XDC3 Drone Racing

I had no working drone for the race but my good buddy Boz loaned me his drone and radio at the end of the night.

FPV Racing Drone - Ideafly Grasshopper F210

The Ideafly Grasshopper F210 is a FPV racing quadcopter that looks like a grasshopper. Don't be fooled, this is not a toy! This drone is very fast, 4S powered drone.

New hobby takes flight Read More : http://www.nst.com.my/news/2016/09/172625/new-hobby-takes-flight

THE thrill of flying drones at speeds of 120km per hour through unique tracks from a bird’s eye perspective is driving the new Xtreme Sport of race drones. One group promoting this new hi-tech sport is Hobby Geng; its members just love to fly these little machines. Other groups that are also into drone racing include Team Air Strike and Team CV. Hobby Geng’s head honco, Adrian Chai Sze Yong, who has been flying drones since 2012, likens the race drones to a different kind of beast. “It combines the excitement of using first-person view (FPV) headgear and skills to control and manoeuvre the machines,” he says. But what’s even more interesting about these race drones is that they are mostly custom-built. “We the ‘pilots’, know everything about the drones that we are flying. It’s just like building your own jet fighter and then flying it,” says Chai, 35. Although flying drones as a hobby has been around for two to three years in Malaysia now, the racing part is new. “Unlike hovering drones, these are fast-flying machines and are built for racing,” says Chai, adding that the drones can also be flown leisurely at lower speed. Recently, the first drone race championship was held in Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur; it was also the Malaysia Nationals qualifier for 2016 World Drone Racing Championships. A member of Hobby Geng team, Ibsen Wong Xin Chi, was one of the winners and now, he can go on to compete in the World Drone Racing Championship in Hawaii on Oct 20-22, 2016. The ESPN channel has included the event in its Xtreme sports category. RACE DRONES What differentiates race drones from the regular ones like the DJI Phantom, is their ability to fly at high speeds of up to 250km per hour. Chai and the Hobby Geng usually fly their race drones in Bukit Jalil Recreational Park, Taman Metropolitan in Kepong and Shah Alam Skate Park or in empty basement car parks. One of the members, Wan Mohd Azzuddin Wan Ahmad Kamal, says drone enthusiasts love to fly these machines because they can get that “feeling of flying”. “The drones are best flown with headgear that gives a first-person view of where the drones are heading,” he says. A small camera on the drone transmits real-time visuals to the headgear, so the “pilot” is in full control as if he/she is actually flying. “This gives us a Superman feel when we are flying these drones,” says Wan Mohd Azzuddin. Due to the speed and power, a race drone has the power to fly for four minutes at a time only. BUILDING THE DRONES Race drones are custom-built to maximise its capability to fly. Hobby Geng (www.hobbygeng.com) is also a hobbyist shop which provides all the necessary components to build race drones. A full-set racing drone costs from RM600 to more than RM3,000; this is actually cheaper than ready-made aerial drones, says Chai. For RM600, you get a drone the size of a palm, with four protected rotors and a camera. This can be flown with the FPV headgear too. Since it opened in 2015, the Hobby Geng centre in Endah Parade, Bukit Jalil, is where hobbyists head for when they are looking for parts to build race drones. “A race drone can be built in three hours, provided you have all the components ready,” says Chai. Besides imported components like the frames, circuit boards and motors, Chai also uses a 3D printer to print components like the camera mount for the drones. TRAINING CENTRE Hobby Geng will open a training centre for drone racing enthusiasts at the end of the month in Endah Parade. Hobbyists can learn to build drones and understand the rules and regulations of flying them. Chai says: “We will teach basic set-ups for DIY racing drones, setting and tuning, simulator training and on-site flying as well as the rules and regulations.” He encourages the public, especially teenagers to take up drone flying. “When they build and fly drones, they learn something useful which will also increase their technical knowledge and skills. It’s better than loitering at malls and being up to mischief,” he adds.

Read More : http://www.nst.com.my/news/2016/09/172625/new-hobby-takes-flight

The Big Buzz: Drone Racing Goes National

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines. All six of them.

Drone racing takes off in October and may mark another inflection point in the evolution of broadcast sports as virtual and physical domains converge to create another piece in the emerging picture that will be sports in a videogame world.

The Drone Racing League (DRL) last week announced multiyear international event and media-distribution agreements with ESPN (in the Americas), Sky (UK and Ireland), and 7Sports, the sports division of German media company ProSiebenSat.1 Media.

Featuring complicated courses in a variety of venues, drone-race competitions will be postprocessed into hour-long packages.

Airing as 10 one-hour episodes, the 2016 DRL season covers five races, including a winner-take-all world championship to crown the best drone pilot. DRL will also partner with MGM Television to develop unscripted shows, executive-produced by reality producer Mark Burnett, exploring the world of DRL, its pilots, and technology, allowing existing fans to get a deeper look at the league while bringing new fans to the sport.

