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Widdershins posted:
Helping hands are pretty much essential and they are really cheap. A bit of soldering practice will serve you well in the long run especially if you ever get into FPV.
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Nov 25, 2013 19:00
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Yeah I did all my batteries to XT60's and I've soldered the bullet connectors on my motors and esc's. So it's not that I "can't", I'm just not very confident with it. I worry about my solder points disconnecting every time I disconnect my batteries. I certainly don't pull them apart by the cables though so it's more of an irrational fear. I'm sure I'll pick one up eventually.
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Nov 25, 2013 19:24
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rotaryfun posted:Yeah I did all my batteries to XT60's and I've soldered the bullet connectors on my motors and esc's. So it's not that I "can't", I'm just not very confident with it. I worry about my solder points disconnecting every time I disconnect my batteries. I certainly don't pull them apart by the cables though so it's more of an irrational fear. Even if you did pull them apart by the cables, a good solder joint is going to be stronger than the wires it's joining. You're more likely to snap the cable just in front of the joint than to pull the solder off. If you are having problems with the solder disconnecting, several things could be going on -- too much heat, too little heat, not enough flux, etc -- but it's definitely a user error. Solder is quite strong.
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Nov 25, 2013 19:38
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Good to know. I haven't had one do it yet but I've just been sure one of them was bound to pop.
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Nov 25, 2013 19:45
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Well my kids daycare was closed unexpectedly for today. I made good use of nap time.  It performs much better than my dubious hk skew planar through two concrete walls in my condo.
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Nov 28, 2013 01:47
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Nicely done!
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Nov 28, 2013 02:11
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My summer of FPV video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11NmKsORfaQ
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Nov 28, 2013 16:01
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ease posted:My summer of FPV video : Cool stuff. I really need to try flying my quad in some more confined spaces.
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Nov 28, 2013 20:21
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ease posted:Nice vid as usual VJ. Gimbal on a plane is pretty cool. Details on the mounts? Great looking setup.
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Nov 30, 2013 07:24
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It's pretty simple, the motor side : The frame side :  3d printed in ABS. And I just put the frame side on a drill press and made two holes for 40mm M4 bolts. It's heavier, probably almost twice as heavy per arm. Haven't had a chance to see how much shorter my flight time is yet, but I'd guess its substantial.
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Nov 30, 2013 17:43
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Soo...I'm pretty much out of the RC hobby nowadays and have unloaded most of my gear. I just found a small stockpile in a closet. Anyone interested in this stuff? I can open an SA-Mart thread if so:
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Dec 1, 2013 19:31
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I want the HK credit. How much for the CC3D and 4x 2830-11?
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Dec 1, 2013 19:34
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Went ahead and made a SA-Mart thread for the rest of the stuff: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3590595
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Dec 1, 2013 23:35
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NEFPV user appelm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNNdh1B8SRQ
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Dec 3, 2013 03:34
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So everyone is currently exploding with opinions on the Amazon delivery drone. Just how possible do we think this could be? Is the battery tech there for this to be plausible? Are they willing to lose money on lost drones and employees to collect said drones? What laws need to be laid out before this can happen? Would they be breaking any if they were able to start doing it tomorrow? How can they guarantee that they are delivering to the front of my house and not the roof/woods? How do you verify that you are delivering to the correct appt#?
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Dec 3, 2013 18:31
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rotaryfun posted:What laws need to be laid out before this can happen? Would they be breaking any if they were able to start doing it tomorrow? Flying experimental aircraft for commercial purposes, for one.
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Dec 3, 2013 20:33
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This just seems to me to be so much of a publicity stunt than an actually doable thing. But I'm still so very new to RC and have NO experience at all with multi rotors that it just seems like a LOT of walls to conquer.
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Dec 3, 2013 20:44
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There are a bunch of articles going through the hurdles around now, I think Wired has a couple. Basically right now, for commercial drones, they'd need constant LoS, which is obviously pretty impractical for a delivery service (they'd need to drive a chaser car all the way to the destination anyway). The FAA is trying to figure out some legislation, but it's looking like that'll come about closer to 2020 than Amazon's timeframe.
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Dec 3, 2013 20:49
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Yeah the fact they announced it during their biggest shopping season on a national TV show rather than a tech conference or PR event is a big giveaway. Plus the fact that the rules for that haven't been finalized and that robotic cars will probably be considerably cheaper in all but the densest urban areas.
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Dec 3, 2013 20:51
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It'll happen, but it's years away and this was mostly a PR stunt.
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Dec 3, 2013 20:58
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ImplicitAssembler posted:It'll happen, but it's years away and this was mostly a PR stunt. I really doubt drone delivery will be a consumer thing. Besides the complicated issues of "where do I meet my drone if I live in a high-rise/flight restricted area/duplex/etc" I just don't think the economics are there. The energy-costs of flying are huge and air-package delivery has the fuel/weight conundrum that means to carry a reasonable payload for a meaningful distance (with landing/takeoff buffers on both ends) means you need larger robust drones. Which then pushes your costs up and further worsens the flight path and landing/takeoff issues. Meanwhile anywhere people want to go pretty much have a road, autonomous vehicles are driving around right now in several states, and short-hop ground transport is an already proven economic model. Why fly a pizza to your house with a robot when a robot can just drive it there and deliver 5 other pizzas on the way? All with a lower per-pizza delivered cost.
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Dec 3, 2013 21:08
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Trabisnikof posted:a lower per-pizza delivered cost. Bingo
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Dec 3, 2013 23:01
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I've been flying R/C planes for several years, and I've thought about getting into quadcopters. Is there any sort of smoke system out there that would work on a quadcopter? I've been thinking about experimenting with skywriting via GPS waypoints. All I've seen are devices which work like smoke grenades, where you light it and it keeps going until it runs out. I would need something that could be switched on and off. Trabisnikof posted:I really doubt drone delivery will be a consumer thing. Besides the complicated issues of "where do I meet my drone if I live in a high-rise/flight restricted area/duplex/etc" I just don't think the economics are there. The energy-costs of flying are huge and air-package delivery has the fuel/weight conundrum that means to carry a reasonable payload for a meaningful distance (with landing/takeoff buffers on both ends) means you need larger robust drones. Which then pushes your costs up and further worsens the flight path and landing/takeoff issues. The cost of running and maintaining an electric quadcopter (the only realistic option for landing in a populated area) would probably be trivial compared to anything with an internal combustion engine.
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Dec 6, 2013 17:41
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Trabisnikof posted:I really doubt drone delivery will be a consumer thing. Besides the complicated issues of "where do I meet my drone if I live in a high-rise/flight restricted area/duplex/etc" I just don't think the economics are there. The energy-costs of flying are huge and air-package delivery has the fuel/weight conundrum that means to carry a reasonable payload for a meaningful distance (with landing/takeoff buffers on both ends) means you need larger robust drones. Which then pushes your costs up and further worsens the flight path and landing/takeoff issues. Fixed pitch MRs might as well have DC motors and powered by AAs with the advances coming out in variable pitch MRs, too. Your example of a robotic car makes sense, but I bet there is much more efficiency to be had in time, cost, and electricity consumed of having a fleet of many UAVs compared to a small number of road vehicles and make more trips. Flying will take less time, pizza stays hotter, customer happy. No traffic, no red lights, and no complicated self-driving car with LIDAR and motion sensors and everything else that goes with it. Instead you just have a GPS guided UAV and maybe a standardized landing pad with IR reflectors or something that the UAV will recognize anywhere. You can build a one-off MR that will carry a pizza 5 miles and back for a couple grand, scale that up to serve every Pizza Hut in the country and they'd be way cheaper than hiring a 17 year old with a Civic, let alone running a robotic car. Thinking on the bigger scale, UPS and FedEx already fly drones across the world delivering packages, well not drones just Boeings. A modern airliner can already fly and land totally autonomously if it weren't for regulations, there's no real reason why an unoccupied cargo plane shouldn't be a UAV. I also think VFR will be gone in our life-times, either that or there has to be some incredible sense and avoid technology developed for UAVs.
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Dec 6, 2013 19:01
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Mm, yes, let's just get rid of all those complicated and inefficient self-driving cars and replace them with simple, easy-peasy self-piloting flying machines that totally have a 90% efficiency while in the air
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Dec 6, 2013 19:57
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I'm not completely up to date on quads or anything but a huge stumbling block I'm seeing is weather. Sure it works great when there is little to no breeze on a sunny day. As soon as you introduce wind/rain/snow/sleet/etc things tend to go to hell pretty quick...even simply too hot/cold temperatures will have an impact. The temp issue alone kills off some markets then add in wind in a big city between buildings (where they will be pushing these) and you'll have trouble. Just IMO. Anything can be overcome with enough money or by making the craft large enough but that opens another can of worms. Personally I'd love to see them go for it mostly to see how the tech trickles down to consumer stuff.
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Dec 6, 2013 20:18
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ante posted:Mm, yes, let's just get rid of all those complicated and inefficient self-driving cars and replace them with simple, easy-peasy self-piloting flying machines that totally have a 90% efficiency while in the air Also, yes flying through open 3D space is far easier than driving on a narrow 2D route that is littered with both moving, stopped, and pedestrians and stop lights and right-of-way laws and merging lanes and SUV drivers on cell phones and stray dogs and-- Or I can buy a UAV off the shelf that already has programmable GPS guidance and can already accomplish the task of delivering a pizza, today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDXuGQRpvs4 Integrating UAVs into the NAS is going to be hard enough, how anyone will integrate true self-driving cars into the far more chaotic and unpredictable world of roads is an unbelievably hard task. I'd seriously like to hear why you think that would be easier because I've expended quite a bit of effort explaining my thoughts. Vitamin J fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Dec 6, 2013 |
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Dec 6, 2013 20:21
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NitroSpazzz posted:I'm not completely up to date on quads or anything but a huge stumbling block I'm seeing is weather. Sure it works great when there is little to no breeze on a sunny day. As soon as you introduce wind/rain/snow/sleet/etc things tend to go to hell pretty quick...even simply too hot/cold temperatures will have an impact. The temp issue alone kills off some markets then add in wind in a big city between buildings (where they will be pushing these) and you'll have trouble. I live in a place where it is routinely below 0*F in the winter and is over 100*F in the summer and have flown quads and other UAVs in both conditions. They fly the same with a very small battery capacity hit that is usually outweighed by denser air. Propellers are old tech though, I wouldn't be surprised if some far more advanced type of flying machine is developed in my lifetime. Vitamin J fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Dec 6, 2013 |
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Dec 6, 2013 20:26
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Vitamin J posted:Well there are no commercially available self-driving cars, only prototypes that costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and are not at all adapted to delivering goods and cannot be operated without a human passenger. This is a pretty funny post. I doubt that slapping a LIDAR unit on a Prius costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes, the program costed millions, I'm sure, but guess what? The technology is here. And from all reports, true self-driving cars are already able to navigate the (far less) chaotic and unpredictable world of roads better and more reliably than humans. The "open 3d space" stops being very open when you start putting tens of thousands of drones through designated airways, add in another axis of movement where poo poo can go horrible wrong, and when it does, it's a whole lot more catastrophic than a car crash. Also motor efficiency doesn't mean a lot when you're trying to fight gravity, something land-vehicles don't have to do.
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Dec 6, 2013 22:18
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I see a self-driving car on the road at least 1-2 times a week (I live near Mountain View). Even from an an electric vehicle to electric vehicle comparison, the energy costs of lifting and flying cargo + fuel will be significantly larger than just driving the drat thing. I can see Amazon/UPS/Pizza Hut using drones to say, track and monitor their automated ground fleet (say the Pizza-mobile is driving into a high-risk area), as then you don't have to transport a payload, land or have a human interface all of which have weight costs.
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Dec 6, 2013 23:06
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ante posted:This is a pretty funny post. You're an idiot, and here's why. Straight lines will always be more efficient and safer. RTK gps will allow for these drones to fly w/ in 1cm xy and 2cm z. It's already possible now. Machine vision will allow it to detect any kind of interference and play around it. And where not talking 32 degrees of vision, we are talking complete spherical machine vision. Spider poo poo. Not to mention that soon, it will be required that everything in the air have some sort of ADS transmitter. Hell, I'd go as far as to say in 15 years we'll loving tag geese with whatever the next generation of ADS is. ease fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Dec 7, 2013 |
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Dec 7, 2013 00:49
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ante posted:This is a pretty funny post. Energy efficiency is not a concern if a UAV is only making 1 or 2 trips at a time like the pizza scenario. I only brought it up as an example of how far technology has progressed in a short period, way to miss the point completely. Also your pizza shop will be limited to areas where it can park a car whereas my pizza shop can be located in a dense urban area or an area that gets heavy snow and the roads are impassible. For parcel delivery then road vehicles will win out of course, but delivery speed is important in that application, they can take all day to deliver hundreds of packages. Like I said, right now UAV pizza delivery is possible. You just plug in two GPS point and the UAV flies between them compensating for wind and could have a database of do-not-fly points or altitudes for given areas. Again, this all exists RIGHT NOW. The most advanced self-driving cars need a specific route programmed in, they can't route-find by themselves yet. So unless I'm completely out of the loop regarding autonomous cars, then I think you're talking out of your rear end right now. I'm sure it's all possible but it doesn't exist yet.
