Hours of manetenance are required for every hour of running, just like flying....Continue Reading

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYUUYEV6JlQ


Interesting review of the Skydio 2 & Mavic Air 2.  DJI has so many mavic's, the meaning of any of the product names has all become quite meaningless.  It might as well be the DJI X AE A-XII.

As before, the Sky Diddyo isn't intended to be flown in any manual way, but be a fully autonomous tracking cam.  They emphasized it doesn't come with a stick controller, but a lot of quad copters have relied on pure phone controllers before.  Casey Neistat was disappointed in the 1st Sky Diddy's lack of any artistic rules & composition, but he was also sponsored by DJI.  The new Sky Diddy continues to be brute force technology without artistic composition.  

The big change with the SkyDiddy is the introduction of a GPS beacon for the tracking instead of being purely machine vision.  They didn't say if the GPS beacon completely replaces machine vision for the tracking or just aids it.  It's kind of a throwback to 2010 when everyone used GPS.  Maybe there's a lesson for the rest of us tracking cam afficionados.

The tracking is still relatively far away, little improved from the very best of the GPS trackers 10 years ago.  It wouldn't be useful for portraits.  They were impressed by the evolution of the Diddy's obstacle avoidance & considered it uncrashable in any environment, but the way it avoided crashes was manely by just stopping when it couldn't find a route rather than being more creative than the Skydiddy 1.  An...Continue Reading

2 years in storage made the tires change color & get harder. We'll see which side wears out faster. The last 2 tires had asymmetric wear & rotating them made no difference. It may be the same phenomenon that rubber erasers go through.

The old tires eventually started slipping, despite never being removed from the hubs. They just stretched & got looser over time, so even though they're real tight now, they still got the rubber cement.