.76] Curry: I put motor on, I flat wings back and forward.
[2365.66] Curry: He didn't really think about how wings work in lift and things like that.
[2371.96] Curry: I felt he was just more about getting the wings flapping.
[2375.06] Curry: How much power can we put this thing?
[2376.76] Curry: How can we balance this out and let me just throw it and see what happens
[2380.76] Curry: as opposed to trying to sort of work out a more sort of dynamic way of
[2384.46] Curry: doing things.
[2385.96] Jack: It kind of makes me wish that Tom Stanton had some sort of, you know,
[2390.86] Jack: would do something wrong.
[2391.96] Jack: So he had to do some public, you know, service work and he could come
[2397.46] Jack: teach us idiots about stuff.
[2399.76] Jack: I'd love for Tom Stanton to come on and do some pro bono work, you know,
[2404.46] Jack: community service.
[2406.16] Jack: Be like, now explain to these guys trigonometry.
[2411.46] Jack: Didn't he ever go autophotors?
[2413.76] Stephen: So yeah, I'd love for him to come on.
[2417.16] Stephen: You can like see the different levels of robotics in those clips
[2420.26] Stephen: though, from that basic light flap as fast as you can on a thopter to
[2424.96] Stephen: one where it's considering the impact of each movement and it's just
[2428.86] Stephen: doing the movements it needs to do.
[2431.06] Stephen: On one of them, it's like just smash at the air as hard as we can to
[2434.56] Stephen: try and stay afloat and the other it's like, right, we're considering
[2438.96] Stephen: each of these movements and we're thinking about the way it impacts
[2441.66] Stephen: our trajectory every time.
[2443.86] Curry: Yeah, it's almost to the fact that like dumbing it down.
[2448.06] Curry: It's like, here's a plane and you've got two ailerons.
[2450.86] Curry: Normally, you'd have the single control which would do the reverse on
[2455.56] Curry: each, but actually, what if we consider each wing individually and
[2459.36] Curry: have a control for each one specially and that's kind of the level
[2462.86] Curry: of stuff they've done with wings.
[2466.26] Jack: You could buy an ornithopter, but it was controlled by your mobile phone.
[2474.46] Jack: It was awful.
[2476.46] Curry: Yeah, and you can buy proper commercial ones, but they are pretty
[2480.06] Curry: expensive and they are so niche that there's not much on it.
[2483.36] Curry: There's, if you look on YouTube, you'll find this like one Japanese
[2486.26] Curry: guy who seems to be in charge of the whole world doing just staggering
[2490.86] Curry: things and things that look like birds and fly that way and he just
[2495.36] Curry: keeps cranking them out, but this isn't the same as like some, you
[2499.56] Curry: know, RTF ornithopter from Banggood 500 quid.
[2503.46] Curry: This just doesn't happen.
[2504.96] Stephen: I think it's like the difference between lacemaking and track suits.
[2509.26] Curry: Yeah, I feel this is, maybe I'm interested in this because I'm always
[2513.86] Curry: looking at a way around like going to the park and flying something
[2517.56] Curry: without somebody like, oh, you can't fly that here.
[2519.76] Curry: It's like, it's not me.
[2520.56] Curry: It's just a bird.
[2521.36] Curry: I'm not doing nothing.
[2522.66] Curry: Did you see the EDF powered seagulls?
[2526.36] Curry: Yeah, that sounds like somebody might like, why are those seagulls
[2529.36] Curry: jet powered?
[2529.96] Curry: I'm confused.
[2531.16] Jack: Why are those seagulls like screaming?
[2535.86] Curry: I can only fly for three minutes and then dive to the ground.
[2543.36] Stephen: They were impressively fast.
[2544.76] Stephen: It looked like a seagull and then you're like, wait a minute, that's
[2547.96] Stephen: going way too fast, way too fast.
[2551.46] Curry: I have seen, I kind of wanted to get, there's been these like phone
[2558.66] Curry: planes that looks sort of like eagles for a while from places like
[2562.46] Curry: Banggood and AliExpress and I always wanted to fly them.
