My Nerdy Hobby

Most people don’t know that I have an odd hobby. Although I can’t shut up about it with my closest friends, I’m usually shy when it comes to telling other people about my hobby because it’s pretty nerdy.

I have been fascinated with everything that flies as long as I can remember. I learned to fly airplanes in college, but it was so expensive that I decided to scale it down and learn to fly model airplanes and helicopters. When that got boring, I got started in a hobby known as FPV (First Person View) flying.

This simply means that I put a camera and video transmitter on the plane so that I can beam a live image from the airplane or helicopter to a video screen on the ground. My FPV system happens to be installed on a quad-copter called a Discovery.

For the past two months I’ve been building the Discovery. Most of that time has been either trouble-shooting or waiting for parts. Because it’s pretty complex, there are lots of small problems that require special-order parts that can’t be found in a store.

You can see in the picture that there are two cameras. The one on the left (the large one) is an HD camera that records in the air. The other camera is the “flight camera” that I use to see what is happening when the Discovery is far from me.

My goal is to take video of a bunch of the cool places in Korea. Although the video isn’t perfect yet (some vibrations persist and my video editing is pretty awful), I think it’s an interesting point of view from which to see the world.

It will all make more sense when you watch the video I made. All of this video was shot last Saturday within a mile or two of my apartment. I hope you enjoy it. Be sure to set the video to HD in the lower right corner – it’s just not the same in standard definition.

Until next time.

-Taft

P.S. Notice at the very end of the video there is one little kid who comes running toward the camera (and me, behind it) yelling my name. Look closely and you’ll see that it’s my walking buddy!