I had been doing some gopro flights with my minimag, but it just wasn't a great idea because:
The minimag is just too small and hard to see from a distance, which is why I already lost one plane and camera after losing the plane because it was too small after it got caught in a strong wind.
The minimag needs a lot of power to stay airborne with the weight of the GoPro HD. The wing loading is just really high with that extra weight, and my last flight where the motor died on final, I barely managed to land while dropping from the sky at what felt like less than a 2/1 glide ratio.
A byproduct of the minimag's wing loading means that I have to run on power at all times which causes both noise and vibration, neither are ideal for filming.
That also means that I can't run the battery that long and the flights aren't much longer than 10mn.
If I do lose the plane, better lose a much bigger one that's easier to find in the weeds :)
The one issue with the Cularis is that it has no landing gear, when putting the camera under the plane, that's the first thing to hit the ground on landing, which ain't ideal (I saw someone who put the camera under one wing and used a counterweight, but the view isn't as good.
I ended up putting the camera under the plane with some foam to protect it and planned to land in the weeds. For my 2 flights, that worked fine although it wouldn't work as well if I had to land in a parking lot :)
My first flight (video below) was 16mn and went fine. The second flight lasted a whole 25mn, although that was pushing it, the battery died just as I was landing (i.e. I got lucky :) ).
I took some 3Mpix shots from the video, a few are below:
the flying field
hwy 280
the next door cemetary
another nice view of the cemetary
they have a nice array of solar panels
nice houses next door
why do people fill their garages with junk and park outside?
One of my coworkers was moving to NYC unbeknownst to me, and I had noticed a glider in his cube. When I asked him about it, he said he wasn't sure what to do with it because he was moving out of California that evening.
Needless to say it was not a hard sell, I offered to take it over and fix it up. The tricky parts were getting a new prop without knowing what motor was inside except for the fact that it was a competition motor with enough power to blow a speed controller or a lipo if either were undersized. He told me a story of one of his gliders where the lipo caught on fire while flying and they saw the glider gliding away while on fire :)
First, the glider is huge. Its wingspan is more than 3 times the one from my old trusty minimag, and about as much as 2 of my bigger planes combined:
The other tricky bit was setting up a radio. This was actually the hardest bit because while I had had the foresight to by a more expensive Spektrum DX7 back in the day and therefore had 7 channels, the DX7 was just a pita to configure for crow/butterfly flaps assigned to the power stick like in this picture (ailerons up and flaps down):
It turns out that the mixers in the DX7 barely allow you to use the power stick to either control the motor, or the crow flaps at the flip on one switch, but it's super non obvious. I owe a big big thank you to the guy who figured it out and wrote this post: http://www.parkflyers.org.nz/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=4193
Not only he gives the setup, but he explains what the DX7 manual doesn't do: how the hell this all works. This in turn allowed me to improve on his programming and have just a single switch that goes from normal airplane mode to crow flaps and back.
The last piece was figuring out if the ESC's BEC was able the power the 6 servos (in theory, 2A is only good for 4). An amp meter on the battery while moving all the servos seemed to show that things were ok on that front. The only part I just didn't know about was how many amps the motor would try to get from the battery and how far I was from the 15-20C (about 40A for a 2100mAh lipo) I would be.
After a long time programming the radio, I finally convinced myself that the plane would fly, I just wasn't sure about the motor situation... It turned out that if I went past half throttle, the ESC shut down to protect itself and the battery, so launching with power was quite an interesting task, I had to put just enough power but not too much and throw just right or I would crash.
I did crash a few times after some not good enough throws, but eventually got the sucker to fly. I got the hang of it very quickly and I saw right away how it must be nearly impossible to land without the crow flap setup: even with it, I stayed over the ground in ground effect without actually landing for quite a while.
I tweaked my programming after a few flights and was able to get a little bit of uplift and glide at Rancho San Antonio.