[2565.36] Curry: If, where I fly, I'm often like buzz to buy sort of buzzes and
[2569.46] Curry: things checking me out and I met this guy walking along once and
[2574.06] Curry: he said, oh, occasionally we get golden eagles come over from like
[2578.56] Curry: the Isle of Wight here and that's where you have to watch out for
[2581.56] Curry: your dog because I'll just swoop down and get it.
[2583.76] Curry: I was like, oh, if I was flying a model eagle around there, I wonder
[2587.56] Curry: if this other eagle would come and swipe me out of the sky.
[2589.86] Curry: Wouldn't that be interesting?
[2591.06] Curry: And then I thought that would be actually quite bad because then
[2595.56] Curry: I'd just be in bits and pieces and not be happy.
[2600.99] Curry: There you go.
[2601.69] Curry: These are the things I think of.
[2605.39] Stephen: That sounds terrifying.
[2606.89] Stephen: I was going to dig out some FrSky news, but I'm just struggling to find a post.
[2615.69] Stephen: So we've got a pro and con on FrSky.
[2620.09] Curry: If your mic's turned off or it's so sensitive that you being a human
[2624.79] Curry: has a way for it, it's not working.
[2626.19] Stephen: Yeah, that's how it's working.
[2627.69] Stephen: Alright, so we've got a couple of FrSky items.
[2630.29] Stephen: One, FrSky have released a radio to the muted fanfare of this might
[2636.19] Stephen: work with Express RS if anyone can be bothered to help us.
[2641.09] Stephen: They released a post which pretty much went down like a damp fart
[2647.09] Stephen: saying that we've got a radio out and it could work with Express
[2650.79] Stephen: LRS.
[2651.29] Stephen: So yeah, great.
[2652.69] Stephen: And it does EthOS and yeah, it's all great in its color and its
[2656.09] Stephen: touchscreens and baseballs.
[2657.79] Stephen: And then it turns out they hadn't actually told any of the Express
[2661.79] Stephen: LRS developers about this or warned them that they were going to
[2665.29] Stephen: announce this or engage them in any way to make sure it would
[2668.09] Stephen: actually work.
[2669.19] Stephen: So the comment thread was just like the most senior Express LRS
[2674.09] Stephen: devs piling in going, what are you chatting about mate?
[2678.09] Stephen: First one then the other and then the other which wasn't a great
[2682.09] Stephen: look.
[2684.49] Stephen: I think it probably will work eventually, but we might want to
[2687.19] Stephen: wait on the hook for EdgeTX to support it and just basically
[2691.29] Stephen: take the nice FrSky hardware with a shiny touchscreen and decent
[2695.09] Stephen: chassis and put totally different software on it.
[2698.79] Stephen: So that was a misstep in the line of great missteps, but they've
[2703.69] Stephen: also released something quite interesting in their support of
[2711.1] Stephen: HD0, which is that FrSky are now apparently making a bunch of
[2717.3] Stephen: HD0 kit, not just the radio.
[2722.3] Stephen: I think we might have mentioned that the radio is going to come
[2724.5] Stephen: with an HD0 screen at the top so that you can do FPV on it, but
[2731.4] Stephen: they're selling apparently standalone FrSky HD0 monitors.
[2737.0] Stephen: So if you want to get in on that for a bit of wing action or bolt
[2741.1] Stephen: it to whatever radio you want to bolt it to, you can now get the
[2745.3] Stephen: standalone HD0 monitor.
[2748.9] Stephen: So that's neat and that's from FrSky.
[2752.0] Jack: Pint show me this.
[2753.2] Jack: Yeah.
[2754.8] Stephen: Yeah.
[2756.5] Jack: It's got an HDMI out as well, isn't it?
[2760.4] Stephen: It does.
[2760.9] Stephen: Yes, we can.
[2762.5] Stephen: Well, you maybe can't see it there.
[2764.5] Stephen: Oh, but yeah, if we look at the monitor here, you can see you've
[2767.8] Stephen: got an XT60 for power, you've got a DC power and you've also got
[2771.6] Stephen: an HDMI output jack here as well.
