First Multi-Day Trip on Sola

My first multi day trip on Sola was over Memorial Day weekend 2021. I wasn’t good at planning, with every boater in the area also trying to take advantage of the perfect weather, but things worked out well and it was a good learning experience.

I loaded all of what I thought I’d need on my boat, returned my car to my apartment, and walked the two miles back to the boat. That meant that I didn’t pull away from my slip until close to noon on Friday. I then went to the fuel dock in Shilshole and added 14 gallons of diesel to my tank. I learned that the price of ice at the fuel dock is almost exactly the same as the nearest QFC. It was a little past 1:30 by the time I was away from the fuel dock.

After clearing the breakwater, I as able to engage the autopilot and stow all my fenders and docking lines. The wind was nice enough for sailing, so I raised the main sail and unfurled the head sail and sailed downwind towards Blake Island.

I passed the western shore of Blake Island about 4pm, and all of the mooring balls were already in use, with several additional boats anchored. Because I was moving nicely under sail power and the sunset is close to 9pm, I continued down Colvos Passage towards Gig Harbor.

I was able to sail all the way to the entrance of Gig Harbor, arriving about 7pm. After motoring into Gig Harbor and passing through a fleet of anchored boats I picked a spot and dropped my anchor with about 30 feet of water below me.

After my 80 foot chain, plus some of the rode, was off the boat, I was hailed by a large motor yacht to the south of me, with them saying that I was probably over their anchor, and that they had about 200 feet of chain out. I sat there for about 5 minutes, then pulled my anchor back up and moved north to another open area and dropped the anchor a second time. That location I stayed the night.

I’d previously taken the boat to Gig Harbor and anchored when I was racing the South Sound Series #4 on Mata Hari on March 20th. That trip I motored down Friday night, anchored, was picked up from my boat to race Saturday morning, returned to the boat Saturday night, and raised the anchor and motored home Sunday. I had the assistance returning to the dock in Shilshole, which was hugely beneficial. This trip I was planning to be alone the entire time.

I planned my departure from Gig Harbor to ride the tidal currents through the Tacoma Narrows south past Fox Island. I had the anchor up by 6:30am, but that wasn’t too much of an issue since the sun is now up before 5:30am.

South of Fox Island, I attempted to sail for a while, but after a couple of hours I wasn’t making much progress. I was slightly worried about finding a place to stay the night since I’d never been in the south sound to stay before. I powered up and passed Eagle Island between Anderson Island and McNeil Island and saw at least one mooring ball I could have used, and will probably revisit in the future.

I continued on, turning north and finally arrived at McMicken Island. There were two mooring balls on the south side of the island as I approached, one occupied. I was tired from not having slept well the previous night, and took possession of the empty mooring ball, and once the boat was secure took a nap.

I made hot coffee in the morning, but ran out of propane as I was preparing eggs in the afternoon. No more hot food for me. I had plenty of food that didn’t require cooking and it was hot during the day so I didn’t feel the need to heated food.

I spent two nights in the same place, on the same mooring ball. It was very relaxing, and mostly quiet. The south sound reminds me much more of a lake than the waters near Shilshole. I remembered that I had my drone on board, but hadn’t freshly charged the batteries, so each of my three batteries was only at 60%. I was still able to get some nice views of the area.

I was able to take time looking around and comparing what I could see to what the charts were showing.

The most important thing I figured out was that I wanted my dinghy so I could explore the park. I was reminded of the US Navy recruiting phrase: “Join the Navy, See the world.” and the army joke that went with it: “We own the part you can walk on.”

After two nights on the south side of McMicken Island, I motored to the south side to see what was available there. There were more mooring balls, and plenty of protected anchorage, but there was also a lot more boats in that area. My solitude on the south side had been nice while there was very little wind or weather.

I’d decided I wanted to explore Jerrell Cove State Park and then stay at Tolmie State Park on Monday. I had some nice south wind and was able to sail for a while going north in Case Inlet and around the northern point of Harstine Island, then dump the sail into the sailbag and motor into Jarrell Cove and back, then raise the sail and sail southwards again. I only sailed about 7 miles total, but it was certainly nice to not have the diesel running for a few hours.

I ran out of wind as I got a little farther south than I’d started the day. While it was now Monday of the long weekend, I wasn’t certain about where I was staying the night, and preferred to arrive and use a mooring ball instead of dropping anchor. I needn’t have worried, as there were three empty mooring balls when I arrived, and one boat anchored nearby. The location was exactly what I was hoping for. Quiet and flat, and an easy location to start back home from. There was 40 feet showing on my depth finder when I connected to the mooring ball. The views of Mt Rainier were incredible, and the water was glasslike in the morning.

