OMG! What a
beast!
Just doing the preparations for the flight were vastly more involved than the Mini-2 flight I did an hour or so before. Some of that is just that it was the first time, but there’s just more
stuff to consider. I took all the components out to the forward flight deck carefully. I set up a little table and a chair as my flight station, fired up Darth, and set him at my normal launch point.
Those
goggles were pretty awkward for me. I definitely need to tighten the straps a bit more. But I got them on, and put them up on my forehead.
But before that, I had turned on the camera I had set up to watch the flight externally, on a tripod. Good thing I did that too, because for the first time
ever, flying
any drone, I got those stupid “Format SD Card” errors, for both the aircraft
and the
goggles. Lame! I poked around a little bit trying to do that in real time, but soon gave up. I haven’t yet integrated which controls are on the
goggles, and which are on the remote, and I’ve never used
goggles before anyhow.
So how do you do that stupid format thing anyhow? In the drone, an external card reader? I’m using SanDisk Extreme 256 GB in both the drone and the
goggles. Or at least, I
intended to. Lame! It should just
work, and it always has in the past.
The “Format SD Card” error kept intruding on the screen, and when it did that, it wouldn’t display any of the flight data! Very seriously frustrating. I was poking at stuff trying to just tell it to go away, and eventually that worked.
I need to change the units to Imperial, but I’m sure that’s easy. I just didn’t think to do it. I can do rough conversions in my head in real time, but I’d very much rather not have to.
When I actually lifted off, it was classic DJI. The props spun up fine, and I gradually added power, until Darth leapt into the air! As planned, I went down to the end of the driveway just looking at it, without the
goggles, and brought him back. I went up to about 25 ft, came back down, went up again, went out a little bit, and came back. I never actually landed on any of these occasions; I just brought him back to a hover in front of me.
Time for the
goggles!
OMG! I’d never worn VR
goggles on any kind before, but I adapted to it in a couple of seconds. I immediately shifted my reference point to
being the drone. It’s
way more natural to me than trying to fly a drone by watching it. I went down to the end of the driveway and back, but it was all so easy and natural, that I scrapped the other incremental tests, and just took off.
What a rush!
It’s almost spooky how easy and natural it was for me to fall into the perspective of being the drone.
I was up in the air and looking around! Sure enough, I moved around in my chair as I was moving around in the air, as others have reported. I did a rotation, and started to cruise down toward the creek…but not for long. All my putzing around had used up most of the battery life.
My fingers definitely don’t know what control is where yet. I got the low battery RTH, and started to climb. I didn’t intuitively know where the button to cancel that was, but I just kept punching buttons on the remote until I found it.
At that point, I flew back to the driveway, descended, and landed pretty much exactly where I had taken off. There was more of a “thump” and a bit more of a hard landing than I expected. Is that normal? I had the left stick full down.
More will come to me the more I think about it. The battery is charging again now, and I should be able to get at least one more flight in today. A big problem that I have is that there’s a semi-infinite amount of FPV crap that I “need” to buy, with a decidedly
non-infinite amount of money! But the Fly More Kit is definitely top of the list, and it probably won’t take me many cycles of impatiently waiting for the battery to recharge before I just do it.
I’m an FPV Pilot!
Yow-wow!
TCS
