=== Let's Drone Out — Episode 493 ===
Title: LDO 493 - Slightly shorter shafts
Recorded: 2025-02-06
Hosts: Andrew "Frank" Hyams, Stephen "Belrik" Howell, Jack "Brightontillifly" Nash, Wayne "CurryKitten" Andrews
Guest(s): (none recorded)
Total audience: 947
Platforms: YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DXLsFdQPU8); SoundCloud (http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/2029489836-letsdroneout-ldo-493-slightly-shorter.mp3)
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[0.0] Jack: Hello, and you're listening to Let's Drone Out, a special thank you to our lovely patrons
[6.28] Jack: that help donate so that we can pay the editor to remove the swear words and silly things
[11.36] Jack: we say.
[13.0] Jack: Massive thank you to…
[14.4] Jack: Carlos Campos!
[16.2] Jack: Art Faulkner!
[17.88] Stephen: Sam Dahmer.
[19.68] Stephen: On with the show.
[20.68] Stephen: Hello and welcome to episode 493 of Let's Drone Out.
[58.41] Stephen: For Thursday the 8th, wait, Thursday the 6th of February, 2025, joining us this week
[68.41] Stephen: is our overlord and master Frank.
[71.81] Frank: Hello.
[73.41] Stephen: The man himself, Bright Until I Fly Jack.
[76.33] Stephen: Hello, how, why are you doing curry last?
[79.57] Stephen: And he's going last because he's everyone's favourite and it makes up.
[84.21] Stephen: We have the one and only, everyone's favourite, Curry Kitten.
[88.13] Curry: Hello, it's because you're the supporting act, so you always introduce us first and
[91.97] Curry: then it's a big build up to the main event.
[94.13] Curry: You look big up there and everything, yeah.
[96.81] Stephen: And who are you?
[98.33] Stephen: And I am Stephen.
[99.33] Stephen: Welcome.
[100.33] Stephen: Welcome.
[101.33] Stephen: Hello everyone to another episode of Let's Drone Out.
[103.33] Frank: Well, there's a lot of chat going on in the chat, in the actual…
[109.21] Stephen: A chat in the chat, you say?
[110.21] Frank: I know.
[111.21] Frank: It's unusual.
[112.21] Frank: It was in the word chat before I meant to, never mind.
[114.61] Stephen: The word isn't chat, the word is bird apparently.
[117.41] Frank: Yes, bird is the word in the chat.
[121.77] Frank: Yeah, because it was the bird 2025 event at the weekend, the tiny Woop International event,
[132.45] Frank: Birmingham International Race Day.
[134.29] Stephen: I saw a clip of footage where it looked like there was actually like viewable Woop footage
[140.77] Stephen: without tons of multiparting, that's quite impressive, what happened there?
[144.49] Stephen: Yeah, apparently…
[145.49] Stephen: Large punches.
[146.49] Frank: Yeah, even though it's a big metal box, it sounds like all the racers had decent video,
[151.77] Frank: which is impressive.
[153.93] Frank: I think the streaming receiver might not have been in quite as good a position, so on the
[161.29] Frank: stream you might not have seen quite as good a video as they were seeing racing around,
[166.01] Frank: but still, seems like everyone had a good time.
[168.93] Frank: We've got quite a few people in the chat saying that they were at least following it.
[174.77] Frank: Caroline Tyler was there, and she's saying…
[177.25] Jack: Congrats on a thousand.
[179.25] Frank: Mm-hmm, yeah.
[180.25] Frank: Well done.
[181.25] Frank: And she's saying she'll have to work on the mega-edit of the bird 2025 Woop competition,
[189.93] Frank: because there is also the Vlog competition, which they're putting on at the moment,
[197.33] Frank: which they will be coming on LDO in a few weeks' time to present the results of that.
[207.41] Stephen: So what's the Vlog competition?
[209.81] Stephen: Is that still flying, or is it in fact a vlogging competition, like they used to have poetry
[214.13] Stephen: in the Olympics?
[215.13] Frank: Yeah.
[216.33] Frank: I believe it's making a vlog, a video, and sending that in.
[224.33] Frank: I'm just trying to part the details now.
[226.89] Curry: Kind of sounds like best video of the day sort of thing.
[231.77] Curry: What is going to show the event at its best?
[236.77] Curry: What is the most interesting video you can make out of that?
[240.21] Stephen: The most diabolical Woop stuck in someone's hair and them doing completely crazy.
[245.53] Jack: I enjoyed a bit of whooping on Monday, believe it or not.
[250.53] Curry: Ooh, where did you win?
[253.53] Jack: With a little bit in my room, and basically a buddy-pot round who flies RC planes mainly.
[263.05] Jack: And I was like, have a go.
[266.21] Jack: And yeah, in the end, we went to a field, and he was flying acro mode, and we were having
[273.41] Jack: a good old time.
[275.41] Jack: Lovely.
[276.41] Jack: For a change, I plugged it in, and she worked for a change.
[281.41] Stephen: Oh, maybe a new year, new luck, Jack.
[284.41] Jack: Is that because that's nice of you, and it works already?
[289.41] Jack: No, I killed the flight controller in that, but most of it's your thing.
[297.41] Jack: And look, look how excited I was.
[299.41] Jack: I brought propellers.
[300.41] Curry: Solo.
[301.41] Jack: Wow.
[302.41] Jack: Yeah.
[303.41] Curry: What are they?
[305.41] Jack: Yeah.
[306.41] Stephen: The 30 mil or 40 mil?
[308.41] Jack: Yeah, the 31, yeah.
[310.41] Jack: Yeah, for a 65.
[312.41] Jack: I bought double the amount because by the time Cole gets his props, he probably would
[319.41] Jack: have seen me first, and I can give him half of mine.
[324.41] Jack: Because he's got everything for a Woop, except props.
[328.41] Jack: And he can't buy any, and he can't get any.
[331.41] Jack: It's a nightmare.
[333.41] Stephen: That's one of the best things about Woop is that you're more likely to destroy a motor
[338.41] Stephen: than a propeller, pretty much.
[340.41] Stephen: Yes.
[341.41] Stephen: The props seem to just be eternal.
[343.41] Jack: Yeah, well, I don't know about you, but I do suffer from them pigging off.
[349.41] Stephen: Oh, yeah.
[350.41] Stephen: Well, that's the motor for usually not the props.
[353.41] Stephen: That's like time to buy a new motor.
[355.41] Stephen: This one's worn down.
[357.41] Curry: I find it slightly hard to deal with props that you friction fit because it just sounds
[362.41] Curry: like that's going to go wrong at some point.
[364.41] Stephen: Well, it normally goes too right in my experience.
[367.41] Stephen: They're great.
[368.41] Stephen: And then you're like, oh, I'll try out this other set of props.
[371.41] Stephen: And you get three of them off.
[372.41] Stephen: And then the fourth one, the fourth one ain't moving.
[376.41] Jack: No.
[378.75] Jack: Get the old blowtorch out, melt the f***er off.
[382.75] Jack: Yeah.
[383.75] Stephen: And we know that, but that's going to use the frame, don't we?
[387.75] Curry: The props are so tight.
[388.75] Curry: I might have to drill them out because I actually do have screw holes to go in them.
[392.75] Curry: It's a bit bigger.
[393.75] Curry: It's like 85.
[394.75] Curry: But I can't physically get the props off without injuring my fingers to the point
[400.75] Curry: that my finger went numb for like two weeks.
[403.75] Curry: So I was having to put too much pressure on getting these on and off.
[406.75] Curry: It's just like, just drill them out.
[408.75] Stephen: I used to take the tape on there to stop the bell spinning.
[412.75] Stephen: And then I could really grab onto that.
[417.75] Jack: I think Houghton made a little prop tool thing that was like a little mini pry bar.
[425.75] Stephen: There's been loads of those, but they tend to be made of much the same grade of metal
[430.75] Stephen: that Coca-Cola can is made of.
[433.75] Stephen: And they bend rather more easily than everything else.
[436.75] Curry: And all screws on every quad ever.
[439.75] Curry: I'll just unscrew this.
[440.75] Curry: Oh, that's weird.
[442.75] Curry: I've just driven a complete circular hole through this screw
[445.75] Curry: without any pressure whatsoever.
[450.75] Stephen: Yeah.
[451.75] Stephen: A share of problems.
[453.75] Stephen: Was it Marsha McFly who always posts pictures of rewinding
[458.75] Stephen: motors just with the tiniest coils?
[464.75] Curry: I spoke about him the other day.
[469.45] Curry: Some people seem to really enjoy that.