While waiting for the currents to turn to the north, I flew my drone.

I timed the currents northwards and after leaving Tolmie State Park a bit past ten in the morning, I was able to be back in my slip in Shilshole just past four pm. I had about a knot of push during most of the trip, with as much as four knots at times.

Using FFMPEG to Concatenate and Embed Subtitles

I recently upgraded my drone to a DJI Mavic Air 2. Among other things, it can create h.265 videos directly. It still uses the MP4 container format and the separate SRT format for storing video subtitles, the flight data. Following most camera standards, it creates video files that are individually smaller than 4 GB, which works out to be about five minutes in 4k video.

If I want to upload a longer raw video to social media, the video files need to be concatenated before uploading.

Concatenating the video with FFMPEG has been something I’ve known how to do for a long time using either of two methods. Today I learned how to properly embed the subtitles in either the MKV or MP4 container format.

The MP4 format is more widely supported than the MKV format, but is less flexible as to what it can contain.  The MKV (Matroska Multimedia Container) container format can hold almost any type of media, and so I’m able to copy the SRT format directly. The MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) container format only supports a limited selection of subtitle formats, so I’m required to have FFMPEG convert the SRT stream to a MP4 compatible stream.  If you are interested in video container formats, these tables are very helpful.

I’ll give several examples using the two video files and their associated subtitle files created by the drone named DJI00001.MP4, DJI00002.MP4, DJI00001.SRT, and DJI00002.SRT. The method I’m using should work for any number of files, up to the largest filesize you can store on your filesystem.

To simply concatenate the video files, create a text input file (I’m using mp4files.txt) with the contents as follows

file DJI00001.MP4
file DJI00001.MP4

then use the ffmpeg command to create a new concatenated file.

ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i mp4files.txt -c copy ConcatenatedVideo.MP4

If you want to embed the subtitles, you need to create a second text file, do some stream mapping, and specify what format the subtitles should be. In this case I’m using srtfiles.txt

file DJI00001.SRT
file DJI00002.SRT

My FFMPEG command to create an MP4 file gets a lot more involved because now I’m specifying multiple inputs and have to specify the subtitle format.

ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i mp4files.txt -f concat -safe 0 -i srtfiles.txt -map 0:v -map 1 -c:v copy -c:s mov_text ConcatenatedVideo.MP4

The FFMPEG command to create an MKV command is only a tiny bit different, and the resulting file is only a tiny bit smaller.

ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i mp4files.txt -f concat -safe 0 -i srtfiles.txt -map 0:v -map 1 -c:v copy -c:s copy ConcatenatedVideo.MKV

When playing the ConcatenatedVideo files on my local machine, I can now enable or disable the closed caption track properly in the player for either format. Unfortunately in my initial testing with YouTube, neither format maintains the second stream of subtitles.

This is not all a waste of time and effort, because an advantage of embedding the subtitles into the container format is that the timing has been matched to the video, and can now be extracted in a concatenated form for use with YouTube.

ffmpeg -i ConcatenatedVideo.MKV -c copy ConcatenatedVideo.SRT

You can exclude the “-c copy” when extracting the subtitles and FFMPEG fill run it through its subrip codec and produce nearly identical results. It will only work with the MKV file because the subtitle format stored in the MP4 file is not easily converted to a SRT file.

Using the -f concat option invokes the concat demuxer in FFMPEG, which has the limitation that the format needs to be exactly the same for each file. If there are any changes between files you want to concatenate, you must use a more involved command invoking the concat filter. In a different project I ran into a command issue with the concat filter command when the command got to be much over 900 characters long.

 

FAA Drone Questionnaire

I got an email from the FAA asking me to participate in a questionnaire about recreational drone use and information the FAA can provide.

One of the questions was How long do you typically fly? My answer was 60 minutes.  I usually have three fully charged batteries, each of which will fly for approximately 28 minutes. I like to land and swap batteries with a few minutes to spare, giving me a total flight time per session of close to an hour.

The form doesn’t like any answer more than 30 minutes. One more example of how out of touch the FAA is with the rapidly advancing technology.

SD Card Holder

I’d been traveling with several microSD cards for both GoPro and Drone usage for the past year when I finally got around to buying this inexpensive plastic card to organize them.

Before buying it, I had read several reviews, and worried that cheap plastic might either make it brittle, or let the flash cards fall out of the enclosure. For $6.95 it was worth a try.

