Xiaomi Mi 4K drone
 

So I finally decided to spring for a decent quality drone when I saw that video capabilities had reached a reasonable plateau for a reasonable price. Getting a GPS capable drone that can take 4K 30fps video for around $400 was the price point I was waiting for. Just couldn't convince myself that spending $2K on something that could wind up flying away or get stuck up in the top of a tall pine tree was a real wise decision for me to make. Not that I would be too thrilled with this thing biting the dust, mind you, but it certainly wouldn't be quite as painful, I think.

This is the first time I have taken it up into the air. I actually got it on Saturday, but with a brisk breeze taking place the past couple of days, I decided to just hold off on the launch date. Besides, I had a bunch of other stuff to do to get ready anyway. Firmware updates for all the hardware, calibrations for the compass and the video camera gimbal. Stuff like that.

Anyway, this was a flight with REAL modest goals. Just get it up in the air, use basic controller commands, test out the video camera system, and then land it in one piece where I wanted it to land. As long as the drone responded to the controller commands like it was supposed to, and nothing suffered any infant mortality, then this should have been easy to accomplish.

I have been practicing with some smaller drones I bought a few years ago, as well as spending some time on a flight simulator program on my PC. Honestly, this thing feels like a piece of cake to fly compared to the simulator and those smaller drones. With the small drones, if you take your hands off of the controls and your attention wanders for a bit, you might have a devil of a time finding where the blasted thing drifted off to. With this particular drone, because of the GPS capabilities, when you take your hands off of the controls, it just stays PUT where you left it. Which is great, because while taking video, it's almost like having the video camera sitting on an elevated tripod, it seems so stable. And of course the three axis gimbal helps a LOT with that too.

As you can see, very little room for error flying anything on my own property. Except for that little area around the garage, the entire rest of the property is heavily wooded. I'm not even sure I could safely land the thing near to the house, as there are some small clearings, but it would be kind of nerve wracking with all the tree branches all around. Even a small error could put the drone up into the top of a tall pine tree, with me having no way to recover it other than just waiting for it to fall out of the tree some day. Maybe I could hire some squirrels....

This drone also has the capability of recording in 1440p at 60fps, which I may try next time I take it for a flight. I think the 60fps might help a LOT with the obvious visual degradation when moving the camera. I wish this thing had come with 4K 60fps, but alas, not too many drones offering that yet, and those that do are a lot more expensive than this one. But maybe by next year things will change there too. There have been a LOT of improvements with this stuff since 2014 when I first looked into this stuff. Reliability has evidently taking a huge step in the right direction, which was a big influence in my decision to spend even this much money on a drone, modest as it is.

The tarps on the garage apron are because we covered some of the tender citrus trees last night and had the tarps sitting out to dry out before putting them away. Things should be warming up for the next week or so. As it turned out, helped somewhat when I was playing with one of the video adjustments.

Speaking of which, here are some adjustable settings for the video camera that I can play with, and early on in the video while right above the garage looking down at the tarps, I played around with the "saturation" setting on the camera. Might just be my eyes, but I could only really see a change in the blue of the tarps, and not much else. But something I guess I need to play with some other time.

I only have a single battery for the drone, so my flight time is limited to around 20 minutes. This flight was much less because about half of the juice in the battery got used up with all the calibrations and updates I had to do over the weekend. I have more batteries on order, but they are on a slow boat from China. Literally.

Anyway, this is kind of a boring video, but it will give you an idea of how well things have progressed with these flying video platforms lately. I think I am actually a bit excited about the potential of taking video from a completely new perspective for me.

The video is in 4K if you can view it at that resolution.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79oLT1hhyE8

Very cool! I'd love to have a drone some day.

Is there any warning regarding how flying near power lines may disrupt the signal to the drone? A few years ago I was flying radio controlled airplanes and had one coming down for a landing at half throttle. I flew about 20 feet over a power line and the plane's motor quickly accelerated to full throttle and the rudder locked over to the right. It dug a 4 inch hole in the turf when it crashed. I wonder if the drones will react and crash?

Unless the power lines are generating frequencies in the 2.4ghz and/or 5.8ghz bands, then there shouldn't be a problem with the drones being around them. Now there could be a danger in that the drone could actually physically contact a line and break a propeller, which would certainly lead to it tumbling down to the ground. And I have seen at least one video where a drone contacted a power line and sparks flew from the contact, so apparently that is a risk as well.

I believe each drone gets mated to it's specific controller, and apparently this is a narrow enough band that interference isn't often an issue. I have a wireless network set up at my house with repeaters that allow me to connect to some equipment in a building 150 ft. away. And I have wireless cameras set up, with two of the transmitters right on the garage in the video. There are four wireless cameras total, each with their own specific frequency. None of these signals have interfered with any of the drones I have been flying. And that doesn't even take into consideration all of the other bands of radio frequencies that I am sure are all over the place.