[2774.1] Stephen: So at a push, if you wanted to use it most of the time as a screen
[2778.5] Stephen: and then, you know, stand very close to it and not move your head
[2782.3] Stephen: too fast so as to not pull the HDMI plug out, you could use this
[2786.3] Stephen: as a goggle device as well.
[2791.5] Stephen: Interesting.
[2793.2] Curry: It's kind of weird.
[2794.4] Curry: Is this FrSky just grasping at straws and there's not many
[2798.2] Curry: straws around so they're trying to do what they can because it's
[2801.6] Curry: kind of like they seem to have like, oh, don't worry about all
[2805.7] Curry: those quad people.
[2806.6] Curry: Let's try and get ourselves into the US circuit and get them.
[2812.8] Curry: But it's not like the sort of traditional model clubs of America
[2817.9] Curry: are really doing much in FPV generally.
[2820.3] Curry: This is normally your line of sight stuff, isn't it?
[2825.3] Curry: Maybe they're just trying to, you know, throw stuff and see
[2828.0] Curry: what sticks and trying to jump.
[2829.7] Stephen: Apparently boomers are notoriously profligate with their money
[2833.3] Stephen: and throwing it around.
[2834.7] Stephen: So FrSky has decided that's what they're going to get.
[2837.2] Stephen: You've got a bunch of boomers to give them that money.
[2840.2] Jack: Well, you know, glasses wearers, you know, or people who fly
[2845.9] Jack: line of sight mainly, but want to partake in the odds, you
[2851.4] Jack: know, like FPV, like look over and glance at it.
[2856.6] Stephen: Maybe if you're doing a multi-rotor with like a giant sort
[2859.7] Stephen: of 20 kilo multi-rotor like that could be a useful upgrade
[2865.0] Stephen: to move away from analog.
[2866.6] Stephen: Feels like they're establishing a different identity for themselves.
[2870.6] Stephen: Like we're watching FrSky right now completely metamorphose
[2875.7] Stephen: into a different company.
[2879.78] Curry: Interesting.
[2884.92] Stephen: Who knows what they're going to look like after they've done
[2886.92] Stephen: this and and who knows how long their target audience is going
[2890.02] Stephen: to be around to enjoy their products.
[2891.62] Stephen: But yeah, they're trying to basically take on spectrum and all
[2895.72] Stephen: those guys.
[2897.12] Jack: Yeah.
[2898.82] Jack: In the Rhone?
[2900.82] Curry: Yeah, if you look at, as Caroline said, flying wing clubs
[2903.92] Curry: only recognize TX as a spectrum.
[2905.92] Curry: It's pretty much, it's like there's this engraved radio as
[2910.02] Curry: far as I understand it in the club.
[2911.62] Curry: This is what we fly here.
[2912.62] Curry: We fly these radios.
[2913.52] Curry: So if someone new comes along, they'll simply say, oh,
[2916.12] Curry: yeah, you're welcome to join here.
[2917.82] Curry: We'll teach you how to fly by one of these radios.
[2919.92] Curry: We'll plug you in our trainer port and we'll sort you out.
[2922.22] Curry: So if FrSky managed to get themselves in these clubs where
[2927.02] Curry: spending lots of money on radios is considered fairly normal,
[2931.22] Curry: then that gives them a whole new market.
[2934.82] Curry: Because I think they've lost us.
[2937.32] Stephen: Well, it's a race to the bottom, isn't it?
[2939.82] Stephen: Were FrSky ever going to compete with Jumper and RadioMaster?
[2943.42] Stephen: I don't think they were ever interested in that competition
[2945.72] Stephen: of producing hundred pound, two hundred pound radios.
[2949.42] Stephen: They didn't want to be involved in that game.
[2952.02] Jack: Yeah, I mean the video that you sent me to watch where, you
[2958.92] Jack: know, like the sales representative, you could just kind
[2963.22] Jack: of, it just kind of crawled all about, you know, it was just
[2968.02] Jack: like real sort of, you know, key of, you know, we're selling
[2973.52] Jack: and we're just trying to offer a different option, you know,
[2976.92] Jack: and it's like, oh, come off it.