[472.45] Stephen: Yeah.
[473.45] Stephen: In another century, they probably would have collected insects
[476.45] Stephen: and pinned them onto boards with very tiny pins.
[479.45] Stephen: But now, in their technological age, they're rewinding tiny, tiny motors instead.
[485.45] Curry: I have to say, tiny, tiny motors thing.
[488.45] Curry: I think it was a potassium YouTube video I saw.
[493.45] Curry: I don't know if anybody...
[494.45] Curry: It was in the last week or so about the most tiny of drones.
[500.45] Curry: And they were basically replicating insects.
[503.45] Curry: And they are down to like 0.35 of a gram.
[507.45] Curry: That would be special.
[509.45] Stephen: Can they pollinate both?
[512.45] Stephen: Is it like a navigable drone or is it the equivalent of a paper airplane
[516.45] Stephen: where it's got a power source and it just kind of...
[518.45] Curry: No, it's navigable.
[519.45] Curry: They can't hold the battery themselves.
[521.45] Curry: So there's these little wires hanging off it.
[524.45] Curry: But the engineering is incredible.
[527.45] Stephen: It's a control line insect.
[528.45] Stephen: Is that what you're saying?
[529.45] Curry: Yes.
[530.45] Curry: And they reckon they can actually roll it faster than any drone
[536.46] Curry: because it's so small.
[537.46] Curry: They can roll it 20 times a second as an example.
[544.46] Curry: Because I thought, oh, that's cool.
[546.46] Curry: I wonder if we could make those.
[547.46] Curry: And then they started talking about making pretend muscles
[552.46] Curry: out of these chemicals and stuff.
[554.46] Curry: And I was like, no, we can't.
[555.46] Curry: We can't at all.
[558.46] Curry: We'll wait till Banggood have a ready to fly model.
[561.46] Stephen: Yeah, we'll wait till Banggood has the protein synthesis kit
[564.46] Stephen: and then you can fabricate your own muscles
[566.46] Stephen: and let them cure overnight.
[568.46] Jack: Yeah.
[570.46] Jack: There's the ifly till the...
[573.46] Jack: Enhance.
[576.46] Jack: What has he been?
[577.46] Jack: Enhance.
[580.46] Jack: Yes.
[581.46] Jack: Caroline posted this.
[584.46] Jack: It's an ifly defender.
[587.46] Stephen: For our audio listeners, Jack has produced an image
[591.46] Stephen: of what looks like a piston and a bike tool
[594.46] Stephen: had a really, really raunchy night together.
[597.46] Curry: It looks like sort of trendy wine corkscrew or something.
[603.46] Curry: Yeah.
[604.46] Frank: My mind went halfway between a tattoo pen and a sewing machine.
[611.46] Stephen: Yeah.
[614.45] Stephen: It reminds me of a bicycle pump that's been made by someone
[619.45] Stephen: who had never seen a bicycle pump before
[621.45] Stephen: and just had it described to them.
[623.45] Stephen: That's probably what they came up with.
[627.45] Jack: How much is 99 Hong Kong dollars?
[633.45] Jack: Because that sounds like a lot.
[635.45] Curry: It used to be about 10 Hong Kong dollars per pound,
[638.45] Curry: but that was like 30 years ago when I knew the exchange rate.
[641.45] Stephen: I remember going over to Hong Kong.
[643.45] Stephen: It's about the same.
[644.45] Curry: Large multiple.
[645.45] Jack: About the same.
[646.45] Jack: Yeah.
[647.45] Jack: Nice.
[648.45] Jack: It's not bad for a tenner?
[649.45] Jack: Yeah.
[650.45] Jack: Worth a shot.
[651.45] Jack: So, Frank, did we talk about going out flying?
[655.45] Frank: I don't think we have.
[657.45] Frank: Me and Jack went flying a couple of weeks ago.
[661.45] Frank: But we had guests on the whole world.
[663.45] Frank: Yes.
[664.45] Frank: Yeah.
[665.45] Frank: Well, the thing was, I looked out the window,
[667.45] Frank: it was lovely blue skies.
[669.45] Frank: And then Jack drove a little bit inland,
[672.45] Frank: and I was just driving down the motorway
[676.45] Frank: and just saw sort of this bank of cloud ahead.
[679.45] Frank: I was like, that's quite a big ominous blanket of cloud appearing.
[686.45] Frank: But Jack said it was blue skies, so it would be fine.
[689.45] Frank: So, I carried on driving, and then eventually had to call Jack,
[693.45] Frank: be like, where's the car park?
[695.45] Frank: It's a car park I've been to many times before,
[697.45] Frank: but I could not find it.
[699.45] Frank: I can't see anything.
[701.45] Frank: I can see the roads about a meter in front of me.
[704.45] Frank: I don't know where I'm going.
[705.45] Frank: It's a perfect day for FPV.
[707.45] Frank: Off we go.
[709.45] Stephen: It was like flying in Silent Hill.
[714.45] Jack: Yeah.
[715.45] Jack: Could you get above it, though,
[717.45] Jack: and have the amazing view of what the fog looked like?
[720.45] Curry: Yeah.
[721.45] Curry: No, the ground just disappeared.
[724.45] Curry: But the last time I tried to do that,
[726.45] Frank: I got instant condensation on my camera lens,
[729.45] Stephen: and I thought, oh, just get above it.
[731.45] Stephen: But it just started beading on the lens almost immediately,
[734.45] Stephen: which was quite a problem.
[736.45] Stephen: Yeah, there was definitely that as an issue.
[739.45] Stephen: But yeah, I mean, even if you were fairly close in,
[742.45] Frank: I mean, because we had these few little dead trees
[745.45] Frank: that we fly around quite a bit,
[747.45] Frank: but you could be flying around those
[749.45] Frank: in just sort of a slightly denser bit of cloud would go by,
[753.45] Frank: and all of a sudden, you can't see even less of the fields
[758.45] Frank: than you could two seconds ago.
[760.45] Frank: Oh, we did some detective work after this one, didn't we, Jack?
[764.45] Frank: Yeah, that brings...
[766.45] Stephen: Are we ready to move on to that?
[768.45] Stephen: Yeah.
[769.45] Stephen: Yeah, let's talk about how interesting this is.
[771.45] Jack: I mean, it's interesting.
[773.45] Jack: Are we ready to move on to that?
[775.45] Stephen: Yeah, let's talk about how interesting detective work,
[778.45] Stephen: because Jack was saying, oh, when I punch out,
[780.45] Stephen: it goes a bit weird.
[782.45] Stephen: It goes a bit weird, and there's many ways
[785.45] Stephen: that things can go a bit weird.
[788.45] Stephen: But he had black box locks,
[790.45] Stephen: because he's got this board with a massive microSD card,
[794.45] Stephen: so he can just log everything forever.
[796.45] Stephen: And so he had loads of locks, and he had his GoPro footage,
[799.45] Stephen: and we were able to line up the arming with the GoPro footage,
[802.45] Stephen: and we could see, indeed, did a little wibble
[804.45] Stephen: when it got to about 80% throttle, didn't it, Jack?
[807.45] Stephen: Yeah.
[809.45] Jack: You were instrumental.
[812.45] Jack: You were Sherlock Holmes.
[815.45] Stephen: We could look at the tomorrow traces and be like,
[817.45] Stephen: that doesn't look right.
[818.45] Stephen: One of these motors says it's 100%,
[820.45] Stephen: and if that was the case, you should be on a roller coaster,
[824.45] Stephen: flipping around, you know, death flips, right?
[827.45] Stephen: But you weren't.
[829.79] Stephen: You were kind of losing power, which is a bit odd.
[832.79] Stephen: And then so when we look at the motor output,
[835.79] Stephen: then I got Jack to put up the IMD shot telemetry
[839.79] Stephen: with the RPM reading,
[841.79] Stephen: and we could see that that motor was trying to go to 100%,
[844.79] Stephen: but in actuality, the RPM reading was a flat, big, fat zero.
[849.79] Stephen: And any time you went over, like, 80%,
[852.79] Stephen: instead of going up further, the motor would just cut out.
[856.79] Stephen: And not in a bursty sort of chug-a-chug-a way,
[859.79] Stephen: it would just flat out stop, like it just gummed up
[862.79] Stephen: and stopped moving.
[864.79] Stephen: And then it would slowly get up to kind of 20%, 30%
[867.79] Stephen: and happily let them put along again.
[869.79] Stephen: And so it was like front left motor, wasn't it, Jack?
