My First Flight: From Dead-On-Arrival to Flying on the BEACH!!

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Oct 6, 2016
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Hi, everyone! I purchased a gently used Phantom 3 Pro from a friend, and through circumstances out of my control, it was dead on arrival. An unfortunate victim of the dreaded prop guard screws. (You can read about my trials and tribulations at this link.)

Long story short, I researched and diagnosed the problem, ordered 4 new motors, learned to solder from watching YouTube and talking to my friendly Radio Shack guy, and I fixed the drone myself!

I took her out flying today. This was my first time flying a drone of any kind, not to mention I'd literally just had this one's guts laying across my dining room table just the day before while I performed major surgery! After I got over the initial fear that it was going to fall out of the sky in a burst of flames from my amateur soldering job, I started to enjoy learning to maneuver and get comfortable with the sticks. I'm really looking forward to learning how to actually fly now, and try to pay attention to what I'm filming and compose some shots. I'm pleased with the video from the P3P!

Here's a video I pieced together from my first test flight. Everybody is posting their beautiful fall foliage videos, and I'm just down here enjoying autumn at THE BEACH! :)

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You done good and is a great feeling huh .
monker thumbup.gif
 
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The opening view clip, how do you do that? I've seen that in many videos where it just takes off so fast & high focusing on the person behind the control.
 
Fly backwards away from yourself very slowly, consistently and carefully, then speed it up 400% in post.

NoCo Drones
 
I sent the copter a few feet from me, aimed the camera at myself, then gave it full throttle up and full throttle reverse, and off it goes! QUICKLY!

I didn't speed anything up in post processing. Probably would have been safer, though! ;-)
 
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