What is FPV Drone Racing?
Drone racing is a sport where participants fly special drones that have a cameras fly around an obstacle course. Racers wear First Person View (FPV) goggles in order to view the camera feed from their drones. It’s a race where pilots only see what the drones see. They then feed their drone footage to certain channels that allow spectators to see what the pilot is seeing as well. Racing drones are specifically designed to be faster and more agile than STEM or recreational drones.
Jay McKibben conducts a race for Dallas Drone Racing group.
Racing Drones
While most people who are interested in drones buy the “off the shelf” versions, drone racers to build and tweak to their liking smaller-sized drones. The custom-built drones are built to the pilots liking and require a battery. Since the drones fly so fast, the battery usually only last about three minutes. The racers usually have three to six spares already charged and ready to be swapped when needed. Along with the batteries, some pilots set up with more than one drone in case of a crash (part of the sport) or to supply spare parts to quickly fix any damaged.
While drone racing is still fairly new, different rules and regulations have changed or been established as time passes.
“In the beginning it was mostly lap count based. Everyone showed up, everyone flew a set amount of time, and whoever had the greatest number of laps at the end of the day was the winner. This rewarded consistency and helped raise everyone's skill level,” states Jay McKibben.
As this becomes more popular most organizers and audiences liked the attraction of multiple drones screaming around the track. In a Fastest 3 consecutive format, a racer has to have one good heat or round to string three really fast laps together in the course of the day to make it into the mains. At the end of the mains you have your top four, six or eight fastest racers.
The RQ-56 Cheyenne Racing Drone
OnPoynt provides drones, curriculum, educator training, and creates custom drone education programs for schools. The team at OnPoynt are experts on STEM, Career Technology Education (CTE) and Racing Drones for use in education.
You can reach Jay via email at jay@onpoynt.com for answers to your racing drone questions.
Note: The OnPoynt Cheyenne racing drone is available for pre-order.
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Unlikely Heros
Drones are advancing as practical tools but they can offer an artistic flair as well. Drones have “enabled cinematographers to push the limits of aerial cinematography.” (Dronelife) The versatility of drones allows filmmakers to capture scenes, that otherwise were limited to ground-based equipment, with a different perspective, like this circus scene from The Greatest Showman. Check out the James Bond Skyfall motorbike chase for a dramatic example. And are able to take your imagination to see a Pterodactyl attack in Jurassic World.
(Jurassic World Poster)
“Modern cinematography drones offer the visual impact with stable aerial footage. Drones are much easier, cheaper, and safer than plane or helicopter,” says Ron Poynter, CEO of OnPoynt.
Drones bring aerial cinematography to our regular lives
The unusual flexibility of drones, and the variety of sizes, allow us to get cinematic footage of everyday life. From Youtubers vlogs showing their traveling, to remembering milestones like weddings. Capturing these events allow you as a viewer to see the world from a different point of view making them seem almost magical, and movie like.
Learning drones at a young age
Being able to manage or direct a drone can be a difficult task. Many students in high schools have sparked interest in learning this tool.
"A good place is for students to learn is the OnPoynt School Photography Kits which schools like for their school newspaper or photography club.” says Poynter from OnPoynt. Drone mastery can be demanding and challenging for students but financially rewarding. Becoming a drone videographer can be a useful, pay ranges from $35 to $50 an hour.
Drone videography is used in multiple industries from real estate, construction and major companies like GE inspect and showcase their work with drones.
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OnPoynt provides drones, curriculum, educator training, and creates custom drone education programs for schools. The team at OnPoynt are experts on STEM, Career Technology Education (CTE) and racing drones for use in education.
]]>Drone Clubs and Drone Racing teams offer a platform for students to discover the excitement of drones. They are a great way to spark interest in STEM and to create stellar engineers, programmers and pilots. Drones clubs, like their predecessor robotics (ground and water) clubs, are growing in a big way at the elementary through university levels.
Part one is located here. Here are more tips:
4. Recruit students with a flyer stating the club’s purpose and meeting times:
State in the flyer, “No experience needed just technical interest and desire to work with others. “At OnPoynt we have seen students who like drones, love to build things, flying for them is secondary.
We have also found students who just want to fly and who always want to be the pilot. Some may be interested in coding, photography flying and video editing. And some just want to be part of a team doing something new and fun.
Drone Racing is a little different in that you are looking for student who may already have experience or interest and are generally competitive. Drone racing can be demanding and challenging but very rewarding. The current champ for the FAI league is an 11-year-old girl from Thailand.
5. Use social media, school website and community media to share the news:
A school newspaper, newsletter, social media or school announcements to spread the word you’re establishing a drone club. These can help you find drone fliers in your school and can generate interest and community support.
