Drone Follies and Other Stuff

I purchased a spare battery for the drone and charged it up to give me more flying time this weekend.

 When I used it for the first time, I got a battery error message from the software.  I rebooted everything and tried again, it seemed to clear up.

 I flew the drone out over the valley and the error message came back up so I brought the drone home again.

I started looking at online forums and tried contacting customer service.  Eventually it occurred to me that I was overdue for a firmware update for the drone.  Maybe the battery had newer software.

So I spent hours Sunday morning updating drone firmware.  Eventually I was successful.  My plan was to try out the "Follow Me" feature of this drone.  More about that with the videos at the end of this post.  In the meantime, I went about my chores etc.

 My "camera on a stick" had fallen over where I last had it so I took the opportunity to relocate it.  We'll see what shows up here.

 The 3 acres prepared for prairie grass planting is holding up ok.  I was worried about erosion but there was enough new growth that it seems to be holding.

 This is the turnip plot.  It is picked pretty clean and pockmarked with hoof prints.

 I sat in the main field Saturday evening.  I could see a nice 8 point buck in the turnip plot.  I couldn't see much else happening so I stuck my head out to glass over to the driveway plot.  When I turned around, four does were staring up at me from the treeline.  They took off after busting me.

I also sat one morning in the barn stand - nothing happening.  This is the sunset Saturday.

I proceeded to boil up the skull on the found deer from a couple of weeks ago.

 The turkey fryer is pretty handy for this task.  I boiled it all day.

 I don't think that I'll be cooking any food in this pot.

 I also burned some trash.

 The mice are still invading the cabin.  Theresa left me this evidence.

 There's not much left of the doe that was under the pond house.

 This is the arrow that was in it.  My guess is that a neighbor wounded it and a coyote stashed the carcass under there.

 I took a pretty good walk thru the valley.  The north side of the slopes still had some snow.  It's fun to see the animal tracks.

 Poop of the week - an impressive buck bomb found on the walk.

 I did find one shed antler - it was right by the orchard.

 A little guy.

Some trail-cameos.

 Creigh looks cold.







So this first video is the start of the trial of the "Follow Me" function on drone control.  I watched a video about how it works and I gave it a try.  I initially started at 100' elevation.  I got worried about trees and power lines and took it up to 120'.  I have to control the gimbal (camera angle) myself so you'll see me goofing around with it for some time.  At some point, the software ended this video and started another one - not sure if that was the file size or the point at which I had control issues.  At the very end of this video, it starts to go rogue.

So, I had about made the loop and the battery was starting to get low.  I made the decision to try to out run the drone and to head back to the barn.  So I quit looking at the RC and drove quickly back to the barn from the barn field.  When I got to the barn and looked at the screen,  I couldn't tell where the drone was.  All I saw was woods.  I hit the "Return to Home" function because I was starting to get battery warnings.  I looked at the screen and it said that it was almost 4,000 feet way (almost to Carters Run).  The good news was that it seemed to be closing in toward me.  I was pretty flustered by this point.  Battery alarm beeping, a long way out, not even sure where it was coming from.  Finally I saw it coming in over the maple tree.  Battery was getting critical and it was going slow in the "Return to Home" landing mode.  I shut off the RTH mode since I thought that I could get it down quicker.  When I shut off RTH, it took off again out toward the valley - I have no idea why.  It was still in "Follow Me" mode and it seemed to think I was out there.  It got past the pond before I hit RTH again.  Battery was really critical now so I started lowering altitude in case it fell out of the sky (lower was better if it was going to fall).  It hit the last tall tree by the pond and crashed to the ground on the pond dam.  Here's the video.

Physical damage was minimal.  Not even a broken rotor.  But when I boot it up now, I get an error message that IMU needs calibrated (I think that's the instruments).  When I try to calibrate, it faults.  I'm pretty sure that at least one component didn't handle the impact well.  I just got off the phone with Customer Service in CA and I'll be sending it in for repair.  From the screens I could see, it appears that the accelerometer isn't working (and who knows what else).

 

I'm not sure what happened with the going rogue situation.  If it loses the GPS from the cellphone (that's what it is following), it is supposed to just hover until it reacquires it.  I suspect there may be an element of operator error/inexperience involved here.  Duh.