It's true: I bought a drone last week. It's a DJI Mini 2, which is a very nice, compact, and fairly cheap drone (about $500). It turns out to be butt-easy to operate thanks to very good internal firmware, and I got pretty good at flying it almost immediately. On the downside, the camera is OK but not great.
The drone controller connects to my phone, which provides real-time video of what the camera is seeing. Among other things, the phone app also includes an internal map that tells you what areas are off-limits. Most of these are airports, and it turns out that I live right on the line of the restricted area for John Wayne Airport. Literally. I can't operate the drone at home, but if I walk a few doors down it works fine.
The only real problem I've had so far is that the controller seems to randomly lose contact with the drone on a regular basis, even when it's fairly close. Or, maybe it's more accurate to say that only the video goes out. It seems as if the drone continues flying in whatever direction it was going but refuses to update the video, which is obviously very bad. When that happens, the drone could be anywhere and you don't know it.
On one occasion, the controller app not only lost contact but froze up so completely that I had to reboot my phone to get control back. On the bright side, once I rebooted everything went back to normal.
Anyway, just as I showed you lots of panoramic photos after I learned about Photoshop's photo stitching function, I'm sure I'll be putting up a fair number of drone photos now that I have this new toy. Today's top photo is a picture of the Chase building on El Toro Road near the 5. I was looking for a tallish building to illustrate what the drone could do, and it happened to be the closest one around in legal airspace.
After I took that picture I turned the drone around and puttered around a bit. Then, as I was about halfway home, I turned the camera back around and discovered a plume of black smoke nearby. Apparently a motor home caught on fire, but the flames were extinguished within a few minutes. That's the lower picture.
"...as I was about halfway home..."
Are you on foot for these shots, or are you driving places and controlling the drone from the car? Or are you sending the drone around to get these pix while standing in your back yard?
Lots of space for cars in those photos, none for humanity. How do you walk around there?
I don't know could've been a lame jogger maybe
Or someone just about to do the freeway strangler baby
Shopping cart pusher or maybe someone groovy
One thing's for sure, he isn't starring in the movies
Cause he's Walkin' in L.A
Nobody walks in L.A
The connectivity problem is due to the fact that RF is always semiconnected at best. (If you want to make yourself sad, look up what semiconnectedness does to TCP.) The downlink from the drone to the controller throttles when it gets too noisy and since the video takes up nearly all of the bandwidth, it is the first thing that is sacrificed. But there is no standard throttling algorithm. It sounds like the one in your drone gives up after a certain number of retries -- a questionable choice. But the codebase may have been repurposed from, say, an industrial-control environment.
I don't have any knowledge on how well they work but there are range extenders you can buy. Considering how noisy LA has to be I'd think some reading/testing might be in order.
Like a sort of strap-on beanie with an antennae sticking out of it.
Space age!
Did Ms. Drum approve this purchase?
Are you saying there's some GPS software thing that prevents you from being able to use it if you're too close to the airport?
So Kevin's gone from California socialist to full-fledged CCP spy. Why am I not surprised!!??