Here are a few articles on schools starting drone clubs:
Bloomington High School North drone program
Royse City High School-drone racing club
Make safety a priority but have enough drones to keep students interested:
At OnPoynt, we recommend four students per drone for a STEM or robotics club. Students can fly in pairs (pilot and spotter). The spotter looks out for a low battery signal from the drone, any impediment in the flying area and tells the pilot when they need to correct.
When students are first learning to fly, an experienced pilot needs to stand with the new pilot and take control of the remote control if needed. Crashing is part of the experience but equipment damage needs to be avoided.
For a drone racing purpose, a club needs a minimum of four drones to get started.
To see more about equipment needed review this OnPoynt Drone Ranger Blog. Call OnPoynt if you have questions, we are happy to answer. Good luck and email us or tweet us about your drone club. We would love to feature your club in social media.
]]>Drone Clubs and Drone Racing teams offer a platform for students to discover the excitement of drones. They are a great way to spark interest in STEM and to create stellar engineers, programmers and pilots. Drones clubs, like their predecessor robotics (ground and water) clubs, are growing in a big way at the elementary through university levels. Drone clubs can start small and be for a specific purpose- an engineering competition, drone racing or just a place for students to learn to fly safely after school and have some fun.
Image: Dallas ISD Science and Engineering Magnet School Drone Team
Here are the steps to starting a drone club:
1. Find a Faculty Sponsor: Technical Skill, Enthusiasm and Desire to promote STEM based hands-on learning is needed:
All campus clubs need a teacher or faculty to sponsor it. Your drone club will need someone who is almost as “into" drones as the students or at least is willing to jump in and learn. A sponsor has to have some technical skill, enthusiasm and a desire to promote STEM-based hands-on learning and maintain composure when the crashes happen.
2. Designate the flight location: It is legal to use drones for education purposes
It is legal to fly a drone for educational purposes provided your team follows FAA guidance published in May of 2016. You will have to register your drone and label them as the FAA describes. Only the drone registration number is needed but ALL drones must be labeled with that number.
Teachers do not need to have or get a drone pilot’s license (called a Remote Pilot’s or Part 107 license) but you may want to go through the training any way. The more the sponsor knows, the better the guidance.
At a university, work through the administration to make sure the campus police and risk management are involved in the process. Recent updated to the law and regulation will require a little diligence and you will want to check the FAA’s online map to determine if the location is within 5 miles of airport. If yes, contact the airport and ask for permission to fly on a designated day at a certain time.
Baseball, football, soccer and even a tennis court are great places to set up a drone race. School drone clubs can fly indoors or outdoors.
To avoid all of this you can start by flying indoor in your own gymnasium. FAA rules do not apply but some commons sense does.
3. Name Your Club and Define your purpose: Create a short paragraph of the primary purpose.
Here are some examples:
• Rover High School Drone Zone Club allows our high school student to learn drone basics- building, repairing and flying. We have weekly missions and work in teams to accomplish a task using the camera sensor on our drones. We learn hands-on technical and communication skills.
• Valley College Drone Racing Club offers simulators and racing drones to students interested in learning drone racing. Meetings are held Thursday afternoons at the Football field where a drone racing course is set-up for students. Students must complete safety flying assessment and skills test in order to fly. Drone simulators are set up in the Maker Space and available to member students any time.
4. Find a Professional, Corporate or Parent Sponsors – Time, Expertise and Money or Fund-Raising Support Helps
There is a local expert or company that can help your school set up a drone club as a volunteer. There are professionals in in every city or town as well as companies that use drones (construction, commercial real estate, inspection) that have a drone pilot or in some cities a company directly in the drone industry. Many of these companies fit perfectly with a STEM –based club.
Parent organizations and school boosters are also great places to look for volunteer help, expertise(engineer, coder, or drone pilot) and financial support. Send an email with your drone club description and ask if the expert or company would like to be a sponsor or volunteer.
The next blog will cover these topics:
• Selecting the right drone for the purpose and age of students
• The number of drones per student
• Repair- a skill everybody needs to know
To see more about equipment needed review this OnPoynt Drone Ranger Blog. Call OnPoynt if you have questions, we are happy to answer. Good luck and email or tweet us about your drone club. We would love to feature your club in OnPoynt’s social media.
Contact Us:
Twitter
info@onpoynt.com or (844)466-7696
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If your community, corporate, collegiate or STEM organization would like to develop and implement a custom STEM program suited to your needs, contact us on OnPoynt. OnPoynt can advise on cost, curriculum, safety practices and drone equipment.
As well, if your school or university wants to implement a drone racing club, OnPoynt can advise on equipment and how to get started. To see a video taken at AUVSI featuring our Girl Scout custom drone and program, click here.
