9 Replies to “Honey, I Finished The Internet”

  1. Well, that was nice. I saw the spot on the Canadian side that fifty years ago while on dates we would sit and watch the submarine races.

  2. That was neat. Makes me more determined than ever to get a quadcopter but the $600+ price tag has been a bit of a disincentive and also the two radio controlled helicopters that I destroyed flying them through the house.
    I’ve been told that a quadcopter or octacopter is a far more stable platform than the cheap RC helicopters I smashed up. The major problem I can see with the type of flight done over Niagra Falls is really knowing how much charge is left in the batteries as, unfortunately, even with high capacity LiPo batteries flights are limited to 5-10 minutes for reasonably priced machines. Add on a high res video camera and you can cut that time down even more. Even with all those limitations, I’ll probably just ignore the cost and get myself a new toy for Christmas.
    For those who don’t want to do the Niagra falls remote viewing, the Swedish company Bitcraze has a tiny quadcopter kit available for about $200 which one can control from the keyboard of ones laptop. Video of the device in action at:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WBUVYZkODI&feature=player_embedded

  3. As someone who also flies one of these with a camera mounted, as a hobby, I wish promoters of the works produced by citizens using these would stop calling them “unmanned drones”, as if they were stealth military hardware. These are flown in the same context as the R/C aircraft hobby with the same equipment, and are enjoyed in the same manner. Using them as camera platforms is just one of the interests of R/C enthusiasts. Unknown to many, including those in the hobby, a significant battle is on between hobbyists, commercial interests, airspace regulators and law enforcement over whether these should be allowed to fly at all. In the hobby, they are referred to “quadcopters” or whatever because that is what they are. Drawing a connection to the military equivalent serves no one’s interest. Using these commercially is already fraught with regulatory difficulty (and impossible in some areas) due to radio spectrum allocations and airspace regs. /rant. 🙂
    Loki, you won’t do that for $600. Someone wishing to emulate that is looking at a minimum expenditure of about $2000-3000.
    Nice video – there was another NF flyover done about 2 yrs ago.

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