I've ordered some bigger batteries that should give me more power and hopefully let me run the motor without it shutting down when I actually need it :) and I'm looking at ways I could put my gopro camera on the glider once I feel that I have enough power to take off without risks (unfortunately, I can't put the camera under the glider since the glider lands on its belly, which would damage the camera on landing).
It was a fair amount of time to setup (and I didn't have to build the whole glider), but it's been fun so far. Now I have to get the hang of how high I am and whether I could safely land back without power if I had to.
Fellow glider pilot at Rancho San Antonio:
Right after receiving my new motor and mounting it on my plane, I went for a quick test flight at the local park which I've flown at before since it's closer than Rancho San Antonio. I thought I'd save a few minutes by going to the park since I just wanted to have a feel for the new motor.
Ok, I'll save you the details, there was wind (no big deal), I was too close to the street at end of the park and when I made my turn to land back close to where I was, the plane flew right into the sun. I got blinded and by the time I could have seen it, I tried to dodge a power/phone line and lost. The plane hit the line motor first, and the plane fell right onto the street outside the park.
I have to say I actually had a string of good luck there:
cars avoided running over my plane (thank you).
plane actually got fairly little damage, glue to the nose will fix it.
the motor shaft didn't get bent and the motor looks fine.
prop is broken, but that's why I buy packs of 10, no biggie.
the only reason why the plane wasn't flying 1H later was the plastic piece that is holding the motor is broken and I'll have to buy another one. It's more the time to go get one than the $3 it likely costs (update: very strangely, one of my aileron servos died, considering I have zero impact damage on the plane, I was very surprised when I went to the field after fixing the plane, and it failed preflight due to a broken servo. Bummer, now I have to wait a few more days for a replacement...).
lipo got compressed during the sudden stop but looked ok.
Plane damage isn't too bad
I had a look at the lipo and it looked like only the connector piece of it got compressed but the 3 sheets of lipo were otherwise unbent/unarmed. The lipo looked ok so I put it back in my car with the rest of the pieces and drove home.
A good 25mn after the crash, it self ignited on the desk I was working on. I was able to throw it on the ground and then away from close to my car where it landed while the 3 layers of lipo ignited one after another. Nothing actually got burnt despite an otherwise intense fire as the 3 mostly fully charged layers caught fire one after another (it shot pretty vivid flames 2 feet sideways). Sorry, I was too busy watching the fire to take a video :)
this is what's left of the lipo
Needless to say that on top of very limited damage to my plane, I'm very lucky that the lipo didn't self-ignite in my car's trunk, or later on when I wasn't watching it.
Moral of the story, a charged lipo that got any kind of reasonable shock is a ticking timebomb! Check Lipo Fire on youtube for more examples.
After adding a tail ribbon to my plane (to make it easier to see where is the front and back when it's far away from me), I went for a few more flights to catch some higher altitude HD video.
My first flight went mostly ok: (make sure to select HD in the resolution slider)
Unfortunately, on the second flight, the motor crapped out. First it started vibrating a lot, hence the shaky video, and when I removed the throtlle in flight when preparing for landing, I wasn't able to re-engage it. The video after the fact gives the 4 beep code from the ESC which means motor failure, shutting down. At that point, the minimag with all that weight feels like a 2 for 1 glider at best. I don't remember if I tried to flare, but it looks like I barely had enough lift glide energy left to make it to the edge of the hill (beyond that, it would have gone below my field of view)
Turns out I was able to restart the motor on the ground after a full shutdown, but it didn't restart in flight and you can hear the unhappy motor sounds :)
Just like motor, the video had a problem: after downloading it on my laptop, I screwed up while recompressing the first video and wiped the second video in the process. The second video was still on the sd card, but its cluster table had been freed since I had reused the card already.
In this case, photo recovery software usually only has to find the signature of the file by scanning blocks, read the file header and deduce how long the file is from that info since it's already lost in the cluster table, and then rely on the fact that all blocks are super likely to be contiguous, so you can just keep reading linearly until you have the whole file. This usually worked well, but Christophe GRENIER's very handy photorec wasn't succeeding there, and neither were other pieces of commercial software I tried: the restored file would not play (I restored the file by hand myself too by just copying the blocks and got the same result).
