Boating Video

We wanted to get a video of the boat running on plane using the drone, but never had the chance during the summer. On the day that we were going to pull the boat out of the water, we decided it was "not or never." That wasn't a good thought.

We needed to take the boat to the pump out station and empty the black water holding tank, flush it a bit and get it as clean as we could before hauling the boat out for the season. Seemed like capturing a video that day would be a great idea because we didn't have company and the dogs were at home.

I launched to drone from the fore deck and everything seemed fine. It was a cold day and windy, but the wind was within specs for the drone as was the temperature. Well, something wasn't right because the drone's battery charge suddenly dropped and it flashed warnings on the screen. We stopped the boat and tried to recover the drone, but the wind was strong and gusty. I almost had it, but a gust threw if off and it hit the VHF antenna. It's supposed to be able to fly with one failed prop, but it didn't and that was the last we saw of the drone. I believe that it lost GPS lock and the IMU was confused because of the gusty conditions. Losing lock was a common problem with that unit, so could be that it occurred again. But I was looking at the drone, not the video screen, so I can't be sure.

Well, if we lost the drone, where did we get the video? The drone transmits video that is displayed on the remote controller. It's very compressed and only 720p instead of the 10 bit 4k color that's stored to the drone's camera microSD card, but... it's all we have. I downloaded the video from the controller and edited it with Final Cut Pro. There were some transmission dropouts, but it's better than nothing.