A couple of my drone vids - And Not DJI - my first post here

Videos by Drone
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I enjoy following this group as I like to keep up with people’s videos, drone news, law changes, etc. but I’ve never posted before so here goes!

A lot of stuff on here always appears to be based around DJI’s. Great as they are, other drones are available :thinking: as they say on TV!

I have a Bayangtoys X 21, I got it for free for review, though I have flown others and RC planes and little helis. Toy grade really I guess. You can buy them now for £130 or less now. But two GPS’s, follow me, RTH, some telemetry, etc. I fitted a motorised gimbal (a bit heavy :frowning: ) and use mostly either a Firefly 7S or GitUp Git2 action camera. Fitted a video tx on the drone so can fly FPV, but mostly just tx to a monitor so I can see the view. The monitor I use is a 12v car reversing colour screen. Cheap! (I have reviewed 53 cameras on my channel too so have a few cameras to choose from! And there is an FPV camera review too.)

Details of my gimbal, fpv set, x21 test flights etc are on my channel. Downside is with the weight of gimbal + camera etc is I get less than 10 mins or so flight time though, so I usually quit at about 7 minutes. (It does have low battery RTH.)

Anyhow here are a couple of my vids. Not sure if they are up to DJI quality, (you can decide) but for a £130 drone, £30 gimbal and £70 action cameras I think they are very acceptable. The Git2 and Firefly 7S give good results.

Downside of my gimbal is, though I can control it from the tx ( via and Arduino board) I can’t do really nice slow smooth pans. Plus I had a couple of problems with drone legs getting into the video frame at times. I’ve since modified the legs!

Note, some of the vids on my channel were made a while before the drone code came out! But even though it may look like I’m really high on a couple of old vids, a very wide angled lens and taking off on top of hill makes it look like I’m in orbit, I wasn’t. The drones were still below 400 ft , easily visible to the naked eye and my telemetry tells me anyway. In my experience a small drone is only visible to 200 - 300 ft ato. And maybe 300 odd metres horizontally.

PS Most of my channel is paragliding and more recently paramotoring which give me a live real life aerial view. (Plus as said , there are loads of camera tests!.) Pls check it out if you’re bored on a wet afternoon! I’m heading for 5K subscribers now and a few more wouldn’t hurt. :grinning:

probably best watched on YouTube for HD.

The sequence at the beginning of this one is a cheat :wink: Not drone footage, but intended to give a feel of flight. Hand held gimbal.

channel https://www.youtube.com/user/bobflyman?feature=mhum

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Why I’m so intrigued with drones. The views, and in my unsophisticated tastes in art, this video was magnificent. I thought, even with my lousy old hearing, could hear almost hear gulls chattering in the background. Great, job.
John USA

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Hey thanks mate. I did mix some gulls sounds into the track! Though it is a fishing port so there were some gull sounds already. cheers.:smiley:

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Oddly enough I’m about to get started in paramotoring. Do you have any advice for me.

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Interesting you used an arduino. Did you siphon off a ppm signal? Arduino’s are great little things!

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Funny I was only saying to the Mrs the other day that the guy who used to always fly around us (Drax/Cammy) hasn’t been about in ages, I look forward to seeing/hearing you in the air real soon.

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I saw him last week a few times during the ‘golden hour’ He took off and landed somewhere near Skipwith common just off the A163

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Hi Brian, I started with a good few years of paragliding behind me, that made the transition very easy. But the biggest problem in the UK. Well in the south anyway, is finding places you can fly from. There are plenty of courses to be found, the hardest thing is ground handling a paragliding wing I would say. But a good few schools say they will get you off the ground within a week. Check it out. It’s the best and worst thing you will ever do:face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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I was / am, new to arduino. A bloke a lot more clever than me on RCGroups forum came up with a way to use a signal from the Bayangtoys x21 TX to turn a signal on the X21 drone into something the gimbal could understand and use to change the angle of the camera. I can post a link if you want?

There’s loads of info and the code on a big long x21 thread on RC Groups.

video here with links Bayangtoys x21 and Brushless Gimbal with Arduino Remote Tilt Control - YouTube
https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?2909235-Bayangtoys-X21-X22/page57

My Windows 10 laptop won’t open the arduino programming thing now unfortunately as I considered trying to make a couple of changes to the code to slow my pan speed.

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Hi again Brian,

Not sure if you saw this, one of my motor flights last year. I’ve only had 14 so far. Frustrating sport/hobby, but when you do get a good flight it kind of makes up for it. I was about 3,000 feet above sea level at times here. Views are amazing. But as said, but either the weather isn’t right, or it’s not that easy to find friendly farmers who’ll let you use their fields. Everywhere I go round here you see ‘no flying’ notices! In the USA they can fly from small airfields, sports fields etc. And it’s probably easier in some parts of the UK. Give it a go!

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