Quadcopter Rookie

The caveats. I am a rookie drone pilot so the flight and video is not always smooth. The video is time compressed (sped up; leaving it a bit jerky) for the sake of not boring the viewers for too long.

I bought a used DJI Inspire 1 v2.0 last year from a Club member and after three flights I broke the gear lifting arm by picking up the drone incorrectly. This drone is older but the part was available new. (Batteries and propellors result in an eBay quest). Replacing this arm required a lot of disassembly to the machine. Uh oh, this brought more headaches.

To keep the story short, a couple things still do not work but flight is not affected. One is merely a rear tail light LED. 

Second, the landing gear auto-extension is not working. When the drone is in close proximity to the ground the gear automagically extends due to its LIDAR sensor on the bottom. Nice feature but does not affect flight. Simply flips the gear switch. By contrast, when the drone lifts off the gear will raise itself. This still works.

Why does the gear raise? It lifts the propellors out of the camera view.

Finally, to put the drone in the case the gear legs must be in travel mode; which is about halfway between raised and extended. This issue is related to item #2.

Today, I managed to put 9 flights on the drone and decided to cobble together a 2 minute video for fun. In the coming days I will create a another short video or two.

The Inspire is a camera platform. 42mph flat out. When you release both sticks the drone simply hovers. You have to try hard to crash it.  Cruising along and let off the controls and the drone stops and hangs there waiting for you to make up your mind. The camera gimbal remains perfectly level and stable to entire time.

After a couple bare naked eye flights I donned the FPV goggles. Pretty cool I must say.

I will edit up some additional video soon.  For example, our flight altitude limit is 400 feet AGL so I  shot video at 400 ft and every hundred feet below descending to 100 ft.