Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

First Person View

Those who read my blog know that I'm into Remote Control (RC) model airplanes.

I won't bore you with the evolution of the RC Airplane Hobby except to say that in my lifetime the the pastime went from free flight models, to control line models to third person view flying and is has now entered the First Person View (FPV) phase.

In free flight the pilot simply started up the engine, cranked in a little up elevator and right rudder and let her rip. When the airplane ran out of gas it came down somewhere in the vicinity.

In Control Line there were two wires that connected the pilot to the airplane and these wires controlled the up and down elevator as the operator turned slowly in circles

In Third Person View the pilot held a transmitter box with two gimbals and moved the control surfaces; rudder, elevator ailerons and throttle through a tiny receiver in the airplane connected to small electrical servos that moved back and forth. The pilot stood on the edge of the flying field and flew from the perspective of a spectator.

In First Person View, a camera is in the airplane and the pilot flies as he were inside a real airplane.

With that in mind I'm building an FPV drone along the general lines of the one I bought from my friend Dustin. It has a bigger wing, carries less weight, and has shorter tail booms. The idea is to make the aircraft as light as possible, straight and with the lightest payload possible. Making it light, straight and with plenty of wing surface area maximizes the loiter time in flight which is an important consideration for a drone.

The important difference in this set up is the camera system. It is much like the camera system in a home security system. The camera has three wires, a black, red and yellow. It runs off a 12 volt battery with a positive and negative post. To wire it in a house the black camera wire goes to the negative post and the red camera wire goes to the positive post. This energizes the system. The yellow wire is the signal wire and it goes to the display unit to receive the yellow wire as well as jacks to plug into the positive and negative power source.

Now that makes sense to me however, an airplane cannot be hardwired to an electrical circuit like a household appliance is. With an airplane there needs to be a transmitter that sends the signal from the yellow wire to a viewing appliance located on the ground. This can be a VCR like monitor or a pair of virtual reality goggles. That's about all there is to it except the pilot also needs to splice into the circuit an Onboard Screen Display (OSD) which shows flight telemetry like a real pilot gets on the instrument panel of his airplane.

So now you know as much about the FPV process as I do. For most you might have learned something new and for the rest, sorry for insulting your intelligence.