[872.79] Stephen: And do you want to pick it up from here
[874.79] Stephen: and explain what was going on with the front left?
[878.79] Stephen: What happened?
[879.79] Jack: I can't thank you enough.
[883.79] Stephen: Because we thought there might be mechanical damage,
[885.79] Stephen: and that was sort of what happened,
[887.79] Stephen: but not the whole picture, right?
[889.79] Jack: I am 32.
[891.79] Jack: Tom, if you're listening to this, I appreciate you.
[895.79] Jack: You are a lovely man.
[898.79] Jack: Mistakes were made.
[905.07] Jack: But you inadvertently f*** me in the ass.
[909.07] Jack: That's the only way I can put it.
[912.07] Jack: As a friendly, you totally tried to help me,
[915.07] Jack: and it just didn't work.
[917.07] Jack: And Paul Almac, thank you for helping, trying to help me.
[925.07] Jack: Sorry I couldn't get any black box logs,
[928.07] Jack: but it wasn't until Shasmitt sent me a flight stack
[935.07] Jack: that actually had some onboard flash memory,
[938.07] Jack: because the SD card didn't work in the Maytech board
[945.07] Jack: that you gave me, Stephen, because I couldn't get it out,
[950.07] Jack: and I think I slightly damaged it,
[952.07] Jack: but good news, I fixed it.
[954.07] Jack: I bent a little bit of metal,
[956.07] Jack: and it was the detector bit where you pushed the SD card in.
[962.07] Stephen: But it's not inside, or not inside.
[965.07] Jack: Yeah, that detector bit was grounding on the outside,
[971.07] Jack: so I bent that on the shield, and that...
[974.07] Jack: Yeah, so it was saying that there was no SD card when there was.
[980.07] Jack: But I bought some second-hand EMAX Eco motors,
[989.07] Jack: and they are 2207 1700 kV motors,
[998.07] Jack: and I bought them second-hand.
[1000.07] Jack: I can't remember who from or where from.
[1002.07] Jack: It was either eBay or Facebook Marketplace.
[1005.07] Jack: They were great.
[1006.07] Jack: One of them had a bit of a damage bell,
[1008.07] Jack: and it was a bit chuggy, a bit grindy.
[1012.07] Jack: It was just really out of balance.
[1014.07] Jack: Tom, my lovely friend, was so lovely.
[1018.07] Jack: He was like, I've got the same motors.
[1020.07] Jack: I don't use them anymore.
[1022.07] Jack: I'll give you a bell.
[1024.07] Jack: I'll give you a bell because you're my bell-end friend.
[1029.07] Jack: The problem is with that was he gave me a bell that was 2306.
[1039.07] Jack: So it's one mil wider and one mil shorter.
[1045.07] Jack: And I was in a bit of a rush, I think,
[1050.07] Jack: when I was putting this lovely gifted bell on this motor stator.
[1059.07] Jack: And what I failed to realize was the shaft is a little bit too short.
[1067.07] Jack: But lucky for me, or unlucky for my situation,
[1072.07] Jack: the screw was long enough to still screw in to the slightly short shaft.
[1079.07] Jack: Now, if you were to fit this properly
[1084.07] Jack: instead of just unscrewing your motor, flipping it over a little bit
[1090.07] Jack: and then just banging this in, I probably would have noticed that.
[1095.07] Jack: But I didn't.
[1097.07] Jack: And E-Max, in their infinite wisdom, thought,
[1100.07] Jack: do you know what, we're going to use a screw
[1103.07] Jack: with the same head width as our motor shaft because we're geniuses.
[1111.07] Jack: And so the only thing that stops this bell from pulling through the motor
[1119.07] Jack: is A, the correct length of shaft,
[1124.07] Jack: and B, this tiny thin washer that you can barely see.
[1130.07] Jack: And when said Dickhead, i.e. me,
[1134.07] Jack: screwed it in with the short shaft and screwed it in nice and tight,
[1139.07] Jack: it conicaled that precious little washer
[1143.07] Jack: so it resembles what I can only describe as a little metal traffic cone
[1149.07] Jack: for the borrower.
[1151.07] Jack: So that when I went full throttle,
[1154.07] Jack: this oversized in width that's moved the magnets one mil further away
[1162.07] Jack: from the stator that they're nice enough and short enough
[1166.07] Jack: so that when the bell initially pulls itself out through spinning of the prop
[1172.07] Jack: and then no longer connects with the stator anymore,
[1176.07] Jack: I completely lose power on that motor.
[1180.48] Stephen: And ladies and gentlemen, that's how you trap a dyslexic.
[1184.48] Stephen: Yes.
[1186.48] Stephen: Yeah.
[1188.48] Jack: Yeah.
[1190.48] Jack: I'm sorry, I am 32.
[1192.48] Jack: I'm sorry, Skystars.
[1194.48] Jack: I didn't ruin your brilliant ESC.
[1197.48] Jack: I am 32.
[1199.48] Jack: I am the moron.
[1201.48] Jack: Tom, thank you.
[1204.48] Jack: One of us needs to learn how to read and it's probably me.
[1210.48] Jack: And yeah, that's about it really.
[1213.48] Jack: So still screwed with a slightly shorter shaft.
[1218.48] Jack: Yeah.
[1220.48] Stephen: Yeah.
[1222.48] Jack: Oh God, Peter's going to get hold of that now and he's going to make a song about it.
[1231.48] Jack: I'm a bell end and I screw in with a slightly shorter shaft.
[1237.48] Jack: There you go.
[1238.48] Jack: Have fun with that.
[1244.02] Jack: Gonna get hold of that.
[1246.02] Jack: Gonna get hold of that bell end.
[1250.02] Jack: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[1252.02] Jack: Gonna have fun with that.
[1254.02] Jack: Slightly shorter shaft.
[1256.02] Jack: Oh God.
[1260.74] Jack: Oh God.
[1261.74] Jack: Oh God.
[1262.74] Jack: Oh God.
[1268.35] Jack: Still screwed with slightly shorter shaft.
[1272.35] Jack: So in the end, I bought some Eco 2 motors.
[1278.6] Frank: Hooray.
[1280.6] Frank: Yeah.
[1281.6] Jack: Painful.
[1283.6] Jack: No wonder you never go out and fly.
[1287.6] Jack: Thanks to our spin.
[1288.6] Stephen: Well it is tricky when there's so many bits that look virtually identical but are crucially different.
[1293.6] Jack: I might take up this new hobby where I buy dildos from Bad Dragon and just fuck myself in the asshole.
[1300.6] Jack: It's less steps.
[1302.6] Jack: It really is.
[1304.6] Jack: You get it wrong sooner or later.
[1307.6] Curry: Weirdly, the bit that I'm unclear of in that sentence is who is Bad Dragon?
[1313.6] Stephen: Why don't E-MAX, and in fact all manufacturers, color code the different sizes of bells rather than make them all look the same with edgy black-on-gray writing that's really hard to read.
[1326.6] Curry: They do normally have the size on it, don't they?
[1331.6] Stephen: Well they have the size on it but evidently not.
[1333.6] Frank: That requires reading though.
[1336.6] Frank: That's where we're going wrong.
[1338.6] Jack: Really small.
[1340.6] Frank: It has to be primary colors, nice bright things.
[1348.6] Stephen: At least you didn't trash anything else.
[1351.6] Stephen: The one bit that was replaced, which you thought was screwed up anyway, you had to...
[1358.6] Frank: The fact that you play as much as you did is a testament to how good modern flight control software is.
[1367.6] Stephen: It was fine until you took it over 80% and the thing just checked out and went home.
[1372.6] Stephen: It was all good until you did that.
[1376.6] Jack: I do fully take my hat off to you and I don't think any of us give you enough credit at how dedicated you are to the detail, Steven.
[1397.74] Jack: You were very methodical.
[1401.74] Jack: It's just a friendship.
[1403.74] Stephen: You found the smoking gun.
[1406.74] Stephen: If anyone wants to do this in future, all I had was a beta flight, the black box tool.
[1412.74] Stephen: I just had the motor output and added the ERPM data for each channel next to it.
[1417.74] Stephen: Then you had a big, really obvious one of these is not like the other situation where you could see one motor wasn't actually spinning.
[1424.74] Stephen: That's how to do it.
[1429.09] Stephen: It's not immediately obvious.
[1431.09] Stephen: I just thought, well, one of these clearly isn't 100% or it'd be death rolling.
[1435.09] Stephen: That's what happens if you actually get one motor hitting 100% and the rest aren't.
[1441.09] Jack: Alka, you were correct if you're listening to this.
