So life has been pretty crazy the past month. A chain of birthdays for my daughters friends swallowed all weekends, and the sudden illness and loss of my mother in law left us really disrupted the past few weeks. Toss in swim lessons for my daughter and a few other issues - the only flying I've been doing lately is the proto-x which is getting flown several charges a night and I'm dying for a better TX for it still.
The last flight of the quad was the session I talked about at the end of this post and haven't had time to post about. He ended up swapping his KK board for a Naze and we did some quick setups on it. Got mixed up as to which config was setup mild vs. which was setup for fun - but found he could flip even in the mild config with horizon mode very easily. Went up for another flight and realized that he had been in the mild mode and now it could flip almost in it's own footprint and we didn't have the rates all THAT high yet.
Unfortunately that weekend the beta version of the config app I have on my phone had a bug that prevented the PID screen from loading - so we weren't able to further field tune anything. But we were able to fly a couple of packs each and I got to do a pack of FPV on my quad which went pretty well until I panicked a bit at the end and landed in a tree. Few things knocked loose but nothing a few quick zip ties didn't fix.
We left with both quads still ready to fly but batts drained. Unfortunately leaving turned out to be a bit tricky. I didn't realize he didn't have 4WD and he didn't realize to stay on the path and not pull over when we stopped. I hadn't thought to bring a tow strap as this doesn't count as "off road" in my mind. Oops. We aired him down, dug him out and got some floor mats under him for traction - but he was buried. Thankfully home is just 20 minutes away and he had plenty of water so I ran back and got my tow strap then returned and proceeded to sink my truck to both axles trying to pull him out. Well crud. So much for showing off one of my favorite places to fly
I hadn't aired down yet though and after doing so was easily able to pull right out of my holes. From the other direction I had firmer ground and was finally able to get him out of his hole and back on a path to head home. We had such a great day flying though that the less than stellar exit was more humorous than annoying.
Life around here has started to return to normal, at least as normal as normal gets after the loss of a close family member. Our house is still a mess due to us starting to paint my daughters room just before life went crazy on us - so 90% of the contents of her room are still strewn across our living room. We still have to do a second coat of paint in her room and just don't both have a day off in common without something planned for a few more weeks so we're not big on moving everything in and back out again. At least her room is very nice to be in right now and she's sleeping better than ever. And I got inspired to clean up my hobby mess. Tore through 3 years of built up mess in my backroom, finally pitched a few crashed beyond repair airframes and got all my bits and pieces more organized.
With outside temps in the 110's and humidity now up in the 30's-40's thanks to the monsoons rolling in ... flying isn't a ton of fun
EARLY morning is tolerable, but only if you can tolerate being up that early which I can't due to our schedules. Evening flights are gorgeous at sunset - but pretty miserable to be out for still.
I'm really wanting to do some kind of gimbal next, but need a camera to plan around. Since it's AC season though hobby budget doesn't make the cut most weeks until October so even a mobius won't be happening soon. My old hacked disposable cam works...but it's heavy, can be stripped down to next to nothing but needs 3.3v to run on - either way it's a pain to mount. I have three of then though including one that's already stripped down so I may try and rig it up with a SSG and see how it does for a ultra budget gimbal. At least let me test enough ideas to be ready to build a v2 for a better cam.
Still, with the weather being so nasty it's mostly hide in the AC season. I'm trying to finally finish up an Android game I wrote last year and got close to releasing - but still have a few things to polish up - I got distracted from finishing it by building this quad so this kind of comes full loop. But in the past 9 months since I touched the code all kinds of things have changed and just getting my build environment updated has taken me a week of spare time. I finally have a working build system again but haven't even tried compiling my own code yet since I have to bring it into the new system - how to do such isn't very well documented since it varies so much from project to project. Fun.
Oh yeah, the whole FAA thing has me pretty upset as well as this is the third hobby in a row I've had pulled out from under me by federal regulation just as I was starting to really enjoy it. I don't have the energy for the same damn fight again - but can't just walk away.
Oh well, looks like the proto-x is charged. Time for another quick flight