Club Meeting 11th April

Andy arranged for Jay Wood of Aerocam to come and give us a talk on 11 April.
Jay flies a large hexacopter equipped with a GoPro camera and FPV and does lots of videos around our area. Check out his website here:-  http://aerocam.org.uk 
Jay arrived around 18:30 and carried out six flights behind the village hall.
    
     

Deciding to have another flight he attached another battery pack and took to the air.
Unfortunately a possible esc failure caused loss of control of the hexacopter and it crashed from around 40-50 feet.
Video of the crash on youtube:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6wReuR_3bg&feature=youtu.be

Jay posted Buriton High dives on his website see here. http://aerocam.org.uk/blog/buriton-high-dives/ 
With some great pictures of the area and possible cause of the crash.
After brief club business Jay gave a presentation on how he started aerial photography and formed aerocam.org.uk
Jay has been flying for around a year, having an interest in photography he was inspired by RCSchim online videos, see examples of his videos here:-  http://vimeo.com/rcschim
Jay started with a Spycopter running on 3 channels similar to the following.

He then upgraded to a 4ch flying a 9 Eagles Bravo SX Micro helicopter

The next step was to fly a Walkera QR Ladybird and learn to fly multi bladed helicopters.

Once the flying multibladed helicopters was master a DJI F450 Quad 4/10 ch with FPV buzz flyer was the next upgrade. The Quad frame was then upgraded to a Hex frame. Possible future upgrades, ideally for stability would be an Octo frame copter with DSLR camera.
     
The Hexacopter is powered by 6 x 2250KV Tiger motors  with 11″ rotors, the total weight is around 1.5Kg.
There is a VU power management  system that is essential for running multiple esc’s and a DC regulator board for video and FPV camera.
The camera and camera mount is very important and can also be very expensive and weight critical. Camera Mount gimbal ideally requires a 2/3 axis  and its important to isolate vibration, a gimbal can cost around £5000.
Jay uses GoPro cameras that cost around £350 and are very robust waterproof, shock proof and can film HD quality video. 

The next step is finding things to film, Jay’s main intersts are ruins and old buildings. He formulates a flight plan for his projects. Planning out what he wants to film and ensure his flights conform to flight regulations ie don’t exceed line of sight, don’t over fly conjested areas etc
After filming the capture video needs to be edited and music added.
On behalf of the committee I’d like to thank Jay for his time and thank AndyP for organising the evening.
Nick