Tag Archives: Hexacopter

The Salinas Project

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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

Skate Park Aerial

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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

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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.

 

2013 San Jose Municipal Rose Garden Pruning Event

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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

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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

DJI F550 Hexa Flight over Calabazas BMX Park

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We went to Calabazas Park in Cupertino, CA, just for a quick fun fly in an open space…. but we found a really cool BMX park with lots of kids hitting the jumps. Couldn’t resist flying over such a great subject for aerial shots… wish I was flying a camera with a little longer focal length.

The Hexacopter sure got a lot of interest from the kids.

My daughter was operating a Lumix ZS20 point and shoot as a ground camera.

 

DJI NAZA Return to Home Function

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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