[2978.62] Jack: You just, you know, you're just done with us and you want
[2982.52] Jack: to lock down, you know, what you're selling and make sure
[2988.42] Jack: you're making money off the.
[2991.12] Stephen: Yeah, they had a market that loved them.
[2995.02] Stephen: They had a market that loved them and they weren't willing
[2997.82] Stephen: to actually like work with their customer base to go the direction
[3001.22] Stephen: the customers wanted them to do.
[3003.12] Stephen: They wanted to just move on something more lucrative.
[3005.42] Stephen: And as a company, I can absolutely understand the motivation
[3008.42] Stephen: for that, but as an individual, I don't really want anything
[3012.02] Stephen: to do with a business that behaves like that.
[3016.92] Jack: Do you reckon it's because Bruce upset them and you know,
[3022.02] Jack: they were done with us.
[3023.32] Stephen: He was on point in that video.
[3024.82] Stephen: I don't know if you watched it all the way through, but he was
[3026.72] Stephen: calling them out on like how they used to be called frisky
[3029.22] Stephen: and things like this and or all the clone parts that they
[3032.72] Stephen: were producing themselves.
[3034.02] Stephen: And yeah, he was especially effective.
[3036.22] Stephen: I wouldn't have liked to be on the other end of his questions.
[3039.02] Jack: Yeah, but I'm more talking about like, you know, he was sent
[3044.62] Jack: to like, you know, he sent stuff to review and then he kind
[3049.22] Jack: of, you know, he sort of, you know, killed off on on way
[3054.92] Jack: and everything else.
[3056.12] Jack: And I just think, you know, was he a bit, bit, you know,
[3062.22] Jack: I don't know, I came to heads with them.
[3063.92] Jack: And then as soon as that happened, they didn't like him.
[3066.92] Jack: And I'm wondering if they kind of went, you know, we're done
[3071.42] Jack: with him and we're done with, you know, the quad community along
[3076.92] Jack: with him.
[3078.82] Stephen: You know, I think there's definitely an attitude of constant
[3081.42] Stephen: improvement where kind of for the money that we spend we do
[3086.42] Stephen: demand a lot for the multi-rotor quad community just constantly
[3090.92] Stephen: saying no needs to be better needs to be faster.
[3093.72] Stephen: We know what the chips can do make the chips run at their
[3097.12] Stephen: full potential and that's the constant like why are you
[3099.62] Stephen: leaving this performance on the table?
[3101.32] Stephen: Why are you doing that?
[3102.42] Stephen: Whereas I think the wing community is like, oh wow, this
[3105.12] Stephen: is amazing.
[3105.82] Stephen: I'm like 500 meters away and I'm still flying.
[3108.82] Stephen: Wow.
[3109.92] Stephen: That's, you know, that's much easier goal to meet than someone
[3112.82] Stephen: who's like, this is this is annoying.
[3114.32] Stephen: I I've got an observable jitter in my control signal.
[3117.72] Stephen: I demand that you fix this within the week.
[3120.92] Stephen: You know, it's a lot.
[3122.92] Stephen: It's a lot tougher to work with someone like that.
[3125.52] Jack: Yeah, Caroline did make you laugh.
[3128.32] Jack: His local ex-mayor thinks he's an absolute gem.
[3131.42] Jack: Yeah, it is true.
[3132.32] Jack: Like, you know, I'm called, you know, I'm a fan of Uncle Bruce,
[3136.72] Jack: but you know, I think it's because we are, you know, because
[3140.62] Jack: we're new to the table, you know, roughly of like FPV.
[3146.62] Jack: We've come here and we're looking at it with fresh eyes
[3149.92] Jack: and like as a new sort of like new hobby and we want more
[3154.62] Jack: and we're aware that technology has a lot to offer and you
[3160.12] Jack: know, we've you know, we've they've come along and stuff
[3165.62] Jack: like, you know, we're like we've got new batteries technology
[3169.92] Jack: and we're in, you know, inspired and eager with planes.
