I love the future. We live in a time where it’s possible to put a perfectly still robot in the sky with a live video feed from a production-level stabilized camera. They have miles of range, and can move at fairly high speed. All that and they’re relatively affordable. 25 years ago I couldn’t have imagined we’d have access to today’s drones.
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I’ve always bought a generation or two behind, used, and have so far had great luck with them. My first was a Phantom 2 that I heavily modified. Getting to hack a flying robot… it was just fantastic! I added better landing gear, a gimbal, a camera, a controller board, a video transmitter, improved antennas, replace two motors, improved GPS strength, gave it Bluetooth, and a link to a ground-based telemetry and waypoint automation setup that ran from a laptop. How nuts is all that? It was “stable” in the sense that unassisted it would stay within a 9 meter sphere – drifting up/down and side to side. To keep it still you had to be at the controls and slightly nudging all the time.
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The fact that my first drone was very tricky to control meant that when I upgraded to a Phantom 3 Advanced it felt like it practically flew itself. Everything was so much smoother and the bubble it’d stay in was only a foot or two across. I was in the air much more often and tried more difficult things. The 2 and 3 were the same size, so they were equals in terms of transporting them, setting them up, and putting them away. Overall not terrible, but it was still a large backpack and that made it tough to travel too far with either of them.
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These days I’m flying a Mavic Pro – and wow it was a leap forward. For one thing, you can literally fit it in a big pocket, or a backpack pouch instead of being an entire pack’s worth on its own. The amount of technology in this tiny little thing is stunning – and it’s already over 5 years old. I picked it up when it was two years old, but it only had 3 hours of flight time on it (score!). Getting to put your eyes up in the sky while staying safely on the ground is amazing. Also – I’m currently working on getting my clips picked up by a stock footage company to turn the whole adventure into a background revenue stream. Take a peek below: