Lessons

Lesson Info

Basics of Flight & Controlling Drones

Okay, So we're gonna go through controlling trying to do this really fast because I'm not gonna about to fly here. Um, but I can tell you that this is how we control the drum control the drone with a wait for it controller. So this is an RC control of this different types. This is the one here is to basically two different types. Now, apart from the magic which you guys already seen, this one has a built in screen like this. This is for the Phantom for professional and a phantom for Advanced. This screen is based on an android system. It's great because I can just turn this on and everything goes in one place and I just turn that on to my cup turn and I'm flying the There's a battery charger on the side. He plugged it in that plugs when you played that in and charges to control and screen at the same time. The app. Everything is on there you can fly. It's a DJ I screen. It's a crystal vision. Crystal sky. Sorry is what it's based on a very bright, very sharp. Really nice. Um, the other...

ones here, you can also get him for that if you get the regular one. As I showed you here, we get the phone. What? The IPad is a little button. You push there and it comes up. If you're impatient like me, you just pull it all the way up. Snapping IPad or near that will hold up to the IPad air or the IPad Pro small. The large repair pro will not fit on here, but way. Would you want to put a TV sometimes with TV on here anyway? IPad minis everything works here, do it up and down to make it fit. Android tablets, of course as well. I don't know what models there because I don't have one. And what's that? Has a little thing here. These little doo hickeys come out. That's a word I learned this week in one East Coast do hickey. Um and you put that there and you slide it down and it attaches your phone on there. So whatever phone you have this IPhone seven plus that's on there. And then you just plug in the lightning cable when was dropped, it lightning cable to the US being here and in this is reviews, so f PV first person view you're flying a drone you can see in here What? The Durham seeing all the camera control is done here. This is where you do all your settings and your camera stuff. And believe it or not, the F PV is also part of the characters. That's what the cameras seeing some of you shoot videos, photos. What you see on here is what you get. There is a little button here, little lever. They can use that for tilting the camera. So the gimbal is controllable on this one. In the magic, you can move the gimbal up and down if you have the deejay goggles, which I don't have them here with me. I do have a video that I did with the deejay goggles and put all you could do hit, tracking. And the maverick will actually rotate camera side to side and track your head. It's really cool. It's like being in a plane and looking out the window and just like looking around its epic and when you take videos is like imax theater in your bones. Oh man, I love it with the inspire one pro What makes this one different than everything else is the fact that this camera is completely controllable. So you can rotate this camera around. 360 degrees happened down. So you can best be part this in this guy and fly the camera around anywhere you want. The Phantom is a micro 4/3 on the pro, by the way. So this is Ah, nice. Marcas uses a Panasonic GH four judge five cents around here so you can get, like, same quality will get micro 4/3 camera. Really nice. Like you want good quality footage like we're talking big boy footage right here. All right. And the other thing about that, to the inspired To is out now, actually, which is now shooting five k video. Um, looks kind of similar, but now they're doing two batteries. They got redundancy on battery. So for battery days, it doesn't pull out of this guy. Continue along that theme Move. Let's keep it in the air. On the ground. Not in between. Uh, so that's good. The other thing about it, you can have two controllers. So this is the inspire one controller. So when we control the drone using the control on it. Be moving to the next light. Here is how you control it and with the in spite one. You can have one person piloting the drone and you have another person in one of these, and you can change these to maneuver the cameras. You can have a dual operating system where one person's flying, the other person's operating the camera. That's great. You know, when you want to get complex shows like on TV, you see, like TV shows and stuff like that, you know, walking dead and all that. They will use these. This this exact one was used and they're flying around and you know, someone else is operating. The camera gets a really complex shots that way. Really good stuff. Okay, as you can see here, we've got basically two things on this controller. The left hand side controls the altitude and your your what? Your We'll get to that. This one here does your motion, like your horizontal motion forwards backwards, side to side. Your is rotating spinning, so let's move that around a little bit. So let's talk about that. Your pitch So we got your is rotation great for doing panoramas. Great for flying. Sometimes when you're flying forward, you can. You are a little bit and kind of operate like an airplane. Um, so you could do that by taking this controlling, moving its active sack. Now, what has always recommended when you first start flying a during for the first time, use this one. Get it, get it up to just above eye level while I live ahead level so you don't crash into yourself. Make sure your wide open space that there's nothing to question two and then use this one and practice moving forwards and backwards and around and around until you get a feel for it. So you're does that. The next one is These aircraft terms pitch. So pitch is like that way that access that is pitched and it will pitch down to move forwards. It will pitch up to go backwards they give, but we'll keep the camera stable in the same location the whole time. But that's how movements moved. So forward and backward has known is pitching. And when you turn the camera up and down, that's