[3175.62] Stephen: I get the sense that the building is like very intricate and
[3178.92] Stephen: careful, but it stops at the plane itself.
[3181.62] Stephen: Whereas with a lot of quad multi-rotor users there, the building
[3186.22] Stephen: includes caring about the PCBs that go into flight control,
[3190.12] Stephen: caring about the PCBs that go into your RX into the radio.
[3194.22] Stephen: People are making custom radios like I follow a bunch of threads
[3197.22] Stephen: where people are building their own handsets.
[3199.32] Stephen: Sometimes they scavenge boards out of old radios, but sometimes
[3202.32] Stephen: they're building handsets entirely from scratch.
[3204.72] Stephen: They take an Arduino, an OLED, a bunch of gimbals from from
[3209.02] Stephen: jumper or something and and put an Express LRS module that
[3212.42] Stephen: they've soldered together themselves in there and they're
[3214.32] Stephen: building the radio.
[3215.62] Stephen: So that concept of making your model isn't just blowing
[3219.62] Stephen: together the airframe and attaching motors.
[3222.42] Stephen: It goes deeper.
[3223.22] Stephen: It goes into not how can we make a better airframe, but how
[3226.52] Stephen: can we make a better solution from my fingers to the end,
[3231.62] Stephen: you know, end-to-end.
[3233.12] Stephen: I've never heard of people doing that to be fair, but I would
[3239.82] Stephen: say that handset thread, Express LRS discord, look at the
[3242.92] Stephen: weird things that people 3D print.
[3245.12] Curry: Although everybody seems to be on sort of doing a lot more
[3250.02] Curry: and caring a lot more about quads at the moment.
[3253.22] Curry: If you just look back at the start of FPV and it was all
[3256.02] Curry: fixed-wing.
[3256.62] Curry: It was very much picking carefully components and because
[3261.02] Curry: people were flying on 4-3-3 links.
[3263.12] Curry: It was like, well, watch out.
[3265.42] Curry: What's the ground noise look like?
[3267.92] Curry: And we have to put this there and this there and people
[3270.02] Curry: getting amazing distances.
[3272.32] Curry: I haven't seen any of this stuff.
[3273.62] Curry: This is weird.
[3275.12] Jack: Holy crap, man.
[3276.72] Stephen: This is actually everything.
[3279.92] Stephen: This is a thing.
[3280.82] Stephen: Yeah, I'm just scrolling through the last couple of weeks
[3284.12] Stephen: stuff here.
[3284.72] Curry: It's like a board from one thing and then gimbals and
[3291.42] Curry: switches from another and then a 3D printed body.
[3294.32] Curry: It's kind of like we're just making the shell we want.
[3298.82] Jack: There are more.
[3301.22] Jack: How deep does it go?
[3302.82] Jack: Like I want to see balls to the wall.
[3306.32] Stephen: So that's an X-light replacement board including
[3309.22] Stephen: the pots for an X-light that goes in there.
[3313.52] Curry: That is minimalist radio there.
[3316.02] Stephen: So that's an X-light and straight up slaps Express LRS
[3319.62] Stephen: in and it slaps it in by replacing.
[3324.22] Stephen: Also the pod wires.
[3327.02] Stephen: I don't know.
[3327.72] Stephen: This isn't the nice one.
[3328.92] Stephen: I'm sure pirate would complain.
[3330.42] Stephen: There's a guy here called...
[3333.12] Stephen: That's more explain the register.
[3341.72] Jack: Have they moved the resistor?
[3343.22] Jack: I don't know.
[3343.82] Jack: I don't know what the 28.
[3346.92] Stephen: E28 is the actual board with the SX 1280 built-in.
[3354.42] Stephen: I think the Varun board that has everything resistor
[3358.22] Stephen: position.
[3359.82] Curry: See, I'm very much with Richard on this one.
[3362.12] Curry: It's like, okay, there's a lot of really really good
[3365.22] Curry: radios which don't cost much.
[3368.72] Curry: The obsessional nature of making your own radio seems
[3372.52] Curry: too obsessional even for me who speaks of someone who's
[3375.82] Curry: quite obsessed with things.