[1445.09] Jack: I don't know why you'd punish yourself with developing and listening to this at the same time, but you were right.
[1455.09] Jack: It is a hardware issue.
[1458.09] Frank: Unless you consider Jack to be the software.
[1465.09] Jack: Yeah.
[1468.09] Jack: I think it's like soft brain.
[1472.09] Jack: The wetware issue.
[1474.09] Stephen: It's a victory, right?
[1476.09] Stephen: You found the smoking gun.
[1478.09] Stephen: Now you can move on and less paper cuts going forward.
[1483.09] Jack: I'd like to pride myself on fixing and repairing stuff, not making it worse to the point where no one's got a clue what's going on.
[1495.09] Jack: But you'll be proud of me.
[1499.09] Jack: I've done a little bit of our due copter.
[1502.09] Stephen: Oh, wow.
[1504.09] Jack: What's the game plan?
[1506.09] Stephen: It's the spreadsheet thing.
[1508.09] Stephen: Yeah, navigated the spreadsheet.
[1511.09] Jack: It really is.
[1513.09] Jack: I've never like you go to I mean, GUI is a very loose term for mission planner because it is not guided.
[1526.09] Jack: It's not a user interface.
[1529.09] Jack: It is if you're a fax machine.
[1533.09] Jack: I've never.
[1538.09] Jack: Oh, my word.
[1540.09] Jack: I've never.
[1542.09] Curry: I don't think it's crazy in your goggles, because that's all it seemed to say to me ever.
[1551.09] Jack: I had the joy of having a drone can can bus like GPS.
[1561.09] Jack: And it was lovely.
[1562.09] Jack: It meant as soon as I figured out how to activate it, it meant the GPS and compass all went through that.
[1572.09] Jack: And I tell you what.
[1574.09] Jack: Oh, if if if drone can become a thing, it would be lovely to be able to just have all the same plugs on everything and just plug them in in a chain.
[1586.09] Stephen: Because you guys were rejoicing in the fact that they were developing drone can.
[1592.09] Stephen: I think that the last release was two point seventeen and they said it was final.
[1597.09] Stephen: So, yeah, you can do your ESCs over Canvas now.
[1601.09] Curry: I think it is a thing mainly for people running autopilot on very big models generally.
[1608.09] Curry: Yeah.
[1609.09] Frank: Do you I mean, I believe with our plane, our pilot stuff, you need a drone bus or canvas node in addition to your flight.
[1625.09] Stephen: Like a router or some fancy FCS have them built in now.
[1630.09] Frank: OK, so that's that's becoming a thing.
[1633.09] Frank: That's exciting.
[1634.09] Frank: I mean, how does how does Canvas compare to bidirectional detail in terms of like it's not as fast.
[1642.09] Stephen: It's way more noise tolerant.
[1644.09] Stephen: I think this is the big deal with can kind of why people use it, why it's a standard in automotive is you can use just absolutely atrocious.
[1653.09] Stephen: Bellwire and run it for meter after meter with no signal problems.
[1658.09] Stephen: And you can have loads of equipment sharing the same bus.
[1661.09] Stephen: So your your outlay and your wiring is minimal.
[1665.09] Stephen: Yeah.
[1666.09] Stephen: And it gets the job done.
[1667.09] Stephen: It's D shot was very much based on the this thing needs to send as many updates per second as humanly possible so that we can train racing quads and things to have ludicrously fast update speeds.
[1679.09] Stephen: But I think our pilot doesn't even attempt to enter that field.
[1683.09] Stephen: Right. It's all just fairly docile.
[1687.09] Frank: I think they fairly recently looked at the shop.
[1690.09] Frank: I think there's been some demand for our pilot to deal with the shop.
[1696.09] Frank: But I wonder if there's going to be almost this meeting point.
[1700.09] Frank: But I don't know.
[1701.09] Frank: Yeah, I don't know.
[1702.09] Frank: I don't know the latency.
[1704.09] Frank: Could you run a beat of white quad on and bus here sees and it's still be performed.
[1711.09] Stephen: I think these flight does can at all.
[1713.09] Frank: So no, no, no.
[1714.09] Frank: But like if if if Canvas here sees arrived and that became the norm like is like with the current canvas, is it fast enough that you could otherwise have a flight.
[1726.09] Stephen: The thing is, you can't even say and as a single thing, it's much like D shot and and all the other standards where there's six different flavors of the thing developed over a 25 year period.
[1739.09] Stephen: Yeah.
[1740.09] Stephen: But does it go fast enough?
[1742.09] Frank: Does it have the performance to wipe out the shot entirely?
[1745.09] Stephen: So it goes up to like a megabit and above, which is fast enough.
[1750.09] Stephen: But I don't know the exact specifics and I don't know which exact flavor got implemented.
[1757.09] Stephen: There's this stuff that can do.
[1758.09] Stephen: I think like I think there's like an ethernet esque thing where they run ethernet over can I heard about a while ago.
[1768.09] Stephen: Yeah, it really depends what exactly drone can is and what the effective board rate is.
[1776.09] Stephen: I'm sure Google can tell us in just.
[1778.09] Frank: Yeah, I'm currently googling to get an idea of it because it's interesting because you really is because it's a bus as a proper bus.
[1791.09] Frank: So it's as bi-directional as bi-directional D shot can be.
[1796.09] Frank: So it's it's more a question of the the update rate more than anything that could be the block of that.
[1806.09] Stephen: The default can bus bit rate of one megaboard in drone can.
[1817.02] Stephen: OK, so that's a decent amount.
[1821.02] Stephen: Be fine.
[1823.02] Stephen: It's fast enough to get the job done.
[1825.02] Stephen: But with these things, it's like, well, a high bandwidth doesn't necessarily translate into low latency if each end has to do a whole load of processing to build a can frame and wait till the bus is free.
[1838.02] Stephen: And then maybe it's just it's like the having a constant stream of little sports cars or one massive coach, right?
[1846.02] Stephen: That goes every hour. Yeah, both carrying the same amount of people.
[1850.02] Stephen: The people in the sports car are going to get there much quicker.
[1854.02] Stephen: Yeah, throughput and latency are different.
[1856.02] Stephen: Yeah, exactly. So if you want to be super fast, you probably don't want something that that does this type of system with lots of framing.
[1865.02] Stephen: But and shared bus as well shared bus is normally a recipe for jitter.
[1871.02] Stephen: But probably good enough.
[1873.02] Stephen: I mean, you can't change the motor speed very fast on these giant motors.
[1877.02] Stephen: Remember what Alka was saying that that the pitch change in a giant motor, some of the really huge ones he was looking at was almost like visually perceptible.
[1887.02] Stephen: Like it would take kind of a quarter of a second to respond.
[1891.02] Stephen: It was so slow.
[1892.02] Stephen: And in that case, it doesn't really matter too much versus the loops that we were just talking about where, you know, they can harp and down and you can hear them playing songs.
[1901.02] Stephen: They're changing pitch so fast.
[1904.02] Frank: Yeah. But this this is why I'm asking.
[1907.02] Frank: OK, so this is there's quite a long run out to this.
[1911.02] Frank: Bear with me. But other weekends, I was walking along the South Downs Way.
[1918.02] Frank: Lovely lovely scenery, nice big hills, walking along the crest of the hills.
[1923.02] Frank: And there's like kites and like the birds, the bird of prey.
[1928.02] Frank: And they're like so smooth and gliding along.
[1934.02] Frank: They're really good at flying.
[1936.02] Frank: It's clearly possible to be really good at flying, even just soaring across across the slopes.
[1943.02] Frank: And with all the big fixed-wing stuff that's been coming out, the beluga and the mojito, like there's a lot of FPV fixed-wing stuff.
[1954.02] Frank: But even like the mojito, which is like as far as, you know, TBS are always pushing what they can and what you can do with what there is.
[1965.02] Frank: They're very much, I would consider sort of pushing the bleeding edge of the technology where they can.
[1974.02] Frank: And on their shot on YouTube of the unstabilized footage from the mojito, it's still pretty pretty jittery.
[1985.02] Frank: And I just feel like there's a disconnect there.
[1991.02] Frank: Like that wing is not as stable as a bird soaring along the ridge.
[1997.02] Frank: And I feel like the bidirectional D-shot allows ESCs on quads to feedback like what is actually happening,
[2008.02] Frank: which meant that you could filter out what is actually happening and get rid of a load of noise and get a much more stable, smooth quad.
[2020.02] Frank: I wonder if we could do the same thing with wings if we could have some feedback from the servos of like,
[2028.02] Frank: I'm trying to get to this position, but I'm actually in this position and working really hard.
