I almost killed Sparkie

 Boy yesterday was such a wash out! I drove two hours to get to Jenny jump forest where is the Perseid meteor shower‘s would be a lot clearer than around city life, especially because the moon will be new and gone from the sky.

Unfortunately I set my GPS to Jenny jump forest, nothing specific to the observatory. There were several times along the way when the sky was bursting in color despite being overcast cloudy and gray, where I was tempted to stop the car off the side of the highway and fly Sparkie. I thought to myself, I’m losing light so if I plan on flying the drone around the observatory, I had better go there directly rather than stopping and taking the 5-10 minutes needed for flight prep.

 After driving around then backtracking,  trying to find the observatory I finally did arrive at the gate which was closed and locked. I never considered that there would be nobody there during this weekend of moody weather and exciting potential to see the Perseids.

It took about an hour and a half to return home making my whole trip about three hours for nothing.  On the way home I decided to fly at any rate and was able to find a truck stop that was empty of trucks and traffic, so I could fly peacefully - or so I thought.

I put the drone on the ground, turned on the battery, turned on the controller, turned on the iPad, got everything connected, started the propellers and took off - not realizing that the 3-D printed shroud I had made to protect the gimbal (a gimbal is what has the camera attached providing instant positional adjustment to counteract the movements of the airship so that the video is smooth and the horizon is kept perfectly horizontal.

The  automatic launch function should have only raised the plane the drone about 4 feet but the bird went up to 10 feet and started kissing the branches and leaves of the overhanging trees selling the propellers and causing the drone to crash to the ground breaking off one of the propellers and cracking the chassis covering open.

 I didn’t want to try it again until I was in a safer place. As soon as I got home I fired up the rig and got Sparky up in the air without a problem at all. I’ll have to do some more extensive testing with photography to make sure things are aligned and none of the processing chips have been damaged but as far as I can tell the bird is as good as gold except for a little physical “dent” so to speak.  WHEW!