pitching the cameras, adjusting the pitch. Then there is wrong rollers site decide, You know, like, roll over like that. Just like a dog. Yes, you don't. The rollover is gonna get that way. All right, so that's used for site decide movement. And that's done on the controller here, using decide here. So forwards backwards, side to side. So the thing you've got the difficult thing about this sometimes is trying to figure out which direction this pointing. Because right now it's really easy with the minute you get this, like, 200 feet away. Where's the front? Right. So there's lights. These red lights are gonna be on the front. They're gonna be flashing, you know? That's the front. These lights on the back, these air status lights, they're gonna be green. If you've got satellite lock, they're gonna be orange. If you're flying an attitude mode, if he's a flashing red, it's time to land. That means the batteries about the day, so you can use it. But the other thing is, no matter which direction you are facing, this is always forwards. So when you push forward on that stick to move forward, this is going to go forward. If it's pointing side to side and you put it forward, it's going to go that way. So forwards is not always forwards, so it takes a little bit of getting used to people. So how long does it take the flight drone? You can fly it immediately. It's gonna take about a year to you really get comfortable with it, flying it like on an almost daily basis. I mean, you know, maybe if you've done a lot of, like video games of stuff, you might pick it up a lot quicker. Do any of PV F PV does make a lot easier because if you've done the car racing game and you're sitting in the car and then you're sitting above the car and you're trying to drive it looking outside the car really hard, right? And in the minute you put yourself in the driver's seat, it's much easier. Same with this. So but one of the things I do is mentally when I'm flying is I just put myself in here. I just consider here I am. I'm looking forwards. I'm looking out the front of this and in, and then someone I'm turning. I'm still looking out the front, so you're kind of putting your mind in the front of that drone and you just kind of flying like this and you want to move forward. You're thinking I came looking this way, so I'm moving forward and falling around takes a little bit of adjusting team mentally. But if you do that, then you're gonna be able to control it. And after a while, you know, you think about it and you get to do more complex maneuvers. So, like some of the video shots, like, I don't know if you saw the one when I you did, you were watching it when I had the canoes is watching the canoes come over. Remember that the guys on the outriggers came and then, um, and then I followed them down and around and whipped up the other way. In order to do that, I had to control, uh, the your because I had to rotate with them, right. I had toe also do the Ford in backward motion to keep them in the shot. And I also had to adjust the tilt of the camera to keep them in the center of the frame. So sometimes you're flying like this. I'm literally doing one thing on this hand, one thing on this hand and got my finger on there. So it's like playing drums. It's really confusing. When you first started after a bit of practice after a lot of practice, it'll become second nature. So there's drills that I used to practice, and I'm gonna rip through those right now before we go to the next thing. So this is flight patterns. Straight line. First thing you do H is your home base lifted up. Fly, Let it hover. Fly it back Land There's your first flight. Don't give any harder than that second flight box pattern. Fly it forward. You're gonna pause now you gonna your turn around 90 degrees, Fly it hover 10 at 90 degrees. Fly back 90 degrees and back. Complete that box. Now Don't even move onto the next one until you can get that nice and smooth. That box could be smaller. Could be big. Find an open field, No trees, no obstacles and practice that no animals, no Children. You see dogs don't fly around. Dogs don't fly around kids. It's not Cuban. The dog starts barking and chasing the doom. It's not funny. Um, you know, and I see people like doing that on the flying. You're going to get the dog just like that's not good at all. The poor little soft nose and that dog is not gonna mix well with these props. So when you see an animal, keep it away, All right, circle pattern. Then you're gonna be flying with the circle. You just basically be flying in a circle like this. Then the next thing you're gonna do this get starts getting really hard. Is figure of eight figure right now you're really cooking with gas. You're basically flying around like that. Then you're gonna switch directions and you're gonna fly around like that and then you're gonna come back like that. So you basically completing two circles, but you're flying in both directions by doing a figure of eight. You're actually exercising most of the flying skills required to do a lot of other things. Then we do know is forward knows forward is when you're flying. If you rotate, you do that. You keep the nose forward all the time. The nose is this end nose forward circle. So you're now flying a circle instead of flying a circle like this like you're mixing cookie dough. What you're doing is you're now flying where the front of this is pointing forward. And what that does is enables you to practice doing two things at the same time. Now you're flying forward. Your speed is controlled on this side. And this side here, your ewing slightly so forward speed and in your sight aside here controls the radius of your circle. How big that circulars or how small that is. You steer with this and you control your speed. With that, it's really hard. At first, your circles gonna look like eggs. They're gonna look like old anything but a circle. Crooked squares usually that they want to get doing that Nice nose, forward circle. It's nice. While I'm on that, let me just show you on the camera here. There's two ways of holding controllers. One way is not right. Any other way is not wrong. It's personal. Okay, I see. Like