I think if these sorts of things were a substantial problem, all of the radio controlled devices would be rendered pretty much useless unless used way out in the boonies where there would be absolutely no interference at all.

Personally I wouldn't fly around power transmission towers at all, if for nothing else, the possibility of physical contact with all the lines involved and the fact that they will be VERY difficult to tell exactly how far away from the drone they really are. Proximity determination at long distance can be deceiving. Using FPV (first person viewing) is not going to be much help because of the narrow view and the fact that nearly all of the cameras use such a wide angled lens, that distances can be very difficult to determine. The best course of action from what I have seen is to always move ONLY in the direction the camera is pointing if you are anywhere near any sort of obstruction.

YouTube is chock full of drone crashes, and I've been watching as many as I can just to see what the most common causes of crashes are. Nearly all of them, especially lately, appear to be from pilot error. Either from mismanagement of the controls in a panic situation, or else just not paying attention to what is around the drone and especially in the direction it is heading, not where it is looking.

Probably one of the most problematical situations I have seen that crashes a drone is when some stupid bird attacks it and they both likely don't fare well after that encounter. I don't know of any way to avoid that if it happens, because unless the bird comes at the drone from the camera's point of view, you would never know what hit the drone to bring it down. Even seeing a bird coming, I don't think my reflexes would be faster than the bird's anyway.

Now that being said, I have found that the compass on this new drone is VERY sensitive to interference, especially magnetic in nature. When I was playing around with trying to calibrate the gimbal, I was using a battery powered level and I found that every time I put it near the drone, the controller would tell me that there was compass interference, and refuse to allow me to launch the drone. And I have heard of people having problems when especially strong magnetic solar storms were taking place.

FYI, I found a particularly interesting site that shows a lot of pertinent data concerning environmental factors that could affect flying radio controlled devices, and shows them all in a real easy to read format, along with a recommendation as to whether it is actually safe to fly a drone or not at any given time.

https://www.uavforecast.com/#/

Hopefully I'll get to fly the drone again tomorrow. Supposed to be cloudy all day, but winds should be calm. Got two additional batteries I ordered finally, so I'll be able to charge them up and able to fly for a longer period of time. Not sure I have the confidence level yet to send the drone out over the woods over my property, but maybe. I might try to fly it above the house to see how that goes. Baby steps, I guess, until I'm sure of myself and this equipment.

WOW
 

When I win the lottery, I'm ALL OVER THIS. Awesome footage, Rich.

The first thing I thought, when hearing about your drone, was that it may be a great tool for locating corn snakes. LOL. You know how thick the vegetation is in southern Florida. You can't always force your way through the brush, or if you do it has to be a worthwhile venture.

Heck Don, this thing is relatively inexpensive. Truthfully I am astonished at the quality/cost equation. I was looking at DJI products that were easily 2 to 4 times more expensive. For $400 I really don't see anything out there even close in quality at that price point.

I read a LOT of reviews about this thing, and it gets high marks from just about everyone. Some noted a problem with the gimbal throwing the horizon off kilter sometimes, but even in those cases, the problem appears to be fixable. Honestly I think mine is a little off kilter too, but I don't think it is going to bother me any. At least not right away.

Hopefully longevity and related reliability will not be a factor down the road, but the technology with this stuff is moving pretty quickly, so I would imagine that when components wear out on this thing, there will be something newer and better available anyway.

Check out YouTube videos on the Xiaomi Mi 4K drone. I was pretty impressed with what I saw, obviously. I have a feeling that the company is blowing them out the door cheaply to get themselves established in the marketplace. So the attractive pricing might not last too long.

Unfortunately, the only places selling the thing are in China. But I got it delivered in just a hair over three weeks, so it isn't too bad. And shipping was for free.

Heck, not sure how well that would work for you. If the drone hits ANY of that vegetation, it is going down, and then you have to wade in after it. And likely have to replace one or more propellers. Having to change the battery every 20 or so minutes would likely get on your nerves, too. And then you could spot a beautiful, one of a kind, corn snake among the palmettos and watch as the snake, spotting the drone thinking it is some sort of predator bird, glides off into some hole among the palmettos.

I guess you could do it, but unless you are REAL good at controlling the thing, I suspect it wouldn't end well.

Now this did bring up an idea, though. I wonder if gopher tortoises sitting at the entrance their burrow, sunning themselves, would tolerate a drone flying up to them? I guess getting too close would have the downwash of the drone blowing sand in their faces, so that might not work. And it IS rather noisy. But maybe I'll have an opportunity some time to give that a try.