Starting next month, thebroadcasts will air on ESPN/ESPN2 and will feature 25 of the fastest FPV pilots from more than eight countries competing for a professional contract in the 2017 season and the title “World’s Greatest Drone Pilot.”

Small and FastDRL founder/CEO Nicholas Horbaczewski describes the challenges of getting a new sport on the air — literally. “It took over a year to figure out the best way to do drone racing as a television sport,” he says, crediting DRL Head of Media Tony Budding with much of the strategy. “You’re talking about capturing something the size of a dinner plate going 80 miles per hour over a complicated course. It’s never been done before.”

The courses are set up in a variety of locations; drone racing may be years away from its own arenas. These include an abandoned mill in Los Angeles, a former paper factory in Ohio, a closed Cadillac metal-stamping plant in Detroit; and the former Bell Labs office building outside New York City. The first race, “Miami Lights,” from Sun Life Stadium, will be shown Sunday Oct. 23 at 10 a.m. on ESPN2.

Horbaczewski says issues around this peripatetic venue journey include finding sufficient power sources onsite for what is a substantial amount of kit for the races. Generators and other heavy equipment are being sourced by Hertz Equipment Rentals. Location production is done by several remote-production companies, all with their own substantial sports-broadcast bona fides, including Kodiak, NEP, and Lyon Video. As many as 50 cameras are used on the races. These include numerous GoPro cams fitted on the drones themselves and along the course and the same Spidercam and Cablecam platforms used at NFL games. Two Red Dragon high-speed cameras are also used to create slo-mo shots in postproduction.

Shotgun microphones are laid out around the courses. A field reporter uses a handheld microphone and is followed by handheld video cameras during visits to the pilots’ area, where the drone jockeys fly as many as six aircraft through wireless video connections through three-dimensional obstacle courses.

PostproductionHowever, unlike most broadcast sports, DRL races won’t be shown live, nor will they be streamed. Instead, the footage will be postproduced and edited into one- and two-hour race packages for broadcast.

Aside from the difficulty in maintaining a visual narrative of such small and fast objects — “The amount of video switching you’d have to do would be enormous to show this live,” Horbaczewski says — drone racing has perceptual expectations to overcome. He notes that market research revealed that many potential viewers expected to see something similar to podracing, a “sport” they first encountered in Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace.

“That was all CG, and it cost millions of dollars to produce,” Horbaczewski points out. “That’s the perceptual bar we had to meet. But it did help us shape our ideas for bringing this to television and determining what equipment we’d need to make it compelling viewing.”

Commentary will be added as voiceover in post, along with comments from pilots recorded before, during, and after the races. Audiences, protected by netting, will be brought into each venue, with crowd-reaction sound captured by microphones along the audience areas. Sound will play a big part in the DRL broadcasts, according to Horbaczewski, with the drones’ own modified engines adding more “roar” than the buzz that usually accompanies drones.

“You get a lot of information about the direction and speed of the drones from their sound,” he explains, adding that audio will be available in stereo and 5.1 surround. “In that way, it’s very similar to F1 and NASCAR, except that a drone can change direction and speed in an instant; there are no curves on these courses. We’ve invested a lot in sound capture for the races. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen or heard before. Ever.”

Ideafly Grasshopper F210 FPV Racer Drone Flips and Punchouts

The Grasshopper is just plain powerful with extreme acceleration from its stock 4S battery and 30A ESC's. Super punchy in its stock setup. Possibly the highest acceleration quadcopter that I've seen straight out of the box. And with a few simple mods, it's a blast to fly.

ESPN upgrades its drone coverage with new race season starting October 23rd

Back in September, ESPN dipped its toe into the waters of FPV drone racing with a live stream of a three-day event in New York followed by an edited one-hour broadcast. The experiment seems to have been a success, and the network has now announced a multi-year deal with one of the sport's fledgling organizing bodies, the Drone Racing League (DRL), to broadcast 10, one-hour shows on ESPN and ESPN2.

These 10 episodes will cover what DRL is calling its 2016 season — a series of five races around different courses, leading up to a winner-takes-all "world championship" final. An hour-long introduction to the sport will also be broadcast on ESPN2 on Thursday, September 15th, then repeated on October 23rd, followed by races every subsequent Thursday and Sunday. The full schedule is as below:

ESPN will broadcast the 10 episodes in North, South, and Central America, as well as the Caribbean, but the DRL is also taking its wares to the UK and Ireland (where they'll be shown on Sky Sports Mix) and Germany (where they'll appear on ProSiebenSat.1). For a closer look at what to expect from the races, you can check out the teaser above.