[matsemann]

The motion controller reminds me of a project I made many years ago, where head tilting of an oculus rift would control the cameras on your drone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7654141

Also cool that they have been embracing virtual practicing it seems. The original DJI controllers were impossible to pair with simulators, so I had to hack it: https://github.com/Matsemann/mDjiController/

I sold (or basically gave away) all my home-made drone setup a year or so ago, after it being in a box for 3+ years. It was a hassle to set up, and very hard to fly and get good pictures and actually be in control (original DJI Phantom included). Cool tech and fun to hack on, but not very good UX heh. However I would still very much like to fly and film more, but then with some out-of-the-box-ready solutions. Modern ones seem to have obstacle avoidance, better hovering, tracking or point-to-point etc, so I can actually focus on the (for me, now) fun parts of filming the sports action.

What are some good drones for that use-case? DJI alone has a big lineup now, hard to know which one is more fitting. And are there other contenders selling ready to use stuff? Thought GoPro had one but seems like they've stopped.

[StavrosK]

Head trackers are cool, but DJI stuff is a step in the wrong direction there. Right now everything is open, you can write a small Arduino script to track your head with an accelerometer, send the channels through your radio to the drone, and add two servos there that move according to your head motions.

With DJI, all of this is closed. I'd be surprised if you can connect/have access to any of these things.

[wpearse]

DJI has a pretty comprehensive SDK, I’m pretty sure that they’ve published the tools you need to do this.

[05]

Well, nobody is stopping the community from making their own open source/open hardware OpenTX based motion flight controller, do they? Just like Naza32 didn’t prevent people from developing Cleanflight/Betaflight

[StavrosK]

Are you saying that because they aren't actively coming to your house and holding your hands away from the keyboard, the fact that they sell closed source hardware is neutral?

[05]

It’s actually positive. Open source community has limited resources, so DJI proving this thing can be made to work well removes any uncertainty someone would have when starting their own project without that knowledge. It also affects the way people look at the feature - previously many would just automatically dismiss it as a useless gimmick, but DJI implementing it and people liking their implementation gives the idea credibility.

[StavrosK]

So the only reason nobody implemented digital video systems until now is that they weren't sure if it could be done, and DJI locking their stuff down is actually good for the hobby.

[05]

OpenHD. If you fly wings and 135ms latency doesn't bother you, you can build it yourself. Of course, it uses Raspberry Pi's proprietary Broadcom SoC h264 encoder, so much for open :)

Is TBS locking their proprietary protocol they use to differentiate themselves from commodity Semtech ICs good for the hobby?

[bee_rider]

Does that produce VR sickness? Transmission time + going all the way to some motors seems like it would be pretty hard to fit in even 60fps, haha.

I wonder if any consumer VR FPV drones would consider transmitting a 360 video signal (or just one that includes more FOV than can be displayed on the headset) to allow some head movements to be handled in software.

[matsemann]

Yes, but not anymore than standard fpv goggles (with no tracking) would give in this case anyway.

Yes, we thought of that as a possible improvement ("future work"). It may be harder to get the stereo cameras to match up, is my guess. But for a single camera setup it's probably not too hard and already exists for 360 videoes. So I guess if one's capable of streaming the video it shouldn't be too hard.

And stereo cameras arent really that useful. We explored it, and found that when looking at stuff more than a few meters away it made no difference. For inspections (which was what our drone was made for) of close stuff it has some merit, but could still probably be handled by some IR sensor or other computational stuff adding an overlay to the video.

As for vr sickness, the most jarring experience was flying behind yourself like a 3rd person shooter haha.

[bee_rider]

I still really want to try third-person view, but I can imagine it would be really disorienting.

[snovv_crash]

The motion controller tech was acquired from a Swiss startup[1]. Even DJI doesn't do everything in-house...

1: https://motionpilot.ch/