I'll look into it. Thanks for the producdt review.

You can't beat a drone for the perspective it brings you.

Like you I waited for prices to fall and was fortunate to come across the 3d robotics solo which went in fire sales for cheap. a $2000 drone for $180 I ended up with 2 so can keep one as a spare.

I fixed those links for you to your videos. The syntax for using the YouTube tag pair is:


[youtube]YouTube video code ONLY![/youtube]


The videos you took look awesome! Wish I had areas that photogenic around here. And honestly it's probably going to take a while before I develop the nerve to fly my drone over the water. The fact that the ability for US to be able to take videos of that nature and quality now just really excites me.

I've been watching 3DR ever since they started producing consumer level drones, and I likely would have bought one had they not always seemed to be just shy of what I wanted. For instance, they refused to over 3D gimbals on their drones and only offered 2D for the longest time. As most people discovered, 2D just doesn't cut the mustard on a flying platform for video.

Not sure what is going on with 3DR now, but my guess is that they are abandoning the consumer market and only targeting professionals and professional applications. I guess they got tired of people crashing their drone and wanting a replacement even though it likely crashing because of operator error.

But what is becoming more and more evident to me is that 4K 30fps is just fine for ground based video, or from flying platforms that are remaining in a stable position with only modest movement in the subject matter. For anything akin to actually flying while video taping, 30 fps just can't process the data stream properly for smooth video. At least to my eyes. Seems that when the processor can't process the data fast enough, it just fills in the blanks with a close approximation which turns out leaving the resultant video "fuzzy" looking in areas. This is especially true in high detail areas like grass and foliage.

I'm guessing my Xiaomi Mi drone will be obsoleted by a 4K 60fps version in a year or less. Xiaomi seems to want to go toe to toe with DJI, and they need to make that step. If they were to come out with something like DJI's Mavic Pro but with 4K 60fps, it would be a killer product, I think. I just hope they don't make the body a dark color. Something of that color will just be a whole lot harder to find if it drops into the underbrush somewhere and you have to run off to try to find it.

Thanks for fixing the links :)

Yeah 3dr target the site survey pro's now.

I would be more worried about losing my gopro than the drone lol but even that I got from ebay so my outlay wasn't that great.

I also upgraded the gps board which gives me confidence to fly over water and far into the distance.

The worst aspect of the 3dr is the size which is quite cumbersome even in its backpack.
Would like a DJI Mavic Pro for its compactness but much to expensive for the casual fun use that I want it for.

Technology is moving at such a pace though that it won't be too long before it trickles down into my price bracket.

For now I'll just practice while having fun :)

I took the drone out for a flight again today...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp9sjk47H0c

Unfortunately I lost the last third of the video because I forgot to stop the recording before shutting down the battery on the drone. I knew I had screwed up just as soon as the battery beeped. Oh well. And it was such a perfect landing too. That "Return To Home" function works really well. What happens is that when you shut off the power before closing down the video, the file becomes corrupted because something isn't written to the file by the camera that needs to be in an orderly shutdown of the video. I've done this before with the little drones I played with, but seems that there is a lot going on to occupy my mind doing this stuff, and the old gray matter just ain't what it used to be.

I only used one battery as I just wanted to test a few things out this trip. I imagine that flying around above my property like this is going to get old soon enough, so no sense pushing it.

At first I took it up to 125 feet, but for some reason the tree tops just looked awfully close to me. So I wound up bumping it up to 250 feet which put a lot more air between the drone and the treetops. I really need to check to see what I have the Return to Home altitude set to. I really don't want that to be below the tallest trees it might encounter if it decides to head on back because of a connection failure. I've watched several YouTube videos of crashes that it seemed obvious that this is what happened to them.

I took a look at the roof of the house and can see quite a bit of rust on that sheet metal roof. So much for the contractor telling us that it would be good for 75 years. I think they used some of the pieces that were "seconds", as that seems to be a common practice around here with contractors and subcontractors. I notice the several better looking pieces were ones that they had replaced soon after putting on the roof. I had commented to them that it looked odd having them so different looking from the rest of the roof, but the contractor told me that it would all look the same after a year or two. Well here we are 26 years later..... Liar. Might have to see if we can find someone who can paint the roof with a "paint over rust" paint and sealer someday, I guess. That's not a job I want to do myself. That roof is pretty steep, and I'm sure falling off of it would really ruin my day

Did a little cruise over our property, heading mostly north towards the stream, but didn't go to the edges. It seems the GPS signal indicating the location of the drone on my smart phone wasn't showing up once it got further away from me, so I'm guessing the trees are blocking some of the signals. The view I could see from the camera was holding up OK, though, so it's not like I was flying blind. It was difficult to keep an eye on the drone through the trees sometimes. The drone SHOULD kick into the "Return to home" function automatically if it loses signal completely.