you know, it's a funny the people like you know, we always loved it become, you know, like I'm a pincher or I'm a thumb er you're a picture or your thumb and people like really gravitate towards those things. And, you know, all the pictures are great and all the thumpers don't know what they're doing. You know, it doesn't matter, really, Just as long as we're up there and was shooting and we're flying. We're doing the same thing. You could be a picture or a thumb. Er So what is what is a pinch or thumb? What do you think? This grip on here on that one, all of them is a grip and nice because some people like to slap their thumbs on there like that and go like that, usually gamers and quite comfortable. It's designed to do that. You can see there's a grip on knew that Zagat something so your thumb can go, is designed to be used with your thumb. You can also use your finger at the same time, but this also grips on the side. Oh my gosh. So that means it's designed for pinches as well. Yes, so some people find, and I find that most of the time in the pincher. Sometimes I'm a thumb when I'm doing multiple things of the camera, but when I pinch, I feel like I can get more precise control. So a pinch is when you grab two fingers and you grab that controller and you kind of move it like that. So that's two ways of controlling one is not wrong. And one is right, which ever way you prefer it is the right way. So pinching in thumbing was there question about that happened there? Yes, withy flight parts are supposed to call him there for your exercises whilst your doing them. I think it's a little bit difficult to see exactly how your circles going with you making an eagle something like that. Can you get any daughter from the flight path that you're taking, like similar to a JPs log? Yeah, that's a great question. Actually, that's a very, very good question. And yes, you can. In fact, when you go into the deejay, I app, um, and you go into certain emergency. At the top is a home screen. You can go into your flight telemetry, and you can actually look at all the previous flights you've done right down to replaying them. And watching them happening will even show what happens on the sticks. You can see when you move the sticks, you can see where it is and GPS coordinates. You can see what Speed your altitude, and you can actually relive their type flight conscripts through it and go forward. And in fact, deejay user, if you crash a drum and they will look at that telemetry and see what happened. And, you know, this is not an official thing, but I've noticed that if it was not your fault, they might repair for you free of charge or under warranty. If you crashed into a tree and I can see that like you questions obstacle, you're paying for that. Repair yourself. So yeah, so is there. And it's also good for I can see that in the future. You know, if you get into a thing and there's some legal dispute and someone says the flow from my house, you can show them. No, I did not fly of your house. I did not spy. Here's my logs. So yeah, you can replay them. They really detailed. Yeah, to the great love that Alright. Oh, another question. Yes. Can you also program them? Can you program flight? Yes, you can is actually multiple flight modes with these, you can use waypoints. So a waypoint flying is where you can actually mark those. You can fly your cup that you could mark those positions in the air and you can have it automatically fly between those points or multiple points. Um, you can have it doing, you know, follow me. You can have another one. Just one of my favorites uses orbit. See this here. You can actually have it orbit with the nose pointing in it the whole time. And ah, that's great. So you actually just fly where you want to do it? You such altitude. You say your distance, your speed and direction and it will automatically fly around there all day were until the batteries die. So there's other types of flight modes that you can do this terrain. Follow me. There's there's a ton of autonomous modes in there. That's one of the things why they put all these centers on here to enable it to do more of those autonomous flight mode. Now, you might be asked, We'll do it if you get all these flight months. Why are you making me these exercises? Because even know this can fly itself it's really important that you have a self driving car. You should still know how to drive that car yourself, you know? So you wanna learn these skills and also there's a certain shot you might want to get. You might want to come in slowly in and go out. Firestorm, do some custom shots. Like towards the end of the day, we're gonna be going within the half day. We're gonna be going through some of those different flight modes that we could be using or ways of flying for video. So, yeah. So the other thing we got here is we got the nose forward figure of eight. Now, this is an advanced flight thing. It's really quite advanced. So you want to do that? And once you've done that, the next one is landing in circles. So you find an area that you want to land, you fly over there and in your land, and then you come back. Now that is way harder than it looks. You would think that that's not hard to do. But one of the things that is a real challenge is when this gets in the year and there's nothing behind it. It becomes very, very deceptive, like where it is over the ground because you lose your binocular vision in about 30 feet. You know, because my eyes are set apart and that's how we can tell where something is in three dimensional space. Once you get out there and there's nothing behind it, to give it a sense of scale, it's really, really hard to know. Like, for example, you see a whale in Utah and flying and find it. Well, it's hats and not easy or dolphins. I mean, awesome dolphins one time and I'm looking through the camera went where they it's Have you ever done binoculars? You see something? You put your telescope and then you put it on and you have 200 round find it. It's like that, right? See if they're limited field of view that also with this is way out there, you don't know what straight down. So doing this exercise helps you learn distance, and