Death of the Kodo, acquisition of the DJI Phantom 3 Professional and other news

Welcome back!  It’s been a couple of weeks since I did an update here.  In that time we have taken possession of our new Phantom 3 Pro UAV and I managed to wear out one of the motors in the Kodo.  We purchased the Phantom 3 (P3P) with the hardshell backpack, 2 extra props and 1 extra battery from B&H in New York.  Please excuse my snarling face in the video above :)

The Kodo’s Status

I have been flying the Kodo every day to practice.  During the week I practice at sunset and on weekends I try to practice at sunrise and sunset to get 2 sessions of practice for the day.  As with anything of this nature, practice makes perfect and that is true here.

I have been getting better with it.  Hover is no issue.  I can fly the quad around a bit and generally stay in control.  I do not feel like the quad gets away from me (as in I cut the throttle because it’s no longer controllable by me).

My training regimen consists of the following (I break down the exercises by battery):

• 1^st battery: Warmup and basic hover practice
• 2^nd battery: Hop between 2 spots on the ground about 15’ apart
• 3^rd battery: practice 10:00 and 2:00 hover*
• 4^th battery: practice 10:00 and 2:00 hover*
• 5^th battery: Have some fun

*3^rd and 4^th batteries are used to hover the quad while the front of the quad is aimed at the 10:00 angle and 2:00 angle.  Once I have those mastered, I will move on to a 9:00/3:00 angle and after that I will move to nose in hovering (quad is facing me, controls are reversed).

Ultimately, I will be happy when I can do a nose-in hover with ease as well as fly in a circle and a figure 8.  That is the goal.

In other Kodo news, I have been using my GoPro to record my sessions with the Kodo.  I will cut together some of that and post it up here so you can see my pathetic attempts at flying.  This past weekend, while flying the Kodo in the backyard, the Kodo decided to take off on its own and it slammed into a wall behind me as I was flying it.

I thought it was odd and that maybe there was some RF interference that caused it to do that so I moved to the other side of the yard.  I flew for a few minutes before the Kodo decided to slam into my shin and cut me.  Again I dusted it off and flew for a little while without incident.

On the last battery, the Kodo flew for about 2 minutes and then I landed it.  Attempting to take off again failed as the left front motor died.  I attributed the the odd flight characteristics exhibited by the Kodo previously to this motor failure and indeed the GoPro footage confirmed this.

We ordered a new motor on Amazon for it (they come in pairs for about $10) and I will replace the dead one once the new one arrives.

So, sadly, no more Kodo practice until I get my new motor.  Guess I will have to play with the P3P then…

The Phantom 3 Professional

We had the P3P for a little over a week before we actually got around to unboxing it and setting it up.  The boxes that it shipped in were pretty beat up by UPS but nothing inside was damaged. 

Speaking of, it seems like UPS’s disrespect for packages has increased of late.  Was a time when most packages were intact.  Now I do not remember the last time that happened…

We only have 1 device that will run the DJI Phantom app (the GO app) and that is my iPad Air (first gen).  My wife is considering a new iPhone 6s+ or an iPad Air II so we will be able to use those as well.

We charged up the batteries and the remote, installed the app and attempted to power the rig up.  We turned the remote on first with the iPad (ALWAYS turn the remote on first (and LAST) – If you power up the quad first, it may think it has lost connection to the remote and attempt to do a return to home – to whatever its last home point was…).

Once all of that was up and running and the app was talking to the remote, we removed the quad’s camera gimbal clamp and powered up the quad (sans props of course) which emitted a rather loud set of musical tones.  When the app started talking to the quad and displaying its camera feed, we noticed that it reported a gimbal error and that it wanted to have its firmware updated.

The gimbal error was a bit dismaying but after a bit of online research, some folks indicated that the gimbal could report a false error with certain firmware versions.  So the first task was to update the firmware.

Updating the Firmware

This was a pretty painless process.  I downloaded the latest firmware from DJI, copied the .BIN file to the microSD card, inserted the card into the P3P and powered it up.  This is the ONLY instance where you can power up this quad without the remote being turned on first.

The P3P took about 25 minutes to perform the update and during that time emitted a constant beeping sound.  I expected this after reading up on it online so I put it in the bathroom expecting it to be as loud as the startup sounds but that was not the case.  The beeping was pretty quiet after all but I left it in the bathroom with the door open so I could hear the louder beeps it might make.

Following the P3P’s update, I attempted to update the remote control.  As it turned out, there was no update for the remote in the update file that I used for the P3P.  It turns out that I had to download the previous firmware file and it had the update so we were able to update the remote with no issues  The remote took about 10 minutes to perform the firmware update.

The final status

Once updated, the app no longer complained about a gimbal error.  YAY!  However I was not convinced that the gimbal was 100%.  I noticed it twitching left and right when the P3P was just sitting idle.   I decided to pick up the P3P and walk around the house with it while recording.

When I reviewed that footage, the image was very shaky and unstable.  I was very disappointed but thought that maybe when the P3P is in flight that the gimbal would just work.  However, it turns out that there is yet another bit of packing material that is wedged behind the gimbal for shipping purposes.

Once I removed it, the gimbal worked perfectly.  No twitching while it is idle and walking through the house with it looked smoother than a Steadicam shot.  Excellent.

Once all of that was resolved, both my wife and I were able to make good use of the simulator.  My initial practicing involved getting the quad to fly in a circle with combined rudder/yaw.  I think it will help a lot with this coordinated skill.  I started by applying 100% rudder (roll) so the quad would spin in place and then slowly started adding in YAW, the effect being that as I added more and more YAW, the size of the circle increased.  Still a lot of practice to do on that.

We have not flown the P3P yet as we are still waiting for the Strong Arm reinforcements.  And, with that, we may have run into a small snag.  We plan to use the Strong Arms with a set of Bestem quick release prop guards.  We need the quick release so that we can use the backpack case.  The Strong Arm product supports being used in conjunction with the Bestem guards but we need to understand how much we will need to modify the backpack case’s foam to accommodate this.

In the next installment, I will have actual footage from our maiden flight so stay tuned!