Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Homegrown Drones: MAKE talks with Eric Cheng”.
This is eric chang eric chang has been filming. Some of my absolute favorite drone made videos, including that steamer’s lane clip uh all shot from uh you’re using dji phantom gopro, hero3s and um. I just want to ask like how did you get started with this and um, and where do you see this going? I actually got started in private a long time ago, uh by flying toys around uh, and you know just imagining one day that i’d be able to put something in the air without the investment of cracking. You know open source, uh and open hardware, stuff um, which now is has come along, but i think in 2006 it was pretty primitive and all the instructions were in german. You know that’s wiki for microcopter and i just decided you know i’m going to wait. A few years until things mature a bit and things really matured quickly and so um this year, you know: we’ve gone from seeing almost none of these things in the air to uh being almost commonplace.
What do you think it was that uh created, uh, sort of a breakthrough and and why? Why are we starting to see so many of these things flying around now? Well, i would get i i tend to separate the maker movement and the sort of push for mass consumer adoption and i think we’re seeing both of those progressing at an incredible rate. Right now – and here you know, we have such diversity in these things that are flying around one right over our head right now. You know everything from ready to made ready to fly copters to you know, total homemade projects and um and so uh.
I don’t i’m super excited they’re. Just it’s uh! You know the opportunities are sort of endless right now, yeah. So your setup, you primarily use the ready-to-fly phantom um. How? How much modification do you do with yours uh? Well, i got the phantom the original phantom when it first came out and if you wanted to do anything it wasn’t designed to do, you had to essentially become a hobbyist, and so you know, within a couple of weeks i was soldering and going to hobby shops Ordering all the all the little parts i needed to do, fpv flying and you know i hacked together my own gimbals and things like that before they were available for the for mass market um, but the industry’s moving so quickly that you know within six months.
Suddenly there were products that you could just buy and they were a lot more expensive and i think it will always be like that, but i think it’s it’s been really important to continue to build things in my garage on the side, because i don’t think i Would understand how these things work, certainly not how to repair them. If i weren’t building uh, you know multicopters on the side as well yeah, it’s actually it’s a really interesting point because uh, you know, there’s been so much of an upbringing in the say that the multicopter world, uh from that that diy perspective uh it it’s been Interesting for me to think about what happens when they become much more commercially available on a mass market scale, and how do people react to that compared to people who’ve trained themselves to be pilots and flyers? You think about that much yeah i do and um. You know, i don’t think, there’s there’s any replacement for for training and practice and uh and in fact many of my friends have lost uh lost multi-rotors to to the ocean and including me, um and and all of it, i’m almost all of in almost all those Cases uh, the crashes could have been prevented, but people were too excited about what they were going to do.
You know the first time you put something above and you see that new perspective. It’S tempting just to push it a little further, but of course, if you’re over water, it’s uh it’s you know, the crash is catastrophic. So one of the things uh, you wrote for the drones issue is the uh: how to do fantastic aerial, video uh, which is a great piece.
Thank you for putting that together for us um, but give a quick run through of any tips that you might have for budding videographers aerial videographers i mean the the biggest tip is really to fly all the time, and that doesn’t mean flying with the rig that You’Ve meticulously put together for aerial imaging, but i always have a second or a third quadcopter, whether it’s ready to fly or homemade that i can use for practicing without having to worry about destroying my camera. If i crash it, so you know, i think, um. You know practice, that’s the most important thing um. The second thing is having a a plan for the sort of footage you want to come back with. You know if you go on youtube and do a search for any quadcopter. You know just search for quadcopter you’ll find you know thousands of backyard videos and park videos.
No, nobody really wants to see those. Certainly, i don’t want to see them and in fact i run a group on facebook and one of the rules is no backyard videos like no park videos. We just don’t want to see these test videos because they’re interesting from a learning perspective, but they don’t ins. They don’t inspire people when compared to you know footage of something um that tells a story right right. So what uh? What do you have in the works? What’S what’s the next one that that we’ll be able to see from you uh? Well, in a couple weeks, i’m heading to indonesia for uh one of the dive trips that i’ve been running pretty much every year for a long time now, um only this year, where we will have uh quadcopters on board, so that will change things. A lot um and uh, so i’m looking forward to to having footage of uh, basically south komodo and a lot of the wildlife there from the air.
That sounds great. I can’t wait to see it well, thanks again for um, putting together a great article, shooting amazing videos that keep me really excited and helping keep the community moving forward. All this stuff, .