I tried recording this at 2560x1440 60fps, and the raw video looks pretty good. But when I went to process it with my video editing programs, NONE of them wanted to work with that resolution. So I wound up upscaling it to 4K 60fps and that seemed to work OK. I'll have to play around with various combinations of resolution and frame rate, and rendering options, to see what seems to work best.

I actually landed the drone while still having 50 percent charge on the battery. But looking up into the sky for long stretches is really hard on my neck.

Later on today I played around with the various exposure settings on the camera while having it sitting on a table pointed to an old camera color test strip card I have laying around in a bunch of old camera equipment. From looking at the results, I think I can improve on the video quite a bit with some tweaks I will implement next time I take it out.

It was kind of windy above the tree tops today, but the drone didn't seem to mind too much. I could hear the motors changing pitch as it fought against the wind, but I couldn't see any sign of that in the videos. That 3 axis gimbal seems to do a pretty good job keeping the camera steady, I guess.

What a fantastic place to live

I was able to fly the drone quite a bit today, and spent some time playing around with the settings for the camera. Honestly, my first test didn't turn out so hot with the video results, as I believe I had the contrast and saturation way too high. I didn't have them at max, but apparently it was still too much. Also set the white balance for the "Sunny" setting, and not sure if the combination was the issue or not, but I could actually see the colors changing on the treetops. It was NOT a good looking effect. And the shadows were just too dark, and the light areas just too bright. So back to the drawing board.

For the next launch I cut both the saturation and the contrast settings in half, and reverted the white balance setting back to the default option. Color seemed MUCH better this time, and I didn't have that odd color shifting. So I think perhaps the white balance setting might be important for a stable image, but perhaps more testing will enlighten me.

I got up to around 340 ft, and was about 800 feet away this time, I flew out to the north and south edges of my property. I'll tell you, at that height and distance, if you take your eyes off of the drone for even an instant, it is VERY VERY difficult to find it again, visually. I was actually surprised at how disorienting it is looking at my property like this from an elevated platform. I thought that if the drone ever lost power and just dropped to the ground, I would be able to locate it fairly easily just by noting where it dropped. But man, I dunno. All the trees look alike when seen from above. Might be a good idea to paint the thing fluorescent orange or bright blue to help in finding the thing if need be.

I did lose the video feed once, but it came back a little later on. I still had the GPS locator signal, so at least I knew where it was supposed to be and what direction it was pointing. I flicked it into Return to Home mode and it headed right on back to me, so at least I still had control over it. But definitely a tense moment. I'm looking for an antenna signal booster right now, as evidently the trees are blocking the signals somewhat. I really can't see me ever wanting to fly any drone that doesn't have a "Return To Home" feature. Having that working for you will make ALL the difference between getting your drone back and it just flying off, never to be seen again.

And I got another corrupted video file too. Again, the last file in the series when I was coming in for a landing during the first time out today. I KNOW I turned off the video that time, so not sure what is going on. The second time out, just as a precaution, I stopped the video right after touchdown, and then started it back up again, just in case the LAST video in a series was getting corrupted somehow. But in this case, ALL of the videos were clean when I took a look at them, and none were corrupted. So, beats me.

I'm not sure which is more boring, looking at someone flying a drone over an open field, or looking at a video of just tree tops. So I doubt you all are going to want to watch basically the same old thing every time I take the drone up for a flight. I may render some of them here and there, but unless there is something noteworthy to look out, I don't see much reason to post all of them up on YouTube.

Oh yeah, I actually used the drone for something I originally thought one might be a good tool for. I used it to inspect the rain spouts on the garage to see if the down spouts are clogged up with pine needles and leaves. Maybe I will render that one later tonight, just to show you all how that worked out. But the short answer is, YES, I need to clean them out. Hopefully tomorrow, as the forecast is calling for rain most of next week. If we get a REAL heavy rain, somehow the installers put those rain spout gutters up in such a way that if they do not drain fast enough, the water will back up in them till water actually starts leaking into the INSIDE wall of the garage. I may have to drill some drain holes at that "leak" level in the gutter sides. I guess that kind of defeats the purpose of those rain gutters being there, but oh well. Much better than having water leaking into the garage. Maybe I need to look into a product that keep the gutters from filling up with crap in the first place. If the pine needles and leaves were dry enough, I think the downdraft of the drone's propellers would probably just blow the junk out of the gutters anyway. That thing does move some air!

