I got talked into working a short afternoon shift today that, I knew if I didn't accept, my Phantom wouldn't come so I accepted it and sure enough, I got the call that it was in. I grabbed it in the two hour gap I had between shifts and when I got back to the office, I had a solid 45 minutes before having to go back out on the road again. One of the other drivers kinda conned me into putting the Phantom together and taking it out into the parking lot for a quick test.
Now as I stated in my 'hello' thread, I was planning on doing my first flight in a large middle school athletic field but couldn't help myself. My first 'flight' so to speak was me doing auto-takeoff, rising to about 8 feet, moving to the left and right a bit and then landing. Not exciting but enough to know the thing works. I put the Phantom back in the car, plugged the battery in to charge in the break room and headed out for my three hour shift.
So when I finally dropped off my last passenger, I burned rubber (metaphorically speaking) back to the bus yard, hopped in my car and drove probably three blocks down the road to a wide-open baseball field where I took off in the last hint of dusk. I did probably 15 minutes worth of flying until I noticed the sprinklers in the area near me had come on so I landed the Phantom and headed for the car.
I noticed a couple things that show me this is a very sensitive piece of equipment and definitely not a toy.
- Got several errors about the bias value being too small or too large. Placing the drone on a level surface combined with a reboot usually solved this although sometimes it took a couple times.
- A few times I got an 'IMU Calibration Required' message which also vanished after several minutes.
- The gimbal also seems to be VERY sensitive to load and a few times I got an 8-pin connection error which also solved itself shortly after showing up.
I got the Phantom up to about 150 feet in altitude but didn't let it get too far from me as I'm still definitely a novice pilot here. I never had an issue with controlling it in flight or bringing it in to land although I'm not going to do any more dusk/night flights...just too hard to see the stinkin' thing.
I'll be heading out again tomorrow before work so stay tuned for a daylight flight update. Overall I'm totally smitten with this thing and can't wait to take off again.
Now as I stated in my 'hello' thread, I was planning on doing my first flight in a large middle school athletic field but couldn't help myself. My first 'flight' so to speak was me doing auto-takeoff, rising to about 8 feet, moving to the left and right a bit and then landing. Not exciting but enough to know the thing works. I put the Phantom back in the car, plugged the battery in to charge in the break room and headed out for my three hour shift.
So when I finally dropped off my last passenger, I burned rubber (metaphorically speaking) back to the bus yard, hopped in my car and drove probably three blocks down the road to a wide-open baseball field where I took off in the last hint of dusk. I did probably 15 minutes worth of flying until I noticed the sprinklers in the area near me had come on so I landed the Phantom and headed for the car.
I noticed a couple things that show me this is a very sensitive piece of equipment and definitely not a toy.
- Got several errors about the bias value being too small or too large. Placing the drone on a level surface combined with a reboot usually solved this although sometimes it took a couple times.
- A few times I got an 'IMU Calibration Required' message which also vanished after several minutes.
- The gimbal also seems to be VERY sensitive to load and a few times I got an 8-pin connection error which also solved itself shortly after showing up.
I got the Phantom up to about 150 feet in altitude but didn't let it get too far from me as I'm still definitely a novice pilot here. I never had an issue with controlling it in flight or bringing it in to land although I'm not going to do any more dusk/night flights...just too hard to see the stinkin' thing.
I'll be heading out again tomorrow before work so stay tuned for a daylight flight update. Overall I'm totally smitten with this thing and can't wait to take off again.