the only way you're going to get there actually is by scale, how big this is. And after a while you're gonna learn, I can see it that biggest gonna land there. That's gonna be beneath it. It's It's not easy, says another thing. Then, of course, Orbit is what I mentioned. Now the orbit shot is a great shots, one of my favorite shots, really good for shooting videos and stuff like that. Um, so any anyway, that's that's that's it. Any questions on this stuff right now, So kind of talking about distances on one way of her drones be used is for, like, climbers and expeditions where they'll send the drone and to get footage of a wall or a trail that's yet to be conquered or something like that. What sort of distances can you program it for? And also was that battery life like So is there just a certain point where it's gonna no longer pick up my signal or it's gonna die? And it's in the middle of the mountains or something like that? Um, number one is never going to die if the signal breaks or the control of the battery goes and the controller loses connection and will always fly home. In fact, well, you can set it actually to either hover to land or to return home. I don't know why you would have it hover. It's gonna hover until what? Until you. Well, I guess if you're out there and you've got a signal is going in and out, maybe over Harvard, till it catches back on this. And actually there was a reason, but anyway, but typically, yeah, that's not gonna happen now the range of these. If you're in the United States, the legal distance is visual line of sight. You cannot fly. Doesn't matter how far this can go. You're not allowed to fly further than visual line of sight. What you can see with your eyes. Some other countries might have different rules. I think China might be a little more lax on that. Um, but this has a range of about four miles. The Maverick has a range of about four miles, so these can go a long way. Now, these have about a 25 minute battery life. I actually seriously doubt I could fly four miles and four miles back on one battery, but technically you could So so that's That's basically what you got this? You got the battery life of the early ones. Don't have as much. This guy here gets about 15 minutes out of a battery 15 20 minutes. Maybe they say 20 minutes. I've never got 20 minutes. About 15. 17 I think might be my record for one of these, but this is a lot heavier. But the other thing I forgot to mention about this, too, is this has interchangeable lenses on the inspire. So I have a longer Lynch's of 45 Olympus, and it goes in it, which becomes a 90. So when I when you see some of my motor motor racing stuff that shot with that long lines, I'm not like right there over the track, it looks like I am. It looks like the motorcycles coming right into it, but it's not. I'm in a safe distance. So when you're doing there and also I did ah, music video recent with Taylor Davis. She's a violinist. Big youtuber, just like 270 million views on your channel. Two million subs. And so we did a video with her and I got really close to her. But once again, I'm using the longer lens on the inspire, so I'm not close to that person. You don't want to crash into a person and just to mention before we finish this segment. The other thing about the inspires it hasn't interchangeable. Camera comes often. X three in the pro has the X five. But this is the Osma. This is the asthma handle. You may have heard of this. Essentially, what you can do is you can attach the same camera. This is the same camera Gimbal goes off there on here, and I can walk around and a stable handheld footage So this will actually hold it stable a zai moving around like this and will hold that camera nice instead. And I can do this. Handheld shots. Kind of like what you would do for steady camp. So this is great. Like, I've seen films that have done entirely with these in these, and it's it's really good stuff. Yeah, we're questioning. So you said you could go, um, like, between buildings. Is there a rule like how high you have, Congar? Oh, above. Like, if you wanted to get, like, say, go to a new city or I wanted to do an outdoor wedding. Okay, well, let's just talk about that for a second. Do not fly between buildings unless you have permission. You don't want to go downtown into cities and large, built up areas and stop flying between buildings. You're going to get yourself cuffed, like, real quick. That's that. That's illegal. Um, but if you are gonna be a soon here and make sure you have permission, um, so, yeah. So, like, weddings and stuff like that? Um, here's what I recommend with weightings because, you know, a lot of people are using turns for weightings. Um, they're great, Like I've done a few. I've done the receptions. I've done some of the, you know, the other kind of stuff, but like the ceremony, you don't want to be if you want to go ahead. But I've had people ask me to shoot a drone for the ceremony and life's treatment, which you can is do live streaming on YouTube and Facebook. I said no, I said, You know, find somebody else. Today is the bride's day. It's about her. She is the one that should have the attention, not that little thing buzzing in the sky. Because the minute you flying here is gonna everyone's gonna look at it. That's that's a way to kind of ruin someone's waiting. In my opinion, it's it's all sound that you are the man to have the experience. And you know all these things, eh? So I want to quickly four to your resource is slide because that you I know you have many more things that we can send people to since we just have a three hour class here with you. But talk quickly about that, and then we're gonna head out. Okay, so I have a few resources on here. Very simple. It's just steel drum. And what I have is because obviously come flying here. So you have some videos that I'm flying on location and I have some tutorials and stuff like that. You know, little flying tutorials and stuff. I have links to those. I also have a little E, but you can download it. A starter kit is just like a cheat sheet. I call it, and it has, like, preflight checklists and stuff like that process. Useful little resource