I've been kind of looking at drones, but I can't decide. I wanted a smaller one that would be easy to take hiking. Like the DJI Spark. Yours is less expensive, though, with a much longer flight time.

Yeah, I'm hoping that Xiaomi comes out with a DJI Mavic look-a-like. The Mavic is what got my interest back up in drones because of the portable nature of it. There are several manufacturers now coming out with a similar looking drone, but a lot of them seem to still be vaporware proposals to generate funding.

If I were to buy a more expensive drone, I will have to insist in 4K 60fps. For really quality video, I believe this is a necessity. And it has to be NATIVE too, not simply upscaled in the drone's processor. If I want upscaling, I can do that in post processing and not spend the extra money on bogus marketing claims they use for check marks on a capability list.

I did an inspection of the rain gutters and downspouts on the roof of the garage the other day, figuring this would be a nice PRACTICAL use of a drone. Ordinarily I need to drag out the 12 ft. ladder just to take a peek, so I tend to put if off longer than I should. So maybe now it will be something I do more often rather than waiting for heavy rains to cause the water to back up and leak into the inside of the garage as has happened a few times.

Seemed to work out OK, but I can see where a larger display screen than my smart phone would be a lot handier for something like this. I really couldn't see a lot of detail till I downloaded the video onto my PC and then took a look at it on the big screen. I could generally see what I was looking at, but determining just how packed the pine needles and leaves were there, well, not so much.

It was actually tougher than I would have expected to control the drone that close to the roof of the garage. I think the downdraft from the propellers was playing hell with the positioning, not only because the drone was mostly half over the roof and half not, but with the roof being sloped, that was probably causing some unusual wind patterns that the drone was having to deal with. Luckily it wasn't enough to unbalance the drone, so no mishaps, and it worked rather well, I think.

And yeah, it looked like I needed to clean out around the downspout areas, and with rain having been in the forecast 2 days later, I did that chore the next day. Being up on top of that 12 ft. ladder is not my favorite thing to do. though. The ground just looks so far away up there, and I'm sure my falling off of the ladder would make for a pretty bad day.

Of course, after the "work" part of this flight, I goofed off and did a flight over a small area of our property. Hope you like seeing the tops of tree tops.... :hehehe:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53qV-ZoeYmA

Yeah, I know watching something like this is just about as boring as watching grass grow, but heck, this fascinates the hell out of me just being able to take video like this. But doing it seems to be a whole lot more interesting that actually watching it. It's all I can do to stay awake through the entire clip.... zzzzzz

Oh, this was taken in 2560x1440 60fps and then upscaled to 4K 60fps using Vegas Pro 15. I think the upscaling is introducing a bit of graininess, so I might have to try just uploading in the native resolution to see if that is any better.

I am glad that people are having the courage to post their videos of their crashing their drones. I think I'm learning a lot by watching their mistakes and trying to figure out what they did wrong. There appear to be several causes:

1. Being distracted by someone else nearby
2. Flying via FPV in a direction other than where the camera is pointing
3. Misjudging how far the drone is from some obstruction or it not being visible at a distance when flying via line of sight
4. A hardware or software failure in the drone or controller

From what I have seen in the available videos, the first three are much more common than #4. And since people might be a whole lot less likely to post videos showing their mistakes than they would of actual failures of the drone/controller, I suspect that "pilot error" is the cause of a vast number of crashes.

Before doing this latest flight yesterday, I recalibrated the gimbal and the compass, and had to do a firmware update too, so I was running slim on battery life for the flight afterwards. These firmware updates are mandatory, evidently, and you just cannot fly the drone until the update has completely successfuly.

The gimbal seemed more level than before, and I didn't get any of the compass errors I seemed to get every flight. The horizon still goes skewed sometimes, but it seems to correct itself eventually.

I also mounted a modified antenna booster too, just to see if that would help. But I didn't send the drone out far enough to really test it any. I will sometimes get video distortion on the display of the cell phone, so I want to see if the antenna booster will help with that.

As mentioned above about "pilot error" I almost made a mistake when Connie was out there with me. Not paying close attention and when I was bringing the drone back down, it had drifted away from the garage more than I had realized. When I noticed the drift, I got disoriented when I tried to move it away from the tree, not immediately realizing what direction the drone was pointing, but luckily caught it in time. When the drone is pointing towards you, all of the lateral movement is the reverse of what you think it should do. I wasn't as close to the tree as it appeared in the video, but close enough. Not a good idea getting distracted when flying these things, I suppose.

Anyway tried a little manual "follow her" when Connie walked down the driveway to fetch the trash cans.

