The Salinas Project

Posted on January 12, 2014 by Brook

Filmmaker Carolyn Brown has released a trailer for her upcoming documentary The Salinas Project. I am thrilled that she asked me to contribute aerial videography to the film.

About one hour South of the wealthy Silicon Valley, sits the agricultural, immigrant town of Salinas. On the east side of Salinas, in a neighborhood known as Alisal, deplorable housing conditions and gang violence are part of daily life. But there are big changes happening in the community and a sense of renewal.

Find out more about this film at thesalinasproject.org

DJI iPad Ground Control Station FAIL

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Brook

My first fully automated drone flight with with the DJI iPad Ground Control Station… Didn’t go as planned. The iPad GCS app for iOS7 was just released, so I thought I would give it a try. Everything seemed to be working great I did an Attitude mode flight with my TX right before this to ensure the F450 was flying OK. Everything checked out. It had GPS satellite lock before takeoff and linked to the iPad GCS flawlessly. It took off on the “GO” command and flew part way through the flight plan before veering way of course and slamming itself into the ground….. sigh.

DJI A2 Flight Controller Unboxing

Posted on September 14, 2013 by Brook

A quick look at the DJI A2 Flight Controller and Auto Pilot System. What comes in the box, and a quick bench assembly. The DJI A2 is a complete flight control system for multirotors in commercial and industrial aerial photography applications.

Skate Park Aerial

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Brook

As I was setting up to fly over the Lake Cunningham Regional Skate Park for The Monster Recon BMX event, a lone skateboarder was bowl riding. I grabbed this shot as I was doing a test flight to size up how high I had to fly to shoot directly down and get the whole bowl into the shot.

I was flying a DJI F550 Hexacopter and shot this with a GoPro Hero2 on the X468 gimbal

Propeller Balancing for Multirotors

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Brook

One of the most important things you can do to make your multirotor fly better and to get smooth jello free video footage is to balance the propellers. Multirotor prop balancing is a little more involved than just balancing the blades… you must also balance the propeller’s hub.

Buy the Du-Bro Tru-Spin Prop Balancer

I also used Extra Thick CA glue and CA accelerator in this video.

Testing Ardupilot Mega 2.0 firmware version 2.9.1 on DJI 450 Quad frame

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Brook

This past weekend I updated the Ardupilot firmware to version 2.9.1 on my small quad. It is a DJI 450 frame with the APM 2.0 board and went out to a local park to give it a spin. Wow! My first reaction is that it flew remarkably well! I haven’t been flying the Ardupilot much lately because my other NAZA equipped copters are such a joy to fly. Maybe it’s time to have a second look at the APM.

I didn’t shoot any video of the flights… But here is a quick cellphone photo of the setup.

2013 San Jose Municipal Rose Garden Pruning Event

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Brook

On January 12th 2013, 375 volunteers participated in the 5th annual Pruning of the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden. The Friends of the Rose Garden asked us to come fly the Hexacopter over the event and provide them with a never before seen view of the event.

The aerial shots in this video were taken with a customized DJI F550 Hexacopter, NAZA GPS flight controller and X468 Gimbal flying a Sony NEX-5N camera. The ground shots were taken by my 14 year old daughter with a Canon T3 DSLR.

The Music was licensed from Kevin MacLeod www.incompetech.com

The Friends of the Rose Garden had seen one of my early test flight videos over the Rose Garden. Looking back at this video my aerial photography has improved quite a bit!

Fall Colors Flight

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Brook

Just a quick tune up test flight of my DJI F550 Hexacopter. I’m posting this video because I liked the fall colors on the trees in my local urban park. There’s no spectacular flying here, just a short test flight as I continue to chase down some vibration issues.

One item of note is that this flight was done with mismatched propellers….. the front and back X props are Graupner E-Props and the port and starboard props are Century Helicopter Glass Fiber. NOT optimal but keeping me in the air while I wait for a propeller order.

The ground camera footage was shot with an iPhone5

Setting Up NAZA Return to Home on Spektrum DX6i

Posted on September 8, 2012 by Brook

After my last video showed off the NAZA GPS’s Return To Home autopilot feature, a few people have asked me how I setup the forced failsafe mode on my spectrum DX6i. So I made this tutorial video:

DJI NAZA Return to Home Function

Posted on September 1, 2012 by Brook

This is the 32nd flight of my DJI F550 Hexacopter with NAZA GPS.

This is another super windy flight but the GPS position lock of the NAZA keeps the Hexacopter from being pushed around. The “Return to Home” flight mode worked perfectly bringing the F550 safely right back to where it took off from.

Hexacopter with gimbal in grass

Dain Bramage Films

Projects and Experiments of Brook Dain

Tag Archives: DJI