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Dec 7, 2013 01:25
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ease posted:You're an idiot, and here's why. Straight lines will always be more efficient and safer. RTK gps will allow for these drones to fly w/ in 1cm xy and 2cm z. It's already possible now. Machine vision will allow it to detect any kind of interference and play around it. And where not talking 32 degrees of vision, we are talking complete spherical machine vision. Spider poo poo. Not to mention that soon, it will be required that everything in the air have some sort of ADS transmitter. Hell, I'd go as far as to say in 15 years we'll loving tag geese with whatever the next generation of ADS is. Straight lines aren't more efficient when you have to carry everything rather than roll it. Whatever magic computer vision you can imagine will in fact be applied to automated ground vehicles too, where this marketplace is already solved efficiently by ground transit. Look at it this way, how big of a drone would be needed to fly a 1kg payload 1 mile, then have hover capacity for 15min, then return? Now you have a drone that can deliver 2 pizzas at a time. Meanwhile, the pizza delivery driver (or driver bot) can take 20 pizzas and probably deliver the 20 pizzas faster overall, and unquestionably cheaper to the company. This makes even less sense for non-parishables where it doesn't matter if my kindle comes in 15 minutes or 2 hours. Vitamin J posted:I'm glad I can amuse you. The NAS is already incredibly micro-managed, and if every UAV has a transponder and VFR is addressed, then boom they're already integrated into the NAS. If by "specific route programmed in" you mean you look it up in Google Chauffeur? Then yes. That's what you have to do for the Google self-driving cars. They're on the regular road all the time. I just 2x checked, and apparently Googlers use them to commute all the time, and company policy is to only autonomously drive on the freeway when commuting. So today, there are autonomous vehicles in use during rush hour on the Interstate. The pizza issue is just my point. You really think it will be easier to service NYC by drone then by car? Pray tell where will you deliver my pizza in the snow when I live on the 57th floor? Or how many drones will a pizza shop need for the rush hour when they get 30 pizzas within 60 minutes? Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Dec 7, 2013 |
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Dec 7, 2013 01:44
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Straight lines win when energy costs are only different by pennies, and getting a package in 15 minutes vs 2 hours is worth getting your customers money. Do you imagine little r2d2's throwing packages out their slots? How about when they get stuck in the snow? Or when kid's push them over for fun. It's just silly sounding. There is tons of space above us, and limited space below us.
ease fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Dec 7, 2013 |
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Dec 7, 2013 02:17
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ease posted:Straight lines win when energy costs are only different by pennies, and getting a package in 15 minutes vs 2 hours is worth getting your customers money. Do you imagine little r2d2's throwing packages out their slots? How about when they get stuck in the snow? Or when kid's push them over for fun. It's just silly sounding. There is tons of space above us, and limited space below us. I just don't think you understand the physics of this, its not a marginal difference between flying something and driving it in terms of energy costs, its a factor of 10x or more. An autonomous car isn't something a kid would just push over (and we already have parking spaces, no need to build drone landing pads everywhere) so that's not really related to the conversation we're having. Seriously, what's a multi-copter drone with a 1kg+ payload and 15m hover time and 30m flight time look like? How big would that thing have to be?
