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Archer font! Love it, great looking build.

Sent from my 6045I using Tapatalk

Not a drone operator as such...

But I did spend a couple years as an FPV pilot of model airplanes back in 2007 when the FPV thing just started taking off... so to speak. 

I have not flown since about 2010 but still have all my airplanes and one Tricopter.

Do you fly the drone FPV?

Well, not currently, no. It's basically a two-man operation, intentionally. The gimbal can move 360 degrees round underneath (the landing gear retract flat under the arms, so one person is flying and the other person is controlling the camera. The problem with this though, is that as soon as the nose of the drone and the camera aren't aligned, it's next to impossible to use the monitor on the ground to tell where the drone is pointing. For shooting static stuff like buildings I think it will be fine, but for moving targets or more intricate stuff, I'm thinking I'll need to mount a fixed cam on the frame so I always can see where the nose is.

The FAA requires you to operate them via line-of-sight only right now (meaning you can use an FPV cam as an aid but not as the only means of flying it).

I went on a total spree (for me) last year and built a load of pedals while I was a stay-at-home dad for our first kiddo. He's 18 months now, and I recently went back to work as a helicopter pilot/instructor. The company was interested in branching out intro drones, for aerial photography/video to start with, and since I used to fly RC helicopters from when I was about 12 to 19 years old, I was interested in heading it up. So here's my latest build!



It took a good few months to research, source, and then assemble all the various components, because this is about as far from a Best Buy drone as you could get. It's about 3.5 ft diameter and about 2 feet tall, weighing in around 20lbs.

We are currently waiting on our FAA approval to operate it commercially, so we're limited to test flying it right now, but it's flown about 5 drama-free hours so far and is doing well!

My friend actually designs and builds the camera gimbal mounted underneath, and this is serial # 0001 of this model gimbal, so we're acting as kind of a guinea pig for him to see if any design changes are needed, but it does a remarkable job of keeping the camera steady and level regardless of what the drone is doing above.

Anyway I just wanted to thank everyone here for everything I've learned from you all. There's no way I would have been able to put this thing together without the primer into electronics that guitar pedals gave me, and you all helped in that even if you didn't know it!

Any other drone operators on the board?

I like the looks of this. If you are handy with a brush or markers, I highly encourage doodling on at least one of your builds. I have practically given up on etching; I'll probably go back to drawing on my boxes again. The vibe on this is cool.

I am not handy at all, that's why I don't even try it haha. I did one etch and was really happy with how it came out. Beginners luck maybe.

You can hack the Lightwah by building an envelope generator that drives an LED, removing the manual part of the Lightwah, and appending it to your Lightwah build with a switch that changes the LED control for your vactrol between the envelope and the LFO.

Otherwise the closest thing out there that I'm aware of is the FSH-1.

Of course, you can also build an LFO to put into almost any envelope filter using much the same method.

Thanks Jon, good food for thought. I played around with the Light Wah a bit earlier and think might just keep it as-is. The external LDR makes it a bit different I suppose.

It seems like out would be easier to add an LFO to an envelope filter than the other way around anyway.

I'd love to see a resonant filter with lfo control similar to the twins peak trem and liquid mercury phaser, but with envelope control too (hint hint drolo :-) ....)

As a matter of fact I have been working on exactly something like this but keep putting it aside for whatever reason.
Somehow doing yet another pedal with the TAPLFO seems like cheating ... it's so easy to do cool stuff with this chip, its not even funny anymore :-)

Lately I have been more interested in playing with the Spin FV-1 as it seems to offer quite some possibilities for crazy filtering. Eventually I will have to decide which route to follow ...

Nice! The tremolo and phaser both sounded incredible, I just didn't have a need for either at the time. I would certainly love to see what you'd do with this idea, and I imagine I'd build one!

Do you just spray clear right over the acrylic?

Yeah, lots of thin coats, like 10 or so, and the acrylic is also model paints so a little thicker than some varieties. Just know that almost nothing you do will keep the corners from getting dinged. (I try to be aware of this when painting over the powdercoated base coat). If she used some of the less durable kinds of acrylic paints, then a clear powdercoat might be the only way to reasonably protect it. I THINK you can get away with baking a powdercoat near 120^o without damaging any components, if you can't/don't want to just remove the guts.

Good info, thanks. If she does any more for me I might look into clear powder coating

I'm just finishing up a Light wah build (external LDR for manual sweep and an LFO mode) and while it's a cool sounding pedal, I'm realizing that an envelope mode might be more practical on (dark) stages than the external LDR. Is there a DIY project floating around that has a good sounding envelope filter with an LFO mode too?

Awesome artwork!

Thanks Jon! High praise indeed coming from you, I love all the handpainted stuff you do.

I was actually thinking of messaging you to ask how you finish/protect the acrylic artwork on your pedals because I didn't want to screw up my sister's work. In the end my method seemed to work well though so it worked out. Do you just spray clear right over the acrylic?

Came out great, fresh and original! Your sister now needs to do a build report on methods and materials used.

Is the back decorated as well?
dave

Thanks!

I sent the enclosure off to her in white primer as the base coat. She drew most of the design on in pencil first to make sure she liked it, then filled it all in with acrylic paints. The lettering was done with black paint pens.

Since some of the white was left exposed, and therefore didn't have any brush stroke texture to it, I decided to mod podge the whole thing to give it a uniform texture, then clear coated it with a few coats of Polycrylic. I like to use polyurethane normally because it's tougher, but it yellows slightly so it wouldn't have worked over the white.

The base of the pedal is plain white but you can see she painted onto the side of it to give it that seamless look.

New Sibling Pedal Refinish Day!

This is an old BYOC Envelope Filter I've had for years. It was probably the third BYOC pedal I built before I found out about Madbean and vero

It originally had a mediocre swirl paint job with waterslide decal and a mediocre clear coat and didn't look very good really. I also never used the fixed wah portion of the circuit, so I decided to whip that out, fill the holes, and refinish it.

I sent it off to FSU to my artsy sister and said she could do whatever she wanted with it, and this is what I got back!




I love it! It's so totally different to anything I would think up or be able to do. I have a lot of respect for anyone who can do this stuff.

No gut shot because I forgot!

Yea, sure that crop was an accident!

Thanks to you both! Perfectly clear. 

If I wanted to build a two-in-one with one circuit operating on +9v and the other on either 15 or 18v from the Road Rage, would I power the 9v circuit straight from the DC jack with the Road Rage in parallel, or use the 9v pads from the Road Rage?

Also, when the Road Rage doc says it gives 18v unregulated, what does that mean and how does it impact a pedal running on that?

Thanks!

There's normally a 'print actual size' option in the print dialog for PDFs. That's what you want.