[2034.02] Frank: And this sort of ties into another thought of like on big, you know, in full scale stuff, if you're flying in a little Cessna or whatever,
[2043.02] Frank: you have Q-feel or the other terms for it of you can feel how fast you're going and what's happening by how much force you put on the stick to turn.
[2056.02] Frank: Like when you're flying really slow.
[2058.02] Stephen: You're getting almost force feedback when you try and push the stick.
[2061.02] Frank: Exactly. When you're flying really slow, there's not much air over the control surfaces and it all goes a bit floppy and you can feel and it starts like shaking and bucketing and you're like, oh, I'm about to stall.
[2070.02] Frank: Or you go really fast and you get resonance building up and nearing the sort of limit of your airframe and it's going to be really, really solid.
[2079.02] Frank: And you're going to have that feel to it.
[2081.02] Frank: And I felt like we're missing that aspect.
[2085.02] Stephen: But something that aircraft are not typically doing, most production aircraft is really aggressively changing the shape of the wing, not just some surfaces on the wing.
[2096.02] Stephen: But, you know, they're lifting one arm up or angling it down or twisting it backwards onto their body and completely changing the orientation of the wings relative to each other.
[2105.02] Frank: Absolutely, absolutely. But I feel like there's at least some low hanging fruit there.
[2112.02] Frank: We have the ability to take feedback from the motor that is in a servo and learn something from that.
[2120.02] Frank: And we've got, you know, servos are just a motor in the gearbox.
[2127.02] Frank: I feel like there's a lot of things there.
[2130.02] Frank: And I was trying to work out, like, could you have like a almost like a Woot motor and an AMS Edge II ESC and all the effects sensor measuring position and make a little thing that could do the bidirectional D-shot in a servo.
[2144.02] Frank: But there's Canvas servos.
[2146.02] Frank: That's the thing which provides current force, your torque, actual position, temperature, all of that.
[2156.02] Frank: So I'm just wondering that if Canvas and drone bus or drone kind of whatever it's called, it's that's going to become more of a widely built in thing to the servos.
[2170.02] Frank: Yeah, we have like feedback from the servos making wings that much more smoother.
[2176.02] Frank: I mean, I would love force feedback in a transmitter.
[2182.02] Frank: If I could feel buffeting a wing, I would love that.
[2189.02] Frank: That would be fascinating.
[2190.02] Frank: Cutting it out there.
[2191.02] Stephen: There's so many applications.
[2192.02] Stephen: A servo is basically what a servo was in the 90s and 80s, right?
[2196.02] Stephen: And there hasn't been a ton of miniaturization.
[2199.02] Stephen: Maybe a bit, but the same principle.
[2201.02] Frank: Digital servos.
[2202.02] Frank: So even though they take PWM in, they're doing more like a PODS type PID loop in there on a little microcontroller to be able to be quicker than just the P type controller that was there beforehand.
[2218.02] Frank: So you get quicker response out of a servo than you did 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
[2225.02] Stephen: Are there censored servos as well?
[2228.02] Frank: I mean, you do also get censored servos, but I mean, I mean, that's that's sort of still what they're doing is they've got a pot on the output shaft, a potentiometer on the output shaft using that.
[2241.02] Frank: Yeah, but it's it's not sending that back.
[2244.02] Frank: It's still just PWM signal goes to it or an S bus signal.
[2248.02] Frank: If you've got a big plane, a big model will have an S bus servo rather than a PWM servo.
[2255.02] Frank: But on the fixed wing flying wing stuff that we're doing, it's generally just the PWM signal to it.
[2264.02] Frank: It's doing internally some control stuff to control the motor.
[2271.02] Frank: This episode was recorded in front of a live online audience, downloaded and edited to make sense when it played audio only.
[2277.02] Frank: Censored to please the iTunes people hosted on the Internet, forwarded through to your podcast provider, downloaded, playing on your device.
[2284.02] Frank: And is now playing in your ears.
[2286.02] Frank: All thanks to our patrons.
[2288.02] Frank: Consider joining them and you'll also get other online benefits.
[2291.02] Frank: Find out more at patreon.com forward slash. Let's drone out.
[2296.02] Stephen: It looks like a cool ornithopter.
[2298.02] Stephen: It's not clear if it's really.
[2299.02] Frank: Is this for Andy is sent.
[2302.02] Frank: And the RC.
[2304.02] Jack: There's a brushes brushes motor with a cam.
[2308.02] Stephen: Yeah, that's not necessarily.
[2311.02] Stephen: I mean, it's fine quite nicely for an ornithopter, but it's not clear if that's really any sort of feedback.
[2316.02] Stephen: It looks like the flat rate is more or less continual.
[2318.02] Stephen: It's just flapping like the blazes.
[2321.02] Jack: Talk more Andy RC.
[2323.02] Jack: What are we meant to know from this?
[2327.02] Jack: I miss having him on the show.
[2330.02] Frank: Yeah, it's it's it's a flying model.
[2333.02] Frank: It looks like a bird and it's flapping, but I don't want the flapping.
[2337.02] Frank: I want the when they're just they're just like cruising along the ridge top.
[2341.02] Stephen: And that's that's smoothly just funny hobby dot com.
[2345.02] Curry: There was a video where it was talking about wing shapes, which I can't find now.
[2351.02] Curry: And it was like it wasn't an ornithopter, but it had birds wings with a problem.
[2356.02] Curry: But the wings could fold and change their shape.
[2360.02] Curry: But I can't find it.
[2362.02] Stephen: It looks just like a regular ornithopter, but made to a higher standard of engineering instead of being an old kind of let's see how light we can make it with bits of wood.
[2374.56] Stephen: They've got CNC to aluminum bits and carbon fiber, and it just looks much more tightly engineered.
[2382.56] Stephen: It's not clear first.
[2384.56] Curry: I feel they could do a lot more with one fopters because right now it's kind of like flat wings, madly.
[2390.56] Curry: And there's no sort of like, OK, we're gliding.
[2394.56] Curry: I'll put your wings out.
[2395.56] Curry: Or, yeah, there's no soaring down for a thing. Yeah, there's no soaring.
[2400.56] Curry: I've seen some tech demos like, you know, when they've got ornithopters that, you know, can go in and grasp hold of someone's arm as they're going to land and things.
[2410.56] Curry: But that's less about the flying, more about like this talents coming out and being able to grab things.
[2415.56] Jack: Someone had a super realistic sort of like printed wrapped sort of seagull shaped seagull and you get a seagull and I really wanted.
[2436.56] Jack: They don't sell it anymore.
[2438.56] Jack: And I can't remember.
[2440.56] Jack: Dan up to mentioned it to me and I really wanted to see our one so that I could install some sort of mechanism squirt toothpaste at people like mentee.
[2459.56] Jack: Yeah, I would I would love that.
[2462.56] Frank: It's slightly unfortunate that there is a model aircraft company called Seagull.
[2467.56] Frank: So that might might pollute you.
[2470.56] Frank: You Google set for that one.
[2472.56] Stephen: Well, I think they will probably be going the other direction to be perfectly honest.
[2478.56] Jack: No way.
[2479.56] Jack: You're someone found there.
[2482.56] Jack: The drone morphing wings tail raptor.
[2485.56] Stephen: This is a close up of the one that Andy found.
[2491.56] Stephen: They'll just kind of show that the gearing and everything because this is it's well engineered.
[2496.56] Stephen: But this is the traditional ornithopter but with a column fiber and aluminium take.
[2504.56] Curry: It's pretty much traditional.
[2505.56] Curry: That the other link is more the thing I was looking at where it's like it's prop driven, but it's got the morphing wings so it can it can cruise in different ways.
[2518.56] Jack: Go ahead.
[2520.56] Jack: Yeah.
[2522.56] Jack: Magical pencil.
[2523.56] Jack: Oh, there we are.
[2524.56] Stephen: Yeah.
[2525.56] Stephen: The ability to actually but it's got propeller on its nose.
[2527.56] Stephen: So it's yeah.
[2528.56] Curry: So you can't have flapping and morphing wings.
[2531.56] Curry: It's one of the same right now.
[2533.56] Curry: Okay.
[2534.56] Jack: Oh, it's just breaks the Internet.
[2537.56] Jack: But look at this.
[2539.56] Jack: So can you describe this?
[2543.56] Frank: No, I can't see it.
[2544.56] Frank: Like it's like a bird.
[2546.56] Curry: Yeah.
[2547.56] Frank: Yes.