I'm still very impressed with how stable this flying video platform is.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNqQqbx4QHY

When I was flying radio controlled planes and gliders they could be flown as high as big dots in the air. Indeed, one of the local airports filed a complaint that we were flying too high. What has happened to the range we used to enjoy? When I read about certain drones the specifications state effective range of 30 meters for the cheaper ones and some up to 50 meters or more. That isn't one heck of a lot of range. If you need to keep the drone in close proximity to the transmitter it kind of limits what you can do, and where you can fly.

The height allowed now is kind of "set" by the FAA to 400 ft. Not sure how much they can enforce such a thing, however. But supposedly all drones over 1/2 lb have to now be registered with the FAA. I'm not sure this would ever pass a constitutional test if it went to court, however, because as long as I am not engaging in some sort of problematical interstate commerce with a drone, I can't see where the federal government was ever granted this sort of authority by the US Constitution. But of course, proving you are right about such things, by riding such a lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court, is a whole lot more expensive to do than most people would ever be willing to take on voluntarily.

The only restriction on horizontal range appears to be the recommendation that the drone stay within line of sight. But not sure where it says anything about the drone actually remaining IN sight along that line. These things are pretty small, and become very difficult to see pretty quickly. Some of them claim a distance of a couple of miles, but realistically that would have to be a one way ticket for such maximums. Battery power is a major consideration when you want a return trip for your drone. Here is a video of a guy running his out to about a mile and a half and then returning it with just a small bit of battery power still remaining.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikMKjC7KKbo

Had the wind been blowing the wrong direction because of a sudden change during the flight, there was a real good chance that his drone would have dropped down into the trees long before getting back home. There are quite a few videos on YouTube of just this sort of thing happening to people.

This can also be problematical because once many of these drones reach a particular low value on remaining battery life, they will automatically land the drone, no matter where it is and what is underneath them. Seems kind of short sighted to me, since apparently this is being done to keep the drone from just falling out of the sky when the battery becomes completely depleted. Personally I would like to have it that I could still use that remaining 5 or 10 percent or so of battery charge to try to pick a better spot to bring it in, rather than the drone itself just deciding, "I am landing HERE, right NOW." And to top that off, with the new smarter batteries, they show zero percent charge remaining even though there is still a substantial charge left in the battery. But to try to keep the battery from terminally discharging, they show zero percent with actually a good margin to spare. Again, personally, I would like to be able to make that decision myself. If I have to choose between losing the drone in a lake, or having the battery depleted to the point where it becomes permanently dead, I would choose to lose the battery rather than lose the drone itself. So I do wish these manufacturers would put some sort of overrides in the system so the operator had some say in the matter when things get a bit out of hand.

Maybe in some later generations that will take place. The drones do seem to be getting more and more "intelligence" programmed into them with things like obstacle avoidance and the like, so maybe some sort of rudimentary artificial intelligence to make rational decisions in an emergency will show up in these things eventually. Of course, even then, I would STILL like to have a say in the matter concerning MY property, not what some programmer in China thinks is best for me.

After checking the specifications, the Xiaomi Mi has a pretty good range, compared to the less expensive models. What else do you plan to do with the drone once the gutters are all clear? I've flown a cheap model just for the fun of flying without crashing. Do you have some practical application in mind?

Nothing really specific at the moment. Might take it out into the national forest near me and see if there are some spots that might look interesting from an aerial view. Too bad the state and national parks all have phobias about drones, as there are some beautiful areas I would really like to get video footage of from this flying platform. I would like to fly over St. Joseph state park (Cape San Blas) and St. George Island park, but apparently I would have to take off and land outside of the park areas to do so legally. I don't believe this drone has the range for me to be able to do that. It is usually quite windy at St. Joseph state park (Connie and I usually refer to it as Cape Sand Blast), so that would complicate estimating where the turn around point in remaining battery power would be. The battery drains rather quickly when having to fight winds. It is usually much safe to fly out against the wind, so that you have the wind at your back on the return trip. But that can be hard to predict for a drive out to such areas, as wind direction can change in a heartbeat around here.

I had thought that the ground level of my own property would be much more visible through the trees than it actually is. Well, at least when viewed from my smart phone while flying. Easier to see more detail when I play the video on my PC's screen. Seriously, there is a lot of our land that Connie and I have never set foot on. We have a stream running through the north end of the property, and unless it is a particularly dry season, it can be swampy in patches. Not to mention that if the mosquitoes are in abundance, it certainly wouldn't be much fun in those areas. With the property being heavily wooded, the shade keeps the mosquitoes quite comfortable waiting for a meal to wander on by. So looking at the land via a drone, I thought, would be rather intriguing. I guess I can once I get over being such a weenie about being too close to the tree tops.