What I really found out was that I should have been using it for at least a year before I got it. The fact that I can carry 10 micro SD cards and they are all in order is a complete boon for organization.

Before using this, I’d often have two identical looking SD cards in my hands and forget which one was full and which one was empty. I’d also take a card out of my device and set it down, and nearly lose it.  Now I take a card out of my camera and immediately put it into this holder. I fill this holder from one end with empty cards and from the other with full cards and never have to remember which cards have something on them any more.

It’s essentially the same size as a credit card, but is quite a bit thicker. I wouldn’t carry it in my wallet, nor would I use the hole for a key ring, but having it in a pocket in my drone bag keeps all the memory cards in one place in a known order.

Being a responsible drone pilot

I try to be a responsible drone pilot. I use the FAA B4UFly App on a regular basis to see what it has to say about locations that I’m interested in flying. Unfortunately, it lists every uncontrolled heliport as an airport and reports “Action Required” so often as to be nearly useless.

Yesterday I was sitting on the beach at Golden Gardens Park in Seattle, watching sailboats race offshore. I thought it would be good to check to see what the app would show. I was sitting at sea level, with a hill near me that would be at least 200 feet high. The rules for drones say that you are not allowed to fly over 400 feet above the surface without permission from the controlling authority. Aircraft are not allowed to fly below 700 feet without similar permission.

Golden Gardens is located about where the “E” in KENMORE sits on the map above. It’s under the Class B Airspace that starts at 3,000 feet, going up to 10,000 feet.

While understanding VFR charts  may be more than the average drone pilot should be expected to recognize, especially for a dense area like Seattle, the B4UFly App’s tendency to show warnings is similar to the boy who cried wolf. It’s impossible to recognize when an action is really appropriate.

AMA Membership and BestBuy

An interesting thing I found in the drone aisle in BestBuy was a card to join the Academy of Model Aeronautics.

I’ve been a member since I got involved with drones. I had to become a member to join the rc flying club I frequent. It’s good to see that it’s being easy to recognize in consumer stores, as opposed to the complete hobby level word of mouth that I’ve seen in the past.

Best Buy and DJI Accessories

I don’t shop too much locally for technology, because it always seems that what I want is not available locally. Yesterday I was wandering around killing time and went into the local Best Buy.  Instead of just looking at the normal things I might go for in a best buy, I looked around to see what was new. They now have an aisle dedicated to drones. There were complete drones from DJI, Yuneec, and several other manufacturers. More interesting to me was that they carried accessories for those drones as well.  I knew that they sold drones on-line, it just never occurred to me to look at them in person in the store.

I bought a Mavic Pro directly from DJI soon after they were released. I got the Fly-More package that entails several items including spare propellers. I’ve not needed to replace a propeller in my first 7 hours of flight time but it’s nice to know that propellers are available locally. DJI charges slightly less, $9.00, but they charge for shipping, and you have to wait for the item to arrive.

DJI Battery Monitoring

DJI charges a significant amount of money for their batteries and calls them Smart Batteries. I’ve seen the statistics reported of how many times the battery has been power cycled, as well as details of how much flight time is available. This was a new and interesting feature to me.

I had left the drone in the back of my car overnight. The temperature had probably gotten into the high 30s, and was still in the mid 50s with the sun shining. The warning message “Battery Temperature Too Low. Warm battery to at least 15 degrees Celcius before flying” came up on my screen and would not let me initiate a takeoff.

I have used batteries in cold climates in the past. I know how temperature affects both current output from batteries and future usability. I’m impressed that DJI has built in this feature to their firmware.

DJI Phantom 3 Standard

DJI has been the standard drone that people visualize when they think of consumer drones for the past several years. It’s a white quadcopter that comes with a white remote control.

This drone is the camera platform I was hoping for when I got into drones three years ago. The flights are very automated, the camera controls are fully integrated, and I can start flying in a new location with very little setup time. The picture below was taken to demonstrate how close the drone came to returning to its launch location and automatically landing after flying over a thousand feet away from where I was standing. The drone had taken off from on top of the ring, and it landed less than 4 feet from the same location.

In early March DJI dropped the prices of their entire line, convincing me to buy the least expensive unit, now on sale for under $500. I ordered it on March 18th, received it on March 23rd, but didn’t successfully fly it until March 29th.