[2548.56] Stephen: There's another man standing there holding it like it's a pet where really we can see it's a plane.
[2551.56] Stephen: The fancy way.
[2552.56] Stephen: Look at that.
[2553.56] Stephen: So that does fault.
[2554.56] Stephen: But it's just the tips.
[2555.56] Stephen: The tip will do.
[2556.56] Stephen: Just the tip man.
[2557.56] Jack: Yeah.
[2558.56] Jack: It looks like it's almost like a like a nano goblin at the core with like wing extensions.
[2563.56] Curry: I mean, I wouldn't look at that and think it's the bird for you.
[2565.56] Jack: Absolutely.
[2566.56] Frank: Yeah.
[2567.56] Frank: Yeah.
[2568.56] Frank: Yeah.
[2569.56] Frank: And tail feathers that like go either really narrow like normal tail or really wide.
[2575.56] Curry: This is just an enhanced version of the sort of retractable wings used to see on fighter jets.
[2580.56] Curry: Right.
[2581.56] Frank: Hmm.
[2582.56] Frank: I've got one of them somewhere.
[2584.56] Frank: A fighter jet.
[2585.56] Frank: Well.
[2586.56] Frank: Yeah.
[2587.56] Frank: Yeah.
[2588.56] Stephen: Yeah.
[2589.56] Stephen: Yeah.
[2590.56] Stephen: Yeah.
[2591.56] Stephen: Yeah.
[2592.56] Stephen: Yeah.
[2593.56] Frank: Yeah.
[2594.56] UNKNOWN: Yeah.
[2595.56] Frank: I've got one of them somewhere.
[2597.56] Stephen: A fighter jet?
[2599.56] Frank: Well, a model fighter jet with the way the wings go.
[2603.56] Stephen: Oh yeah.
[2604.56] Stephen: Yeah.
[2605.56] Frank: Yeah.
[2606.56] Frank: Like a F-14 or something.
[2607.56] Frank: Yeah, exactly.
[2608.56] Stephen: A classic that everyone of our age kind of wanted as a model jet on your kids.
[2613.56] Stephen: I'm not reading you now.
[2615.56] Frank: I can't reach it.
[2618.56] Stephen: Anyway.
[2619.56] Stephen: But does it make a big difference to the flight feel?
[2622.36] Stephen: Does it give you that kind of,
[2624.6] Stephen: does it give you graceful, elegant flight
[2628.44] Stephen: or is it going faster now I'm going slower?
[2631.92] Frank: It's, I'm going fast, I'm going very fast.
[2635.88] Frank: Those are your options.
[2637.32] Frank: Okay.
[2638.16] Frank: I'll come in to land,
[2639.84] Frank: I'll go into only just fast mode
[2642.24] Frank: rather than very fast mode.
[2644.56] Stephen: Clench, clench, clench, right it's down.
[2646.8] Frank: Yes.
[2647.64] Stephen: See if everything's still attached.
[2648.84] Frank: Yeah, it's a nerve-wracking one.
[2655.02] Frank: Turns out, if you include a load of hinges and servos
[2659.22] Frank: and gearing mechanisms, it gets quite heavy
[2662.26] Frank: and when it's quite small and quite heavy,
[2664.98] Frank: that means it has to go quite fast
[2667.26] Frank: otherwise it falls out of the sky.
[2669.78] Frank: Yes.
[2670.62] Jack: That's how that works.
[2672.78] Jack: Physics.
[2673.62] Jack: It's like a manhole cover.
[2677.7] Stephen: But I ordered it, that's what I want.
[2680.02] Stephen: The death Frisbee.
[2682.46] Frank: So the chat between Carol and Tyler and Andy R.C.,
[2686.02] Frank: they seem to be suggesting attaching
[2690.86] Frank: some kind of electrical device to the stick
[2694.98] Frank: to provide feedback.
[2696.54] Frank: I'm slightly confused.
[2700.02] Curry: You don't have to use a joystick like the PS5
[2702.86] Curry: which has got force feedback in its triggers
[2705.98] Curry: and stuff and put them into the stick
[2708.58] Curry: so you know when you're really,
[2710.26] Curry: it's making more of an effort to move
[2712.94] Curry: and the servo is trying to work harder.
[2716.98] Frank: Yeah, that's what I want.
[2718.38] Frank: That is what I want.
[2719.22] Curry: That's not too tricky.
[2721.82] Jack: It reminds me, you know when he says
[2724.98] Jack: just strap a 04 module to a C goal,
[2729.26] Jack: it reminds me of that person
[2730.9] Jack: who put little cowboy hats on those two pigeons.
[2735.54] Frank: We're all sort of looking at you
[2736.86] Frank: with a bit of a blank face, I think.
[2740.06] Curry: I was just showing the extremely micro drone things
[2744.62] Curry: which is just absolutely ridiculous.
[2746.98] Stephen: Of the battery on board stuff.
[2749.5] Stephen: Yeah.
[2751.86] Frank: Are these like the toothbrush bristle type robots?
[2754.38] Curry: Yeah, I mean, that's it next to like a quarter.
[2761.02] Curry: It's just ridiculous.
[2763.06] Curry: But interesting is they've managed to replicate
[2766.22] Curry: the sort of insect wing quite well
[2769.46] Curry: in the same way they do the ornithopter.
[2771.06] Curry: So as it flaps, the wings take, they work.
[2776.3] Curry: And as the upstroke, of course,
[2778.82] Curry: the sort of big web of the wing goes downwards,
[2781.66] Curry: which I thought was interesting,
[2783.3] Curry: which is something all the fopters actually do quite nicely.
[2791.34] Jack: In 2019, hundreds of Las Vegas pigeons
[2794.26] Jack: had tiny cowboy hats glued to their heads.
[2798.38] Jack: The person who committed this crime was never caught.
[2801.62] Jack: When they just trying to go around.
[2805.26] Jack: They go around and glue, and they're brilliant.
[2810.06] Jack: They're just little pigeons with like tuck,
[2814.34] Jack: look, and they just glue the little pigeon hats to them.
[2817.78] Stephen: But they're just assuming that someone stuck them on
[2820.54] Stephen: and not that the pigeons decided to change up their look.
[2823.58] Stephen: You know, little pigeon, big city.
[2825.66] Stephen: Gotta make a splash.
[2827.1] Jack: Yeah, I know.
[2831.82] Jack: I mean, technically that might be a drone.
[2833.74] Jack: Hey, off-axis, how you doing, mate?
[2835.22] Jack: You all right?
[2838.39] Jack: I saw your incredible 3D printing.
[2841.23] Jack: It's looking really good.
[2843.31] Jack: Those signs that you made.
[2847.02] Frank: Oh, wow.
[2848.46] Frank: Oh, that's an ornithopter.
[2849.3] Curry: That looks proper.
[2851.38] Frank: That looks-
[2852.22] Frank: What is this?
[2854.14] Jack: I was looking for ornithopters, I think.
[2856.26] Jack: The three wrinkles during up-
[2858.98] Jack: It's a robofalcon.
[2860.18] Frank: Robofalcon.
[2861.98] Frank: It definitely looks very bird of prey falcon-esque.
[2865.66] Stephen: And they've got that kind of dynamic flight
[2867.5] Stephen: where it's darting side to side,
[2868.98] Stephen: and it's really using a lot of roll to move.
[2872.18] Stephen: Whereas most of these have negligible roll.
[2875.02] Stephen: This thing's really like yanking at the air
[2877.86] Curry: and gripping and pulling it.
[2879.7] Curry: I feel the only problem generally with ornithopters
[2881.94] Curry: and even these is that looks such like a bird,
[2884.58] Curry: but if you hear it and hear the motor
[2887.86] Curry: and the mechanic going twice and such.
[2890.66] Curry: It's a bit of a giveaway, really.
[2894.5] Jack: It turns by talking.
[2897.46] Stephen: So cool.
[2898.98] Stephen: Looks so good.
[2900.5] Stephen: It still looks like an absolute lunatic thing
[2903.82] Stephen: when it's flying full speed.
[2905.3] Stephen: When you slow it down, it looks more realistic.
[2907.82] Frank: Yeah, like eight speed, it looks really majestic.
[2910.62] Frank: But a full speed video, it does look like it's just worth
[2915.38] Frank: having a better-
[2916.98] Curry: I feel the people that are making these need to tie it up with the people that are doing
[2921.38] Curry: like the imaging stuff and like yeah what you do to land it you hold out your hand and
[2927.58] Curry: it goes and sort of glides and holds your arm like that that would be where we go in.
