Victory Snatched From The Jaws of Defeat!

[Chaosrider@brilliantfrogs]

My first FPV Manual mode flight was pretty successful, but my second one ended in disaster.

Almost.

It got eaten by a big pine tree, but the pine tree spit it out, very much like the swamp creature did to R2D2 in Empire.

When my FPV got blown backwards into a tree, I played the "Find my drone" last 30 seconds over and over about half a dozen times in the goggles. I thought I knew where it was, but I went up to look, and found nothing. I even sent one of my Mini-2s up to look for it, to no avail.

I figured I was just SOL. But then I concluded that the view I had of where it had gone down was unsatisfactory, literally not more than a second or two. I thought I knew where it had gone down, but all I was sure of was a general direction and rough distance, and that it had been blown into a tree.

So I popped the SD card out of the goggles, and loaded that file into my video editor. I watched it frame-by-frame, and it quickly became clear that my original location estimate was completely wrong. And by doing that review I had a very good idea of where it actually was, and what tree it had hit.

So, I got in the car and drove up there, parked, and got out. I looked around, and on an intensely green manicured lawn, I saw an odd dark shape. Could that be my drone?

It was! Sitting there in the green grass upright and proud was my Beast. I scrabbled over some decorative rocks to get to it. One prop is bent, but that's what spare props are for. The exterior was covered with green debris in places, where the props had shredded the pine tree, but that just looks cosmetic.

More significantly...the battery had been ejected from the aircraft! I figured that it was totally gone, but I had two more, so I wasn't going to sweat it. Still, I looked around, and there it was, at the base of the demonic pine tree that had eaten my FPV. But the battery didn't look quite right. I looked more closely when I got it home, and sure enough, the battery has been PUNCTURED.

That battery is definitely not going back in my aircraft!

So now I need to replace the bent prop, clean up the worst of the pine tree debris, pop in a new battery, and see what's what.

I have pictures...

Update tomorrow!

 

[RH009]

So I have to know, did you follow everyone's advice and take off in N Mode and then transition to M Mode after gaining altitude, or did you attempt to take off in M Mode?

Rob

 

[rktman]

Great news

(a.k.a. EpicFlight)

 

[Chaosrider@brilliantfrogs]

So I have to know, did you follow everyone's advice and take off in N Mode and then transition to M Mode after gaining altitude, or did you attempt to take off in M Mode?

Rob

I did indeed!

It's possible that I could have taken off in Manual mode successfully, but not likely. Eventually it will be easy, but not soon.

The root cause of the crash was overconfidence, based on how well the first flight had gone. The second flight had gone even better; I was sort of in control of the drone in Manual for the entire 3:30 Manual portion of the flight.

While in one of my favorite thinking positions, I realized that I could correct the rearward and downward drift I had encountered during my first flight by adding a bit of power, and pitching forward a bit. That worked! So I headed down the canyon, a route that I know exceedingly well.

But I wasn't really in control of it. I was able to keep it in the air, and keep it moving in some semblance of the direction that I wanted, but I was sloppy. I haven't yet developed the muscle memory skills to be able to make small adjustments smoothly.

Still, when I got down around the Flag, my usual turn-around milestone, I was indeed able to turn it around, and head toward home, in a random walk sort of way. I was bombing along at about 55 mph, wavering around in the sky, and went a bit past the house, since I still had battery power.

The proximate cause of the crash was that by the time of this second Manual flight of the day, the wind had picked up substantially. When I started flying backward during a gust, at a much lower altitude than I wanted, all I wanted to do was go UP, and I didn't have the knowledge or automatic responses to make it do that. The flight leading up to that had been fully satisfactory as a second Manual flight, even though sloppy.

What I should have done, as soon as it wasn't acting at all the way I wanted, was to eject, and hit the Brake button. But I decided to try to pull it out.

Bad plan! Overconfident.

The good news is, I replaced the prop and put in a fresh battery, and it flew like a champ, as always, in N/S mode, even though I was getting high wind warnings. The gimbal works fine, and the lens appears undamaged. The friction on the throttle is annoying when flying in N/S mode, but I scan the instruments sufficiently reliably that it was just an annoyance, and not a problem. Once I realized that with the throttle I was really setting a rate of climb or descent, it was just a question of paying attention to it.

More Manual flights planned for today!

The big question now is, what do I do with that punctured battery? Is there any recycle value to it? Is there any reason that I should send it back to DJI? Or...? I haven't quite figured out a mechanism by which the battery could get punctured, while the aircraft itself suffers no more than a bent prop.

I'm not at all sure that I like Manual mode. I'm a big auto-pilot/cruse-control kinda guy. I just want it for the extra power that it opens up, but that could be done with an "Extreme Sport" mode that gives you full power, while retaining the flight stability systems. I think I'd like that better.

But we'll see!

 

[rktman]

Manual mode is not the mode to be in and cruise around, exploring, enjoying the view. When that's what you want to do, Normal or Sport mode is the way to go.

The issue for us old guys is M mode is fast and continuous, there's no break, no chance to gather your thoughts. You are "on" every second, and you have to focus.

I get tired fast flying M.

You're gonna love LOVE the Motion Controller.

 

[Chaosrider@brilliantfrogs]

Manual mode is not the mode to be in and cruise around, exploring, enjoying the view. When that's what you want to do, Normal or Sport mode is the way to go.

The issue for us old guys is M mode is fast and continuous, there's no break, no chance to gather your thoughts. You are "on" every second, and you have to focus.

I get tired fast flying M.

You're gonna love LOVE the Motion Controller.

Well, sure there's a chance to take a break, and gather your thoughts.

It's called the "Brake" button!



But you're right, there are some things that the Minis do better. I think of the pace of the Minis as being, "Master of all I survey.", while the pace of the FPV is "Just passing through!"

The key to handling the pace is to learn what you need to do to make what happen, and then program that into your personal internal "auto-pilot", so that those things just happen when needed, without any thought or attention required on your part. I'm not there yet, but I'm getting there, and I'm WAY closer to it than I was on May 31st. With more practice, many FPV control tasks will fade into the background.

They'll just fade into my internal processor background, rather than the aircraft processor background!

I do fully expect to love the Motion Controller!