]]>Club SciKidz hosts drone camps in the Maryland and Virginia area, and was an early adopter; offering drone camps five years ago. Club SciKidz uses the STEM Ranger Drone. It can be built and rebuilt as well as repaired on the spot. The STEM Ranger has altitude and distance limitations safety features.
After each summer, they send equipment back to OnPoynt for repairing, reconditioning and upgrades. Club SciKidz has used the same equipment for the past five years. The ratio of students per drone is four to one, with various activities conducted in teams. The staff is trained in how to build, configure and safely fly the drone.
Club SciKidz emphasis safety, a team approach and scenarios STEM activities. To see the full interview, click here. Meanwhile, here are some highlights:
Q: What do the students learn in the camp?
A: The kids learn robotics, the safety, how to work in teams, how to build and fly the drones and learn how the GPS [of the drone] works. So, in our camps, we actually start off with the introduction to robotics and robots. But then we specifically talk about the drones and how they are used and how they might be used in the future.
Q: How many students do you recommend for a drone camp?
A: Twelve students is the best for maintaining a good staff to student ratio so that the students get individual attention from the instructors. Students work in teams of six with assigned roles.
Q: Tell us about training.
A: The instructors are specifically trained on how to operate the drones so they're not going into the camp blind. With other camps, you can do that, you can give a (quick) lesson and they can do it, but with a drone, they've got to know how to build it, how to fly it, they have to know the safety.
Q: Tell us about how you use your best practices and what you do with them when your students are flying drones outside.
A: The most important [objective] to us is the safety of the students. [OnPoynt] has a nice PowerPoint that we use that talk about all the safety rules before we go outside. We use safety and a team approach. The kids understand their roles: they wear the vests, have different jobs that each of them hold and they rotate between these roles. There's never only one person flying the drone. We have the spotter and the teacher is always in control. The kids know that they use two hands on the controller. They have the lanyards on them so that they don't drop [the controller]. The instructor goes through how to setup the parameters on the drones, so we don't lose the drones.
Q: What STEM scenario(s) do use use
A: I taught a program during the school year where I had the kids engineer a basket underneath the drone, and we put a water balloon in there so we can simulate a fire. I made a ring on the ground outside the school, and they had to try and release [the water balloon] with the gimbal into that target to put out a pretend fire. That was actually a lot more challenging than I had thought it would be because when we put the water balloon in first, it put the drone off balance, so [the students] had to come up with a way to keep it in the center and be able to release all the water at the same time.
]]>Girl Scouts building OnPoynt Custom Girl Scout Cookie-Carrying Drones
OnPoynt Aerial Solutions designed a custom drone that holds Girl Scout cookie boxes for a four-day drone camp that 20 North Texas Girl Scouts attended. Teams of Girl Scout campers learned safe flying, assembled drones and conquered an obstacle course with and without First-Person View (FPV). Indoors, campers created business models in a Shark Tank-style setting, where they pitched their ideas to a team of local Dallas 'minnows'.
Girl Scouts fly their Girl Scout Cookie Drone with OnPoynt President, Ron Poynter
“The Girl Scouts were really captivated by the camp,” said Ron Poynter, OnPoynt President. “They were thrilled with their accomplishments in successfully building and flying the drones through the obstacle course. It was truly a great experience to see these young ladies getting excited about hands-on STEM education with drones. ”
Girl Scout shows her finished product—A custom OnPoynt drone
The Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas also recently added 23 new STEM and Outdoor badges for troop members to work toward. To see more about STEM opportunities, watch STEM Center of Excellence at Camp Whispering Cedars sponsor Texas Instruments’ live stream of the OnPoynt Drone Build & Fly experience here.
]]>In the last year, a lot of schools have started drone clubs and drone racing teams. Purdue University conducted a Collegiate Drone Race last spring, and since then, the sport has continued to grow.
If you're new to racing, here's the gist: pilots race their drones around a course using First Person View (FPV) goggles. Each racing drone is equipped with a small video camera and transmitters, so pilots can watch in first-person as their drone speeds around the track. These young men and women pilot their drones at speeds that can exceed 75 MPH solely by watching the live video from the drone via FPV goggles.
Sound like fun? It's easy to bring this new sport to your own school by starting a drone racing team. Here's what you'll need:
First step: get racing drones! A school will need between 4 and 8 of them depending on the size of the school team. These drones are different from most drones you see in classrooms or electronics stores—they're small, but that doesn’t mean slower or easier to fly. In fact, they require a decent amount of practice to fly, because they don’t use GPS.