[2935.14] Curry: If you're going to build a bird you might as well have a VTOL one they generally are
[2938.7] Curry: in real life aren't they?
[2941.54] Stephen: Well some of them do need a bit of a struggle you ever seen a goose trying to take off or
[2945.98] Stephen: a duck.
[2946.98] Frank: Yeah some of them need a bit of a run-up but you know DJI Mavic Osprey coming in 2030.
[2954.78] Frank: Sorry what was that Frank?
[2958.38] Frank: The DJI Mavic Osprey coming in 2030.
[2962.3] Jack: Currie do you want to tell us about your flying day where you had to phone Dr Google?
[2973.66] Curry: I had to phone Jack you know it's gone wrong when you have to phone Jack don't you?
[2979.14] Curry: What happened I attempted to take out my free open IPC quads because I wanted to test
[2986.3] Curry: the MSP OSD in real life like fly them around and see how it works.
[2992.22] Curry: Free quads I only had one flying properly one of which I guess is kind of my fault I
[2997.86] Curry: had the the emacs big thing on and I neglected to think that oh I've swapped the flight
[3003.62] Curry: controller out that probably won't do anything I'd taken it to the garden and I'd hovered
[3008.1] Curry: it and I was like that looks good and it was all good.
[3011.14] Curry: A I'd forgotten to tighten up the props so the first attempt to fly sort of like oh that's
[3016.7] Curry: gone wrong so I think oh the prop salute so tighten those up and then it's like up to
[3022.22] Curry: about 20% when it's hovering it's fine go above that mega oscillations like so that
[3028.3] Curry: was unflyable so I have to tune that and then I tried to take this one which is previously
[3034.54] Curry: flown hadn't been a problem and it I armed it and it just said load which I'd never seen
[3042.5] Curry: before and I've got no internet in in the field no phone signal apart from like regular
[3048.42] Curry: voice calls so I had to phone Jack as my internet proxy and say what's load mean and
[3055.62] Curry: he was able to figure out that it probably meant the CPU is too overloaded and doesn't
[3061.78] Curry: want to do anything which is interesting because I flew it last time and I hadn't changed anything
[3066.74] Curry: and it was fine then and now it's saying load which is weird but it was that I got home
[3073.14] Curry: and I looked at it and the CPU load was 62% doing nothing so I changed the pit loop down
[3079.46] Curry: and it would at least arm the other one I did actually manage to fly I can show you
[3085.46] Curry: quickly what a a flight looks like when you're using MSP OSD on open IPC it's not very exciting
[3094.9] Curry: because it basically looks like walk snail or DJI in terms of what the OSD looks like
[3101.14] Curry: but it's better than when I didn't have an OSD because I had to count in my head wondering
[3106.42] Curry: how long the battery would last what you've got here is is not a very good recording on my
[3113.54] Curry: tablet and in fact weirdly because I had my little thing I used to get the picture
[3122.5] Curry: plugged directly into my goggles and that was all good 60 frames per second not a problem sometimes
[3128.58] Curry: it got a bit blocky but it was fine and right next to it I had a similar receiver plugged directly
[3134.26] Curry: into the tablet and I noticed on playback the tablet has places where it freezes up
[3139.86] Curry: and just like completely stops that wasn't happening so I'm gonna build myself a proper
[3146.74] Curry: sort of something I can mount to the goggles out of a redaxer little single board computer
[3152.26] Curry: which will both provide the live display to my goggles and do DVR recording I think that'd be
[3157.86] Curry: better but yeah the the MSP OSD worked okay my barometer was doing weird things and it was a very
[3164.34] Curry: windy day so it's a bit it's a bit uh jittery in the display but yeah worked okay I thought
[3172.82] Stephen: it's a little bit blown out but it's uh better than I've remembered some of these cameras looking
[3177.94] Curry: yeah that that's the run cam one the run cam one's pretty good last time the little emacs one that
[3183.46] Curry: was in this wasn't focused because the pre-production units had this little printed
[3189.54] Curry: a case for the camera but I feel I got that just about focused right but then again I couldn't fly
[3196.1] Curry: it and I couldn't fly the big emacs one because my my tune was all over the place I didn't know
[3200.58] Curry: about it but yeah it was it was good enough to like you know fly through reasonably little gaps
[3207.78] Curry: and uh you know do some you know light aerobatics I was trying not to crash because the field is
[3213.46] Curry: mostly underwater it looks like lush grass but it's mostly sinky mud and water and you didn't
[3220.42] Stephen: really want to crash net is this cutting edge open IPC or is this kind of as it was before
[3225.86] Curry: Christmas this is open IPC as it was before Christmas since that time that those little
[3230.82] Curry: scamps have put at least two big updates in where they're getting more bandwidth through
[3237.78] Stephen: yeah I saw them you should go full megabit there and what's his face was talking about
[3242.5] Stephen: 20 megabit being fairly stable and like 30 megabit being you know maybe soon yeah so so I've I don't
[3250.42] Curry: like to do like uh if I've missed something I don't like to put multiple updates on it once
[3255.46] Curry: because it's like well that gives three possible ways of going wrong whereas if I just do one at
[3259.94] Curry: a time I know if I've got a problem so this seems to be working fine there's there's little bits to
[3265.94] Curry: sort out there's like my ground station to build and stuff but you know I managed to
[3270.1] Curry: fly one out of three so I guess it's it's not all bad did you get one of those new SBCs the
[3276.42] Curry: rads I gather they've been pretty high demand that's that's what I'm going to grab because
[3282.02] Curry: one of the problems is my my ground station is like on the ground beside me which is never good
[3289.06] Curry: I need it I need to at least stand up because where I'm going just it was working fine the
[3294.34] Curry: other side of the head is but I've already got like a different a different look from the tablet
[3301.22] Curry: recording versus my my recording I was doing through the goggles so yeah I'm going to build
[3305.38] Curry: one of those I was I was thinking like you know they're going to they're going to bring out a
[3309.7] Curry: goggle module someone's going to make one but it hasn't happened quickly so I'm going to I'm going
[3314.02] Curry: to make myself a I don't know what to call it redax or what do you call it a raxa something like
[3319.3] Stephen: that r-a-d-x-a isn't it I don't know the right way of saying it is it r-a-d-x or r-a-x-d-a
[3327.62] Stephen: I think it's r-a-d-x-a radska something like that anyway I'll make all those and you
[3335.7] Stephen: apparently you can just get better diversity by simply attaching more USB wi-fi adapters now
[3341.06] Stephen: they've added a feature you could just jam on extra USB wi-fi yeah ground state yeah you just
[3345.7] Curry: literally just put multiple ones in I've got I've got three like receivers now so I can just
[3352.1] Curry: pile them in but it's it's it's pretty good what I want to do I had this this new frame
[3358.5] Curry: I'll put the emacs one in there and I'll put a GPS on because people keep saying
[3363.3] Curry: how far can you go and I'm like I don't know I don't want to go as far as I possibly can
[3369.06] Stephen: because I might it felt like you only get the antenna limit on walks now so that's a
[3374.34] Curry: that's a good yardstick isn't it yeah if you know I don't expect miracles out of the sort
[3380.9] Curry: of standard the little plug and play systems but you know a reasonable kilometer without it doing
[3387.06] Curry: anything bad would be nice and I think we still have that update to come where uh the receiver
[3394.26] Curry: sort of works out the the RSSI it's getting back from the transmitter and basically tries to lower
[3402.18] Curry: its own bit rate because of it that's kind of what walks and DJI do at the moment so it's not
[3407.94] Curry: it's not like two-way communication but the fact it's like oh the the signal's dropping I'm going
[3413.14] Curry: to drop my bit rate or you know put the the squiggly bits in the corners stuff like that
[3419.46] Stephen: hmm lots of good stuff coming yeah at that point I have the flyway okay yeah
[3428.74] Jack: so early departure from curry very much curry thank you for coming on uh yeah it'd be interesting
[3434.5] Stephen: to see when the goggle modules appear because there's so many DIY solutions and there's this
[3438.66] Stephen: threshold where it starts off being you know five different things all tied together with HDMI cables
[3444.02] Stephen: and USB and BEX and stuff and then it eventually boils down to something it's a development board
[3450.5] Stephen: and it won't be too long before someone says well I'll make a one-off special edition of
[3455.38] Stephen: that development board and I'll sell it in a 3D printed case and from then it's basically
[3459.62] Stephen: game on isn't it it's like everyone's just going to be in a mad rush to make the the smallest and
[3466.1] Stephen: cheapest version of this and the fact that you can just chuck on extra USB wi-fi adapters is a
[3472.02] Stephen: a very interesting take when it comes to signal diversity yeah I mean it's interesting because