I guess this is more of a fun toy, which I thought would be a reasonable purchase now that the reliability of these things is much better than when I first looked into them, and the video quality is respectable enough to actually be useful. As I mentioned before, I do think that 4K 60fps will be much better to use on a moving platform, but that option is not widely offered quite yet, and only now on drones that cost a lot more than this one. But maybe next year options will improve. By then either less expensive drones will offer this improved video capability, or else maybe I will have even more confidence in these things to where I won't mind so much spending a bit more money on one that is a bit more full featured with better resolution options and all directional obstacle avoidance. Sure hope there is "hawk avoidance" too, as I know we have them around here, and getting the drone attacked by one would certainly bring it down, not to mention likely injuring the hawk too.

Took the drone out the other day to try to figure out where that high pitched squeaking noise is coming from that I am hearing. First I took the props off and then used a microphone attached to my camera to try to see if I could identify which motor was making the noise by checking one motor after another. But I really couldn't hear the noise that way, so perhaps the lifting force of the propellers is necessary.

So I put the props back on and then did a short flight and brought the drone as close to the camera as I could to see if that would register audibly what I have been hearing. I guess I should have moved the work table out of the way, as this drone just does not like an uneven surface that gets in the way of the prop wash. I found it tough to control even under GPS mode and had to fight with it when it kept trying to drift close to me and the camera.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A4OYaY_yvs

But I can plainly hear the squeaky noise starting around 2:54, but not too much luck trying to determine if it is just one motor making the noise and if so, which one. I think it got slightly louder as the left front motor of the drone faced the camera, and I kind of leaning towards that motor being the culprit, if I had to make a choice.

If it would hold still, I could try the same thing using the microphone, but that would mean having to set the controller on a table and walk around the drone closely without having any hands on the controls. I am not too keen on that idea.

Not sure how much this is something to be worrying about, though. Maybe a little spot of lubricant applied to the motors would help? Hopefully if it gets worse, it will do so gradually instead of a sudden motor failure while 200 ft up in the air and over a pine tree.

Why can't you anchor the landing gear to a picnic table and let the motors run so you can Check them? We used a hollow tube in the old days to hear engine noises. Today they have stethoscopes. I'd be careful about lubricating the motors. If they are brushless they may be either sealed, or shielded, with high temperature grease. Oil may dilute the grease and cause more problems.

I contacted the company about the slight gimbal tilt I (and others) have had with this drone, and they set it up such that a new firmware update would be sent to my controller the next time I logged in to fly the drone. So the other day I set things up to get the firmware update and then go through the recommended calibrations. One thing that struck me as odd was that the procedure indicated that the drone should be pointed due North for the calibration. I could see that for a compass calibration, but no idea why that would be important for the gimbal to be able to "dead reckon" a flat horizon. But I did it their way, anyway.

I then took a short flight, straight up, and then spun the drone around to check it out. Still seems like a very slight tilt, but definitely looks like an improvement. Even if I can't iron out the slight tilt, this would be livable.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlrcojiD2uQ

Jealous
 

That's amazing. I SO need to get one, but only after I retire. Too much on my plate for that now. Thanks for sharing.

I don't think there is going to be any real penalty for waiting, Don. Technology is pushing these things to better and better quality and reliability almost on a daily basis. I know I will hold out for my next drone having 4K 60fps. 60 fps makes a substantial difference in the video from a moving platform. 30 fps is OK for relatively slow moving video, but it degrades quite a bit when the action, either from the camera's perspective, or the subject's, speeds up. This can be especially noticeable when foliage is in the image, because the image processing bogs down and just tries to smooth over the information it can't handle. So branches, leaves, and grass will wind up looking like green cotton candy in the image as the detail is lost.

DJI just came out with a new product they are calling the Mavic Air (I believe). But alas, it is still only 4K 30 fps. They do have the Phantom 4 Pro in 4K 60 fps, but more than I want to pay at this point. And DJI is still apparently plagued with fly-away problems from what I have been hearing on the net.

I'm hoping that Xiaomi will be coming out with a new model in the near future that really goes toe to toe with DJI.

One of the funniest things I read recently looking into these drones was someone in China complaining about their own Chinese competitors copying their designs and products and selling them cheaper than they were. :laugh:

Karma is a bitch, ain't it? :laugh: :laugh:

Finally had a day yesterday where it wasn't raining, windy, or I was under the weather from that cold or bug I picked up last week. So I took the drone out to try out some stuff with it. Actually felt a bit rusty at the controls, so this is something you really need to practice quite a bit, I guess.

