Challenging flights!

gasquetmike · Sep 4, 2019

Sitting here this morning thinking about my experiences with drones over the last few years. I bought my first drone in Dec. 2014, it was a Parrot AR drone. It was the first time I had ever seen a drone that you could fly with your phone and see what the drone saw on your phone! I thought it was the most coolest thing ever! After only 22 flights I realized there were better drones out there, with gimbals, so the videos would be much more stable. At that time I bought a DJI Phantom 2.5. I flew it 21 times, had a flyaway ( the one and only flyaway i have ever had) where it crashed, they did repair it for free, but i lost all confidence in it and sold it. I then bought a Parrot Bebop2. I loved my bebop and really got good at flying with VR goggles. Almost all of my 202 flights with the bebop were with VR. I had a chance to work on a commercial shoot here in my neck of the woods last year. I let the director use my bebop to check out an area he was going to shoot later. He told me if i had a drone with 4K he would have let me film the shot. (The bebop was only 1080P) .Another thing about the bebop was you only see about 720P through the goggles, which isn't that great. At this point i started looking at 4K drones with better video quality in VR. I almost bought a DJI mavic until I went to our local flying spot and saw a guy with a Mavic try and try and try to fly it but it wouldn't let him due to a "no fly" zone. This was an area 5 miles away from our small local airport. It just so happens that one of the runways points in that direction so DJI changed it where you cant fly there without jumping through a bunch of BS hoops! That's when i saw the Autel Evo on the computer and started researching it. I finally bought one in march. I have had 39 flawless flights with my Evo now. I find so many interesting things around here where i think" could i make it to there and video that?" Its a lot of fun to fly somewhere where I have never been and at this age, 63, will probably never go to. I always wanted to own my own helicopter, but haven't won the loto "yet"! The Evo, using VR, is my own low cost helicopter. The one issue i have with the evo is the head tracking. Its almost impossible to get a smooth video because of it. I really wish Autel would give us the option to turn it off. , Here's one of my latest flights showing the area I have to play!

ElectricPickle · Sep 7, 2019

Awesome. I'm the same age as you. In my teens I flew R/C planes and solo'd in a real plane at 16. About 4 years ago I got caught up in building my own "drones" - at that time we called them quad-copters and tri-copters. Ordered the parts from China and built them according to some plans made by a group of people in Denmark. They eventually started racing them with VR goggles but I had lost interest by that time. I just recently wanted to get a commercially made drone that had a good camera with gimbal and found the Evo. I'm still stretching my legs with it and am gun shy after I ran it into some Spanish Moss while flying down my driveway. The crash damaged my gimbal and I had to mail it to Autel for repair.

I tried VR but could not get it to work. Sent a note to Autel and they claim that VR is still beta and not ready for commercial use. Since the last firmware update Autel has removed their VR training video. How did you get yours to work?

gasquetmike · Sep 9, 2019

ElectricPickle said:
Awesome. I'm the same age as you. In my teens I flew R/C planes and solo'd in a real plane at 16. About 4 years ago I got caught up in building my own "drones" - at that time we called them quad-copters and tri-copters. Ordered the parts from China and built them according to some plans made by a group of people in Denmark. They eventually started racing them with VR goggles but I had lost interest by that time. I just recently wanted to get a commercially made drone that had a good camera with gimbal and found the Evo. I'm still stretching my legs with it and am gun shy after I ran it into some Spanish Moss while flying down my driveway. The crash damaged my gimbal and I had to mail it to Autel for repair.

I tried VR but could not get it to work. Sent a note to Autel and they claim that VR is still beta and not ready for commercial use. Since the last firmware update Autel has removed their VR training video. How did you get yours to work?

I have a samsung s7 phone. i heard I phones dont have the VR yet?..im guessing your using an I phone?

ElectricPickle · Sep 9, 2019

gasquetmike said:
I have a samsung s7 phone. i heard I phones dont have the VR yet?..im guessing your using an I phone?

I have a new OnePlus 7 Android phone. The app works for everything else but not for VR. I get the data overlay in VR but the camera view part is black.

gasquetmike · Sep 9, 2019

ElectricPickle said:
I have a new OnePlus 7 Android phone. The app works for everything else but not for VR. I get the data overlay in VR but the camera view part is black.

same here...

gasquetmike · Sep 9, 2019

gasquetmike said:
same here...

i just realized that you were talking about the new update...so yeah...no vr on anyphone now...grrrrr

DanielC · Sep 10, 2019

I want to move to a headset too, but I don’t know how to get there.

Trox · Nov 9, 2019

@gasquetmike I was waiting for you to put the bird in Ludicrous Mode and lock the gimbal in FPV view once at the peak and do a screamer run down the mountain with some exhilarating music beat for the finale.....like at the end of a fireworks show. ? Or to give the impression of those flying squirrel base jumpers cruising just above the surface.

I've been working on some flight plans to explore our glaciers and ran into a problem on a couple of future missions....I will run out of altitude limits from my take off point. 2600 feet is the limit and some of my flights will involve hitting 3000 feet or more of change from take off. I guess I will find out if that limit actually works or not. In the meantime I'm putting in a request for Autel to add a toggle to turn off altitude limits. With the mountains I want to "explore" with the drone I can easily hit 4000 feet of elevation change from my launch site. As long as you are flying within the 400 foot AGL limit there should be no altitude limit in the software.

Hopefully by next Spring (or sooner) Autel will have a dependable VR mode available. With as much altitude change as I want to fly I think a VR googles view will provide me more security in flying closer to the surface of my subjects providing my latency is only in milliseconds. Would be great to be able to control the drone confidently enough to fly at ice level along some of the larger crevasses.