I live in downtown Seattle. I didn’t want my first flight to be anywhere that would draw excess attention. I’ve been flying drones for three years now, and have grown accustomed to things going wrong. I’d planned on flying at the RC field I regularly visit on the evening of  March 24th. When I got there, first I was not able to get the drone to power on, then when I figured out how to do that, I was forced to do a firmware update before I could fly. By the time I’d got all that out of the way I was running late for a meeting. I decided that the safe thing was to put everything away until my next opportunity.

The Phantom 3 Standard is delivered with two sets of propellers, the transmitter / remote control, a flight battery, an AC battery charger, and a few small extra parts related to the camera gymbal.  It is designed to work with an iPhone or Android phone to both control the unit and see what the camera is doing. I don’t have either of those phones, instead I’m using a Google Nexus 7 tablet. The device connects to the transmitter via WiFi. While my tablet is connected to the transmitter it is not able to connect to the internet.

My first flight with the drone was in a Seattle Park. The battery reports that it can fly up to 25 minutes. None of my previous drones would fly for more than about 13 minutes. The controller app on my tablet has plenty of feedback about the battery condition.

Normal flight mode for me has been that I tell the drone to take off via the app. It takes off and hovers about 4 feet in the air. Then I use the sticks to fly the drone to a location telling it to go up/down or rotate left/right with the left stick, and moving horizontally with the right stick. I usually enable the camera in movie mode before taking off, and only take it out of movie mode if I want to take still photos. When I’m ready to finish, I can either drive it back near myself, or toggle the left switch on the transmitter to cause it to go into return home mode. I’ve got it configured so that it will be at least 100 feet above the ground during return to home mode, which is good enough to clear most trees, but I make sure that’s true early in my flight just in case. If the drone loses contact with the transmitter for more than three seconds it will enter return to home mode.

After owning the drone for one month, I also purchased the DJI backpack specifically designed to carry the drone. It has been what really makes the drone fun for me because I can store the drone in the backpack, knowing it’s fully protected, and easily grab the entire thing and throw it in my car to go somewhere that might have interesting things to photograph.

 

FrSky X4rSB Receiver controlling Eachine Racer 250

I wanted to use S.Bus communication to connect my receiver to my new Eachine 250 
Racer drone. I wanted to be able to remotely control the lights on the drone. I wanted to bring back telemetry from the drone to my transmitter. All of those are possible with the X series receivers from FrSky.

I’ve used the X8R receivers in the past, but I bought an X4R-SB receiver specifically for this drone.

In it’s default configuration it will output PWM on the pins for Channels 1 through 3 and S.Bus on the 4th connector. It has a separate input connection on the side for S.Port telemetry devices and an analog data line.

By putting a jumper on the signal pins, as shown in the picture above, during the binding process, the output is changed so that CPPM channels 1-8 are on the first port, PWM Channel 9 and 10 on the second and third ports, and S.Bus on the fourth port.

I’ve got the S.Bus connection going to the main port on my CC3D flight controller, a cable to control the lights on the third port (channel 10) and the first two ports remain unused. I have the momentary switch SH on my Taranis configured to control Channel 10. Toggling it cycles the LEDs on my Eachine Racer through the  off and on colored states.

The telemetry cable is connected first to a FrSky SP-GPS – Smart Port GPS Sensor (GPS-V2) and daisy chain connected to a FrSky SP-FLVS – Smart Port Lipo Voltage Sensor.

The GPS Sensor is a new item in my arsenal. I’ve used GPS chips connected to my flight controllers in the past, which allow the flight controller to direct its flight position using GPS. Since this is not connected into the flight controller, it’s purely a toy, though it may help finding the drone if I get confused and crash it away from myself. The last data received in my transmitter remains on the display, which I could then use to assist my search for the drone.

The voltage sensor connects to the balance plug on the battery, allowing me to monitor the state of the individual battery cells during flight, as well as having low battery alerts reported on the overall voltage.

For installation of this receiver in my drone, I’d come across a 3d model for a holder. I had never used a 3d printer before, though I’ve been fascinated with them for several years. I realized that Windows 10 has a 3d Modeling program installed by default, 3D Builder, and that it can print using an on-line service.  Because the service accepts the file and tells you how much it is going to cost delivered, this was an easy first try. I downloaded files for both a battery protector tray and the previously mentioned receiver tray, merged them into a single model file, and had them delivered for $27.15. Other than the time involved for the delivery I was happy with the result. I submitted the order on 4/26/2016. I received notice that it shipped on 5/10/2016. It finally arrived on 5/13/2016.

The design here has the receiver extending in the model over the flight controller and under the video transmitter. I’m not positive that I’m going to use the battery tray. If I don’t use it, I just need to get screw extenders to install the receiver directly above the flight controller.