Anyway, this drone comes with some automated flight features in the controller app that I wanted to play around with. The first one is the capability to set way points that will direct the drone to automatically fly from one to the other point in sequence. What you do is to go into the menu to select it, set up the parameters you want (drone height, speed, etc.) and then select the points you want on the map screen by simply tapping points on your cell phone display running the controller app. My goal had been to send the drone out the driveway at 125 ft elevation, down the road, then when reaching the edge of our property, move from one corner to the next, circumnavigating the four corners and head on back to "home". But I think there is a limit of 6 way points, which would have been OK, since I could have triggered the Return To Home feature when the drone had finally reached the end of the way point run.

BTW, what is interesting to me about this function is that I think it would be handy to set way points to command the drone to fly a pre-determined path, which would allow me the freedom to then just worry about manning the direction that the camera is pointing without also having to worry about where the drone was actually going to be flying. Theoretically, of course. At this point, I don't know what the drone actually does if you, for instance, yaw the drone to chance the lateral position the camera is pointing. The only movement you can make with the camera itself, is from pointing directly forward to pointing directly down, and any point in between. Any time you want to video something off center from being directly in front or directly under the drone, you have to move the drone itself to do so.

But the flight plan didn't work out as planned, however. When the drone flew out over the driveway, and then headed north up the road to the north edge of the property, it got to the point where I had it set to turn west to that NW corner of the property. Instead, it announced that it had lost signal, and that automatically triggered the Return To Home safety function, so it just turned to point directly "home" and came on back to the launch point and landed. Perhaps I could have regained control at that point, but I didn't try that quite yet.

Hmm, flight data was showing that it got out to about 1100 or so ft, and I think I've flown it slightly further than that before. But I was running a screen capture program on the smart phone this time, so perhaps that is interfering with the control app somewhat. I then tried a simpler way point set, just heading straight out to that northwest corner of the property, then turning south to the next corner. BTW, it seems that you MUST put the drone up high enough to clear any obstructions BEFORE triggering the way point routine, because when you trigger that function, it immediately heads towards that point, gaining altitude along the way. In my case, that would have meant flying directly into a pine tree before it got high enough to clear it. Fortunately I put the drone at height before triggering the way point command, otherwise this could have turned out ugly. Anyway, the drone again only got about 1100 feet or so out there, and then lost signal and did the RTH thing again. I may have to try this again sometime without that screen capture program running to see if that is causing this problem. The drone SHOULD be able to go much further out than that. Some people have logged a couple of miles with their drones (this model). Of course, I don't expect to get it that far with all the trees causing interference, but still, I think it should go somewhat further than 1100 feet out from me.

Anyway, so much for the way point test. So I then decided to try another function called "Orbit Mode". With this one, you have to position the drone above the Point Of Interest (POI), then set up the parameters you want. There was one parameter called "angle" that I'm not sure about, since the display didn't mean much to me. It could mean the direction the drone is pointing, but that is apparently covered in another selection. Maybe position of the camera, but the display didn't seem to be associated with the possible directions you can actually set the camera, which is just up and down at various degrees. So I guess I'll have to play around with that sometime just to see what it does. Again, you need to put the drone at height to clear obstructions BEFORE triggering this function. It doesn't go UP then out, it goes up gradually at an angle while heading to the start point on the circumference line of the circle you have set.

This one seemed to run without issues, but I was only about 215 or so feet from the controller.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz6Q2hUT7dc


I can see where people could get into trouble with some of these modes by not knowing how it actually operates and allowing the drone to run into something as a result. There is no sort of obstruction avoidance on this drone, so if you tell it to run into a wall or tree, it will certainly oblige your wishes. I'm guessing you can cancel these automated functions on the fly, but things could happen quickly and you just might not have time enough to figure out what to do before the crash. Probably would be a good thing for me to figure out experimentally under controlled conditions.

Also I had quite a few instances of trying the RTH (Return To Home) function, either because the drone lost the control signal, or I just used it as a fast and easy way to bring it back home, and noticed that the drone just didn't seem to get as close to the launch point as it had in the past. Sometimes came down as much as 8 ft. away. That's not too bad, I guess, but you still have to keep that in mind in case you are launching it from a narrow area with obstructions all around you.

But all in all, a good day of flying. Any day you don't crash or lose your drone flying it is a GOOD day.

Oh, just out of curiosity, I took my temperature gun outside because I wanted to check the temps of the propeller motors after flying to see how that looked. I'm guessing that a motor going bad would tend to be hotter than the rest of them, so I wanted to get a feel for what the temperatures should be. All four of them were registering between 100 and 103 degrees F, which doesn't seem TOO hot to me. So all is good with the motors, so far.

This video is taken by someone using a DJI Phantom 4 drone, and not the Xiaomi Mi, but it gives an interesting application of using a drone to actually find snakes out in the wild.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v97KrZTzYWU