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Dec 7, 2013 02:46
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ease posted:You're an idiot, and here's why. Straight lines will always be more efficient and safer. RTK gps will allow for these drones to fly w/ in 1cm xy and 2cm z. It's already possible now. Machine vision will allow it to detect any kind of interference and play around it. And where not talking 32 degrees of vision, we are talking complete spherical machine vision. Spider poo poo. Not to mention that soon, it will be required that everything in the air have some sort of ADS transmitter. Hell, I'd go as far as to say in 15 years we'll loving tag geese with whatever the next generation of ADS is. So you're saying that the magic of RTK GPS can overcome wind gusts, machine vision that requires seeing everything in complete sphere is easier to accomplish than machine vision that only needs to be 360 degrees on a flat plane, and avoiding unexpected objects in the air (evasive maneuvers) is just as simple as avoiding stray dogs on the ground (stopping). Also doing all of this while overcoming gravity in a straight line is cheaper than doing this with a 10-block detour to main roads while only overcoming rolling resistance. Yes, I'm the idiot here. Maybe if they can airdrop packages with a plane-style drone, but I dunno, that makes it pretty hard to sign for packages. Helicopters aren't exactly known for their fuel economy.
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Dec 7, 2013 03:33
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ante posted:So you're saying that the magic of RTK GPS can overcome wind gusts, machine vision that requires seeing everything in complete sphere is easier to accomplish than machine vision that only needs to be 360 degrees on a flat plane, and avoiding unexpected objects in the air (evasive maneuvers) is just as simple as avoiding stray dogs on the ground (stopping). Right now. This is today : A copter can fly out 5 miles and back on one charge. That's about $.05 of electricity. What makes you think that in the future the amount of energy used to deliver a package is going to matter enough to say oh hey lets put this in a land based robot? Yes, RTK will have no problems correcting for wind? What's your point? Overcoming normal winds is, right now, not a problem. It's stupid to argue about. You first arguments were that it wasn't safe, which was false. Now we are arguing about pennies of difference for cost, and hours of difference for time. I win.
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Dec 7, 2013 04:14
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ease posted:Right now. This is today : A copter can fly out 5 miles and back on one charge. That's about $.05 of electricity. What makes you think that in the future the amount of energy used to deliver a package is going to matter enough to say oh hey lets put this in a land based robot? With how much payload? This whole argument is about cargo movement so just quoting magical numbers about an unburdened drone is silly. Marginal costs are huge factors for capital purchases (buying the thousands of drones required to cover even one city). For example, the Draganflyer X8 can carry 800g, so more than 1 pizza but it can't support a pizza volumed payload. But the Maximum Flight Time: Approx. 20 min (without payload) And it also requires 60 minutes to charge, so you need at least 3x copters to provide coverage. What's the size of a multicopter with 1kg payload and 30+ min flight time? Edit: Even the platform used in Domino's Domidrone stunt only had a 10m flight time when loaded with 2 pizzas. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Dec 7, 2013 |
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Dec 7, 2013 04:26
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ease posted:I win. Hahahaha Gettin' mad about Amazon delivery methods in here. You throw in a fact about GPS being good to a few cm, and then act like that is a totally accurate measure and can be relied on in gusty conditions. I only joined in on this conversation because of that one post that had a whole bunch of faulty comparisons, but that's cool, I guess, if you want to keep spewing points that don't really work in the real world. You can win. (I guess to fully spell out that rebuttal above, to get any kind of money-earning volume in deliveries, you'd need to be spitting out a shitton of drones one after another, and if you need to give them huge margins of safety space that's not really possible. Automated cars, on the other hand, can draft each other, with only inches of space between them because they actually have brakes (drones don't have air brakes))
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Dec 7, 2013 04:52
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Trabisnikof posted:If by "specific route programmed in" you mean you look it up in Google Chauffeur? Then yes. That's what you have to do for the Google self-driving cars. They're on the regular road all the time. I just 2x checked, and apparently Googlers use them to commute all the time, and company policy is to only autonomously drive on the freeway when commuting. So today, there are autonomous vehicles in use during rush hour on the Interstate. In the future there will be platforms or balconies where UAVs will drop off deliveries. I'm sure such things as balconies already exist on some buildings there. Since you brought it up, can you explain how a google-car drive when there is snow on the roads and ice covering the road signs? I suspect that the most efficient way to delivery pizzas in NYC for a long time coming is the same as it is now, with bicycle couriers. Definitely not a car...lol can't believe you think a car is the best mode of transport in NYC. Trabisnikof posted:Seriously, what's a multi-copter drone with a 1kg+ payload and 15m hover time and 30m flight time look like? How big would that thing have to be? Vitamin J fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Dec 7, 2013 |
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Dec 7, 2013 05:10
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