Droning On…

After “watching” a Facebook friend work on his DJI Phantom 3 Advanced drone in Norway, and helping him design his float system for it, I was finally inspired to pull my Phantom 3 Professional out and try to get it working better (after a pretty catastrophic crash in November of 2015). I’ve flown it since the crash, but the camera’s never worked properly (after replacing the camera, of course – it was broken off in the crash). I finally ordered a cable kit for the drone, and installed the cables that were related to the camera.

Good(ish) news! The camera no longer appears to randomly lose power to the gimbal, and it stays responsive and steady. Bad news: it still seems to have a problem with the SD cards. It’s like the cards randomly reboot or remount. Some cards have a greater tendency to do this than others, but they all seem to do it, regardless of format. Reformatting them in the drone seems to fix the problem, but the process itself is unreliable. I may try replacing the board in the current camera with the board from the other camera, and see if that helps.

In any case, I’m flying more now, and am still able to get good footage with the camera (when it works, it’s solid, and captures great video; it just might take a few reboots and formatting cycles to get it to that point).

Here’s an edited RAW format photo I took in the evening recently. I’ve been learning how to use the manual camera settings.

 

I’ve gotten some decent video footage, and I’ve been posting videos on YouTube. Here are a couple of the recent ones that I really like:

 

 

I hope to expand my fleet (well, fleet of one) later this year, and enhance my filming capabilities, as well as maybe work towards a commercial drone license (it’s a process, but I don’t know every step yet, or how much it costs).

Feel free to comment below, and I’d be grateful if you’d watch more of my videos, and like and subscribe to my channel.

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