[3378.02] Curry: It's weird and interesting.
[3382.16] Stephen: I find the actual full-on custom ones, but I'll just leave
[3385.16] Stephen: this up there for a second.
[3386.66] Stephen: This is truly insane.
[3392.21] Stephen: People go to extreme lengths just for custom gimbals
[3395.31] Stephen: and stuff.
[3397.21] Stephen: I've put some custom gimbals in but not really tried
[3400.21] Stephen: to ram them.
[3400.71] Stephen: I've seen people do anodized aluminium stuff.
[3408.03] Stephen: How about one of them?
[3409.83] Stephen: Oh, the JCB.
[3412.23] Jack: Try.
[3414.43] Curry: I don't know.
[3414.93] Curry: It feels like we're on spinal tap saying, well, this
[3417.13] Curry: goes up to 11.
[3418.83] Jack: They're lurky.
[3421.13] Stephen: So you can't get the gimbals you want for your cheap
[3424.33] Stephen: jumper radio.
[3425.33] Stephen: Well, why not print a mold out of anodized aluminium
[3428.93] Stephen: and sit it in there so you can fit the gimbals in.
[3432.53] Stephen: All you need to do is pay someone to like, sinter a
[3435.63] Stephen: bunch of metal for you.
[3437.43] Curry: Yeah, that's definitely more expensive than buying
[3441.33] Curry: several radios.
[3443.33] Stephen: Yeah, and that's for like a hundred quid radio.
[3449.07] Stephen: Okay, now one.
[3450.67] Curry: People have got the wrong priorities.
[3453.07] Curry: Well, yeah, but you could have bought an autofopter
[3454.97] Stephen: for this instead.
[3456.67] Stephen: Well, yeah, good.
[3458.17] Stephen: Oh, this is a good one.
[3460.27] Stephen: Check this like, and they found that pistol grip
[3464.77] Stephen: with an Arduino.
[3466.77] Jack: No, that's that's pretty tame compared to like, you
[3471.37] Jack: know, getting a bunch of sand and mold, you know, like
[3475.27] Jack: a furnace and molding your own two gimbals.
[3480.47] Jack: It looks pretty cool though.
[3483.97] Jack: Digging the oil yourself.
[3486.67] Curry: A comment I received from somebody about how you could
[3489.97] Curry: never find like a car radio, the old pistol grip and
[3493.47] Curry: steering that like ran open TX or Express LRS.
[3498.57] Curry: It just doesn't happen.
[3502.27] Stephen: Yeah, I'm kidding.
[3503.07] Curry: Okay, why are these gimbals like sideman?
[3505.27] Curry: Does he hold his radio like this?
[3507.87] Stephen: Yeah, yeah.
[3508.57] Stephen: So this is someone it comes down to ergonomics.
[3511.47] Stephen: So a lot of the people that build these have real annoyances
[3515.97] Stephen: about the ergonomics of radios.
[3518.07] Stephen: So what someone's done here is they've taken a jumper
[3520.27] Stephen: tealight and they've decided that ergonomically what
[3523.87] Stephen: they want is the throttle to actually track the joints
[3528.27] Stephen: of their thumb when they're holding their fingers up
[3530.47] Stephen: like this.
[3531.47] Stephen: They want up to be diagonal because that feels more
[3534.97] Stephen: correct when they hold the radio with their elbows out.
[3539.07] Stephen: So they've built a radio where they can stick their elbows
[3542.17] Stephen: out and up now becomes towards the center of the radio
[3545.97] Stephen: bit.
[3546.77] Curry: I don't buy this.
[3548.17] Curry: There's something wrong with this guy and it looks like
[3550.77] Curry: he's created a radio that I really like the shape of random
[3554.07] Curry: rocks.
[3554.57] Curry: And this is what I want for my radio notice.
[3556.77] Curry: This is a real handy ergonomics.
[3559.87] Curry: He's just this is how I like to hold my radio.
[3565.57] Stephen: And then he just like gravel.
[3567.97] Stephen: There is no right.
[3568.87] Stephen: There is only opinion.
