This is very cool, an awesome article and video in the New York Times about racing quadcopter drones.

A couple of days ago I did a flight over central Utah’s Goblin Valley State Park. This is a very unique place full of thousands of rock formations known as hoodoos, which look like goblins. Thus the name.

On the ground the area is like a maze but I was curious to see what it looked like from the air. I checked with the park ranger first and made sure I had permission to fly the area. I did one hexacopter flight during which I was able to capture 375 photos.

I would have done another flight or two for some video footage, but the battery on my camera died. Shooting that many photos ate the battery up quickly.

I should pick up an extra battery for that camera, or perhaps find a way of supplying the camera power from the bird.

Well I’ve had enough of fighting the Arris Lander X3 electric retracts on my large 960mm hexacopter drone.  The gear retracts fine but it does weird things going back to the down position.  It takes about 30 seconds and about 20 attempts before the gear is completely down.  It will start by going down 2-3 inches, then it goes back up an inch, down three, up two, down three, up two.  The gear finally goes down, but not without a LOT of waiting and wondering if it will burn out something, or simply fail.  I do NOT want to have to hand catch this bird.  That’s a no-go.

The retracts come with mounts, larger legs, and the electronics needed to control them.  By removing all that I did free up about 150-170 grams of weight, which adds a few seconds to the flight time.

Pictured above is the big bird with the old/new gear back on, next to my 250mm racer.

I’m hoping to take this big bird traveling to the bahamas later this week.  I stripped the old stuff off today and did some test flights, which were successful.