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Old 12-22-2017, 01:27 AM   #18
Rich Z
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.