[3479.06] Frank: I feel like a lot of the um sort of the the existing digital systems like the goggles are
[3489.46] Frank: almost a loss leader and they get their money back on the vtx sides and the spares and bits
[3498.02] Frank: so by having this where you're almost eliminating the goggles to a degree
[3505.46] Frank: right um at least it's not it's not you know a custom built specifically for this which makes
[3510.66] Stephen: sense like goggles are like pairs of shoes everyone's slightly differently shaped and
[3514.98] Frank: wants different things from them yep as as andy i'll see in the chat will testify who's not been
[3521.86] Stephen: getting on with his latest goggles i believe oh right that would this be the uh dji goggles three
[3530.5] Frank: uh i can't remember which one it is andy let us know in the chat but he's he's mentioned on a
[3536.66] Frank: couple of his recent videos that they don't fit his face so the problem yeah yeah or been
[3545.78] Stephen: packing them out with bits of foam for years haven't we let's see how that goes but most
[3551.54] Stephen: goggles these days can do 720p i think if you've got an analog set any newer than like the hd02s
[3558.58] Stephen: that then they're 720p capable i think which is probably enough for flying footage isn't it
[3564.5] Stephen: it's all very well having 1080p or 4k for laters but you can just record that on the drone
[3570.02] Frank: yeah yeah although you know we we do have this uh sort of limited bandwidth i mean we can get
[3578.66] Frank: you know the 50 meg if we use a big chunk of the the unlicensed bandwidth but there's you know if
[3586.66] Frank: the the less bandwidth that you need the more pilots you can have flying at the same time
[3592.42] Stephen: true so that's channel width when it comes to wi-fi right whether you're using 20 megahertz
[3596.74] Stephen: channels 40 megahertz 80 megahertz even 160 on some ridiculous installs exactly um and we're
[3604.58] Frank: we're now at a point with um like video games where like the actual ray traced
[3613.06] Frank: um actual raster image is a fairly low resolution image that is then being ai upscaled
[3621.86] Frank: uh on the fly pretty quickly to to a resolution that you actually want and the generating frames
[3635.94] Frank: in between there as well um by saying okay we we've been told that since we've rendered the last
[3643.62] Frank: image where you've moved your camera by moving your stick three degrees to the left so we're
[3650.9] Frank: going to warp this image so that we're we're providing you an extra frame while we're rendering
[3657.22] Frank: the next one that is three degrees to the left i wonder like as as all the gpu npu chips get
[3667.22] Frank: built into mobile stuff are we going to get goggles that are going to do like ai upscaling
[3672.58] Stephen: but the cynic in me who's been subjected to a great deal of technical marketing down the years
[3677.78] Stephen: says that the reason we're seeing all this image upscaling and multi-frame generation
[3683.22] Stephen: and rubbish from the big players is that the actual business of rastering rasterization
[3689.22] Stephen: and generation of real frames not fake frames hasn't really improved in speed so what they've
[3695.46] Stephen: done to distract the consumer from basically slowing of progress in in terms of raw performance
[3701.78] Stephen: is to throw a few shiny baubles of we'll upscale this we'll generate some frames using all this
[3708.02] Stephen: stuff that we happen to be using over here to make a whole load of money with ai and the enterprise
[3712.74] Stephen: and in cloud and we'll just pass on some you know some stuff to make gamers happy because we're
[3717.46] Stephen: not actually focusing on them anymore and so that i'd say that's what's really i agree but still
[3724.18] Frank: those techniques are being worked on and developed and i feel like you know they they could actually
[3729.54] Stephen: have you seen how much new graphics card that boasts those features costs
[3733.86] Frank: these days but the those sort of features are going to be built more and more into phones right
[3739.62] Frank: like in terms of the those those particular upscaling is nice but you need goggles that have
[3747.46] Frank: higher than 720p display i'm not expecting this in the next three years i'm expecting this in like
[3753.62] Stephen: 10 years time five to ten years time i was hoping we'd have 4k displays on our faces like
[3758.74] Stephen: 4k 120 hertz displays that just hasn't really happened well but that's because we've got a
[3763.38] Frank: limited bandwidth that we can push it through right so if we can if we can use less bandwidth
[3769.3] Frank: to move just a you know a lower resolution image that then can be upscaled at the other end
[3776.98] Frank: and fewer frames are actually being moved and it's all being generated well there's a lot of
[3781.54] Stephen: perception like people in the general public are not wanting to wear goggles even fancy sexy
[3787.54] Stephen: apple goggles they sold like turd cakes they were they know everyone sent them back at the instant
[3794.02] Stephen: that they were near the end of their um trial period they sent them back before they they lost
[3799.14] Stephen: the option to get the money back on their orders and that means that what you don't have lots of
[3805.62] Stephen: people pushing for more pixel dense advanced displays you just have the same basic oled
[3812.42] Stephen: displays without much of an increase in progress whereas if big consumer companies like apple
[3818.74] Stephen: start to really push then before you know it you'll have amazing display tech
[3824.58] Frank: as it is it's not going that fast i haven't heard much about the apple vr headset since
[3830.58] Stephen: yeah because everyone returned them yeah everyone did like and influence a video on them
[3836.1] Frank: and then before the returns period they're pretty much gone now well maybe maybe the next few
[3844.5] Frank: versions will become fewer than however many thousands of pounds yeah yeah anyway we've
[3854.26] Frank: we've definitely run out of time now we've been yammering on yummy we're worried about
[3860.5] Frank: worried about awkward silences and we've just had loads of things to talk about thank you frank
[3865.3] Stephen: that was absolutely wonderful and i feel a good discussion on the topic as well
[3871.7] Jack: excellent goods frank before we go would you like to fill in the listeners on the little mishap
[3879.62] Frank: uh i i may have paid some ldo bills in the wrong order and slightly got us in a bit of an awkward
[3885.54] Frank: situation but it's fine it'll all work out the money's just resting in his account
[3890.1] Frank: which it's no that was that was keys it's the opposite way around this time yeah
[3898.58] Frank: make an effort um we've had to we've had to borrow money for frank if you're listening
[3906.34] Frank: if you're listening after frank spent our money yeah after i spent it in the wrong order yet um
[3912.18] Frank: if you're listening to this on the audio only podcast uh just be aware that that is
[3918.66] Frank: thanks to our wonderful patreons who have been keeping this going and we'll be keeping this
[3924.18] Frank: going until our 10th anniversary episode after that at the moment if you're listening to this
[3933.14] Frank: audio only you may be surprised to find out after our 10th anniversary episode you may not get
[3940.26] Frank: a lovely edited episode appearing in your feed like clockwork every weekend so
[3947.78] Frank: if you really would miss that i would encourage you to sign up to our patreon
[3953.78] Jack: we are we are financially not stable anymore turns out hosting has gone up
[3963.3] Frank: everyone's you know we we understand as well everyone at home has got less money to just
[3970.98] Frank: fritter away on random podcast patrons but if you are able and you value the audio only episode
[3977.54] Stephen: if you want to hear more real guys talking about on a weekly basis then join us for
[3986.42] Frank: ornithop to talk here at let's drone out absolutely and just to be clear we don't get any
[3994.82] Frank: money out of this like it just goes on getting getting all the infrastructure in place getting
[4000.9] Stephen: all running so infrastructure kind of adds up you don't think about it and then a year later you're
[4006.98] Frank: like what bill yes uh but next week we'll be back with another interesting guest that uh jack has
[4018.26] Frank: lined up with the help of magical pencil in the chat yeah uh we have a director actor
[4027.78] Frank: and uh drone operator who vunderbar coming on talking about all sorts of things so yeah we'll
[4037.3] Jack: ask him next week yeah i will ask him if uh i am a creative genius who rubs himself with a ferret
[4047.7] Stephen: and films dogs buttholes that'd be a quick discussion then um if we can stop jack from
[4055.22] Stephen: asking that question we might be able to interview him so you never know tune in and find out
[4062.74] Jack: yep thank you to all our lovely patreons please help us if you can
[4070.58] Jack: do you want to see us out stephen don't forget to say goodbye to curry as well
[4076.1] Stephen: thank you very much to our wonderful patreons you have been joined this evening on let's
[4081.46] Stephen: turn out by our lord and master frank goodbye jack aka right until i fly thank you
[4093.06] Stephen: some people's favorite curry kettin oh god he's gonna knife you for that
[4100.42] UNKNOWN: and myself stephen thank you very much have a good week everyone bye telemetry last