brainwagon

I hadn’t been flying my DJI Phantom 2 since last year (before I herniated two disks in my neck) but I’ve been meaning to take it out and get it in the the air. This week, two different things happened which provided some incentives to get it in the air, for reasons which weren’t entirely […]

I’ve been having a bit of fun with my DJI quadcopter lately, but there is something that is annoying me and stressing me in the back of my head, and that’s surrounding the legality of flying quadcopters. Basically, it’s impossible to determine with any certainty whether flying your quadcopter in any particular place is legal. […]

It was a warm and reasonably calm day, so Carmen and I decided to take the Phantom 2 out to Lime Ridge Open Space, where many RC enthusiasts fly. Rather than bore you with 18 minutes of video, I thought I might give you two short video highlights… Without further ado:

I’m getting more confident flying the DJI Phantom 2, which means that I’m closer to having my first crash as I try to do more aggressive things. Mind you, the Phantom 2 pretty much has training wheels on it: no matter how hard you lean the stick to one side or the other, the copter […]

At lunch today, I managed to get a quick flight in before the field was taken over by soccer players. Unlike my early attempt, this time the gimbal was working. The footage is not all that interesting, since I don’t have FPV setup, I can’t see what the camera is aimed at, which makes the […]

I mentioned that during yesterday’s aborted attempt to fly quadcopters from a regional park resulted in a visit from the “Can’t Possibly Have Fun Police”, informing us that short sighted regulations against flying had been enacted in Eastbay Regional Parks. The entire incident was recorded remotely from Joachim’s Phantom 2. With soundtrack! (This is what […]

Carmen bought a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter for my birthday, which I’ve been a little too chicken to put into the air so far. But John and Joachim were interested in flying theirs today, so I decided to give it a whirl. Initially, we headed out to Miller/Knox park, out near the old location of […]

Building my full sized quadcopter is going rather slowly (sigh) but in the mean time I picked up a little Hubsan X4 to play with. It’s cheap, and because it has a very low mass, it’s pretty hard to destroy. After more crashes than I can count, I’ve only managed to ding up one propeller […]

At work, we have an informal group that is interested in drones and quadcopters. Every third Thursday, we get together and fly. Today we went over to Cesar Chavez Park for a bit of flying. I was hoping that I’d have more of my own quadcopter completed, but instead I just observed Mark fly his […]