For the Records: Phantom Cable Spaghetti

Luckily, newer firmware releases for the Naza-M starting with V3.16 support S.BUS2 operation. The english articles already base on a S.BUS(2) setup. Having only a single cable between receiver and Naza-M is a great improvement, no more cable spaghetti.

For the records, I'm documenting the mess that was my interim setup, using seven servo patch cables to connect the receiver to the Naza-M flight controller. You need to see this...

Horka-Werbellin: a Short Dive Trip

Marco of Tauchrevier Deutschland fame was watering my mouth for quite a time already to do some dives in the lakes in the larger region around Berlin. Some weeks ago I got the opportunity to go on a short trip, starting at former stone pit Horka and travelling North until Werbellinsee. Of course, there are so many more dive spots in this area, so my wish list hasn't been checked clean so far. It was a really pleasant experience visiting the region, the landscape, interesting dive spots and with even more interesting people. Enjoy the video!

First Under Water Cyclist with Full Face Mask?

As if cycling under water wouldn't be bizare enough. So I couldn't resist and add a full face mask on top. This is now my personal, inofficial world record. Probably I'm the first one to do it in this combination... so a good reason to celebrate this with its own dedicated video clip. Enjoy!

Trimming Video Files Lossless Using ffmpeg

Recently, I needed to trim an H.264 video file of several megabytes size down to a few seconds worth without loss of quality. I simply didn't wanted to deal with this big video file in my editor and wasting space on an enormous proxy video file. Of course, ffmpeg immediately comes to mind, but how to tame that beast...?

Upgrading My Phantom With a Zenmuse H3-2D Gimbal

Unimpressive box containing impressive tech!

Welcome to another upgrade (or add-on) story for my ready-to-flight quadcopter! Rrrriiing ... my doorbell proclaims new work arriving. The kind delivery man hands over a small parcel containing pleasant work. At least for now I consider it to be pleasant, so let's enjoy the moment.

The parcel contains my long-awaited Zenmuse H3-2D gimbal system. This upgrade should bring me into the league of super stable aerial filming.

I couldn't resist so I immediately opened the next chapter in the book of my flying construction site. Today, it seems ages ago that I purchased that ready-to-flight kit...

Test Flight of Zenmuse H3-2D Gimbal

Taking aerial footage now is a great pleasure using the cam gimbal system Zenmuse H3-2D. You have to see how incredible stable the camera point of view now is, so here's a little video showing some simple footage. Now seeing such stable footage is great earnings for the effort I had to suffer when upgrading my Phantom quadcopter with the gimbal. More on the upgrade details will come as a separate blog article. Update: see here for my Zenmuse H3-2D upgrade experience.

SanDisk Extremes Without Problems So Far

I now could test the new SanDisk 32GB Extreme microSD cards both in the air as well as under water. They performed without any problems so far. Since their writing performance includes a good safety margin with respect to Protune requirements there is hope that these cards will also perform okay over a longer period of time. But only time will tell...

Replacement Superlative: and Now for the Extremists...

We now opened a new chapter in the probably never ending story of class 10 microSD cards from SanDisk. The currently heavily marketed Ultra series turned out to be an underperformer when used in HD Hero 3s, as they weren't up to the required writing performance of Protune. Now SanDisk marketing sends its extremists to the Protune race, as a replacement superlative for their ultras that took a big hit. Since one of my dealers wanted to only replace my Ultra cards with other SanDisk cards I bit the bullet and agreed to start the experiment...

World Records Day Under Water Video

Now you can also get a more vivid impression of our world records day under water. Enjoy!

World Record Day Under Water

Yesterday, we saw two new world records under water (2013-09-07)