You can buy racing drones as kits or completely assembled, but we suggest getting a kit (especially one that comes with cameras and video transmitters). As students learn to pilot their drone, they'll undoubtedly crash a few times—which means it's helpful to already know how the drone is built and how it should be re-assembled when damaged.
Cost: $ 100 - $250 each.
A six-channel remote control with a corresponding receiver is necessary to fly the drones, so your team will need one for each racer. These do require some set-up.
Cost: $60 - $140 each
Drone races usually last about 4 to 6 minutes, but to get your racing drone up to speed, you need high-powered “juice cans"—lithium polymer batteries. Most racers use between 4S – 1600mAh 70C and a 3S 1100mAh 45C battery. To save time, get a charger that can charge one, two or four batteries simultaneously.
Pro tip: stay away from the small, inexpensive chargers—those can take hours to charge a battery and in the heat of racing, you'll either need a lot of batteries or a better charger. A good charger can charge a battery in about 20 minutes.
Cost:
FPV Goggles have built-in video receivers that display the drone’s live video, so you can navigate the drone racing course from the perspective of your racing drone. Some goggles even have built-in DVR to record the video! This is a great way for students to share their ups and downs, since there will be lots of them.
Certain FPV goggles are sleek with a small screen in front of each eye, but these are more expensive and don't work well for students with glasses. We recommend getting FPV goggles that are larger, use a single screen and offer an adjustable diopter focus. These are less expensive and any student can use them easily.
Cost: $60-$250
Once students get the hang of flying, you will need to set up a race course. Racing gates usually have a 5ftcenter. Racers must follow a path of marker disks, maneuver through the gates, around 6’ -12’ slalom flags. Teams can build racing gates and flags with PVC pipe and canvas to start.
Before you start, you may also want to use small marker flags to establish the dimensions of the racing area. There are several amateur and professional drone racing groups who have examples of course layouts. We recommend setting up in an area about the size of a soccer field, about 300ft long and 100ft wide.
Cost:
Gates (set of five): $100 - $400
6’ slalom flags: $40 - $85
100 field markers: $20
Boundary flags: $10
The last item you may want is a drone race timing system. These typically require a laptop to run them and include both hardware & software. There are a couple of different types, ones that use IR LED lights on each drone and newer ones that use the video transmitter on each drone to collect timing data.
Cost: $500 - $1000
If your school has a makerspace, you will have all of the tools you will need to build and repair your drones. If not, a few pairs of pliers, soldering irons, screwdrivers, Allen wrenches, electrical tape and wire cutters are all you need for fixing up your drone after a crash.
Cost: $50-$75
Adding new equipment and standing up a team of racers is not difficult, but it does require some dedication on the part of the teacher and students. You'll also need funds—a budget of at least $1,500 is necessary to field a team of four racers.
High school drone racing is a great way to engage all students in an exciting new sport. As they build and race drones, students may not even realize they are learning about physics, electronics, aerodynamics and a whole host of other STEM-related topics.
Schools that see the benefit in this are setting up racing chapters with MultiGP and are starting to race other school teams. With the tools above and little dedication, you can join in this new STEM sport and start racing drones around your school in no time.
Drone Racing: It's STEM education—at 75 MPH.
]]>Most, if not all drones used in STEM education use lithium polymer batteries. These batteries offer great advantages over other types to include high power and fast discharge rates. But these benefits come with some strings attached. Proper charging, use, life cycle, maintenance and disposal are all thing instructors need to know about as they introduce exciting aerial robotics into their school of STEM Camp.
Lithium polymer batteries, called LiPo’s require a charger made for them. LiPo’s have polarized power leads and a balancing cable. Both need to be connected to fully charge or discharge them. The main power lead is mated and can only be connected one way. This is a great safety feature that keeps anyone from reversing the polarity and shorting out the battery. The balancing cable for a 3-cell battery has a 4-wire connector that is also polarized. The balancing cable, as the name implies, ensures the voltage is balanced across all cells.
LiPo batteries offer a lot of power and that is necessary for multirotor drones to get off the ground. That said a short circuit, damage from a crash or, more commonly, misuse can cause the battery to burn. Placing the batteries in a low-cost LiPo protective charging bag is a great practice for both charging and storing these batteries.Overcharging and over discharging are the things that can lead to a fire.
Guidelines for Safe Use in the Classroom
The modern multi-copper would not be very capable if not for the innovation of the lithium polymer battery. Knowing how to use, charge, maintain and dispose of these batteries safely will ensure a great safe learning experience.
For more on the use and management of batteries for your drone education program you can watch our Drone Ranger™ video on You Tube.
And you can see our complete line of Drone Ranger™ Education Kits and accessories from OnPoynt Aerial Solutions at our website TheDroneRanger.com.
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