In the end, I got really good help on the mencoder-users list from Reimar Döffinger, whom I owe a debt of gratitude to: he looked at my sd card image and figured out that my GoPro HD Camera wrote the index-related part of the file header, after the data blocks. With Reimar's help on what offsets I should be looking at, I was able to get the first part of the header at the beginning, concatenate the end of the header that was written after the data blocks, and then add the actual data blocks. After almost 2 weeks of trying, his answer worked and I got my file back. If you are interested in more details, see this message from the mencoder-users list.
Here it is: (make sure to select HD in the resolution slider). Jump to 04:20 for the motor failure.
I recently bought the GoPro HD to replace my GoPro wide. The rationale was of course to get HD video, and for that the GoPro HD does deliver (full 1080p 30fps video).
A 4mn clip comes to 360MB in H264 video from the camera, and I can recompress it with virtually no visible loss of quality to 100MB with mencoder set at 3200kbps for H264 (or almost 100MB/mn down to 25MB/mn).
Changes with the GoPro HD so far are:
it's just very slightly bigger and heavier, but my plane still takes off with it
it has an internal li-ion battery which should last a few hours (GoPro Wide lasts almost 2H for a set of rechargeable AAA batteries).
the current firmware does not support shooting upside down, which I do in my plane and car. For now, I use software to flip the images and video.
more importantly, it's supposed to support SDHC up to 32GB, but for me it fails with my 16GB card so I use 2GB SD for now (that's only about 20mn at full quality before it fills up though). Hopefully they'll fix it in a new firmware.
more sadly, colors look washed out on the GoPro HD for me. I contacted support about this and will see what they say.
Here are some pictures comparing GoPro HD colors vs GoPro Wide (that's the 2 pictures per second mode where both GoPro Wide and GoPro HD take 5Mpix pictures). Just in case you ask, pictures were taken just a few minutes apart with the same amount of sun.
GoPro HD: Nice crip picture, somewhat dull colors
GoPro HD: Still nice crip picture, somewhat dull colors
GoPro Wide: Picture slightly less crisp, more vivid colors, more blurry around corners
GoPro Wide: Just prettier picture except for blurriness around corners
So far, I'm a bit torn, the every 2 second pictures are just nicer on the older GoPro Wide for me, and the early bugs on the GoPro HD had better get fixed (SDHC support and taking pictures upside down at least). No idea if the washed out colors problem is solvable or not. If not, that would be a shame.
But yes, the full 1080p HD video does beat the old 512x384 videos hands down though :)
Here is a link to the full 1080p video recompressed to 3200kbps and a link to the youtube page with the video (which allows 720p and 1080p viewing).
I took my minimag to Laguna to take some shots like I did at Thunderhill recently.
Unfortunately I didn't have the time during lunchtime so the sun was lower and showing in some shots.
Laguna was also harder to get because of how much bigger it is compared to Thunderhill where I can mostly overfly the whole track while being in a couple of spots. Laguna has much more track that just isn't visible from the paddocks. So, I ended up driving around the track (not on) and finding other vantage points that had better visibility. This mostly worked, except my 200+ shots taken around the corkscrew: I had a great vantage point, but my camera got knocked out of angle during a tough takeoff and all my shots were unusable :(
Anyway, here are a few of the good shots, and you'll find more in the link below
After getting a digital hero wide, and coming up with the idea that I should overfly the tracks I go to to take shots, I brought my minimag to thunderhill and took a bunch of pictures over lunch. Below are a few of them:
short video with takeoff from turn 11 (click for video)
turns 10, 11, 12-13
another vantage point
both straights
5, 6, 7
better view of 14-15
5 looks kind of flat from the sky :)
closeup on 14
another vantage point of 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15
Shot of one of the instructors who went out for fun during lunch