[3570.87] Jack: I do I like to warn you that maybe some people do have
[3574.87] Jack: a disability and yeah have no choice like like Ben Heck,
[3579.97] Jack: you know, where he's making the one-hand controllers.
[3583.07] Curry: Well, that's absolutely fine.
[3584.47] Curry: But that that that does not look like that's going to be
[3587.27] Curry: holdable for anybody that has this is some pretty hardcore
[3591.97] Curry: hands.
[3593.17] Stephen: That's cute as far as I'm concerned.
[3594.87] Stephen: They've taken by the smallest possible chassis with the
[3597.27] Stephen: biggest possible gimbals and gone.
[3599.27] Stephen: We can make this work.
[3601.17] Stephen: This is hilarious.
[3604.77] Curry: I've seen some one-handed flies actually just using standard
[3607.47] Curry: radios basically holding it sideways.
[3609.77] Curry: Yeah, it's like this one stick like this, which looks pretty
[3613.57] Curry: incredible.
[3614.77] Stephen: I do love it all looks good until you realize that the
[3617.37] Stephen: power button isn't quite straight.
[3619.77] Curry: Everything else looks perfect.
[3620.97] Curry: It's off-center as well.
[3622.07] Stephen: Why isn't it just made it a little bit straighter?
[3624.47] Curry: I think that's where the battery goes into the eye at all.
[3627.47] Curry: I know don't can't get behind that one.
[3632.67] Jack: Right, so that is all we've got time for.
[3637.47] Jack: If you're part of the Patreon, which our lovely Patreons
[3642.67] Jack: keep us keep this show ad free.
[3647.97] Jack: There's no mid-rolls.
[3649.17] Jack: There's no hopefully there's no adverts at all and you could
[3653.97] Jack: just sit here enjoy this for an hour.
[3657.27] Jack: Laugh at us.
[3660.37] Jack: You know, the lovely people at Patreon down there don't know.
[3664.17] Jack: So if you're listening to this on iTunes the editor beeps
[3668.37] Jack: out everything, tidies it up, gets rid of incriminating
[3672.97] Jack: evidence, etc.
[3675.27] Jack: And you get to listen to a really clean.
[3680.47] Jack: I think we found Steven's little fetish.
[3685.57] Curry: He built himself a rotating stand to show it off.
[3688.77] Stephen: That's the sadder me.
[3689.97] Stephen: This is someone who's even more obsessed with cheap yellow
[3692.37] Stephen: radios than I am.
[3693.47] Jack: Oh my god.
[3694.27] Jack: We need to discuss this on a bonus podcast.
[3696.37] Jack: Anyway, you've been listening to Let Drone Out and you've
[3701.67] Jack: been joined by everyone's favorite curry kitten.
[3704.47] Jack: Goodbye.
[3705.67] Jack: Every man's favorite DIY yourself a radio fetish.
[3711.87] Jack: Steven.
[3712.27] Jack: Cheers.
[3712.97] Jack: Bye.
[3713.97] Jack: Do you like it because it's yellow and it has a yellow
[3716.37] Jack: eyelid?
[3717.37] Stephen: I do like yellow.
[3718.57] Stephen: I'd also like to say this podcast brought to you by very vanilla
[3723.87] Stephen: stout, a delicious stout.
[3726.97] Jack: No worries.
[3728.07] Jack: I won't be here next week because I've got the whole wedding
[3731.97] Jack: thing.
[3733.07] Jack: So I let you know if I've upset everyone with my best man's
[3737.27] Jack: speech.
[3739.37] Jack: You know, all right.
[3740.27] Stephen: If you're in jail, just call us after the podcast.
[3743.37] Jack: Yep.
[3744.87] Jack: I killed sound and go follow the link in the chat, which
[3750.57] Jack: of Warwick's got it or go to bright until I fly on YouTube.
[3755.97] Jack: If you want to watch my video that lovely Cole has edited.
[3761.47] Jack: Thank you guys.
[3763.37] Jack: Thanks for everyone.
[3765.87] Jack: Good night.
[3767.07] Curry: Telemetry lost.