Georgi's Blog

What I learned from 4 years of CrossFit and why you should try functional training too

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve wanted to share this for a long time. My goal is to help as many people as possible see the benefits of training and positively impact their lives as it has mine.

👋 Who am I and how it started

Left: me at 36 (February 2022), right: me at 40 (February 2026)

My name is Georgi Yanev. I’m originally from Bulgaria, but I’ve been living in Finland for close to 15 years now. I’m 40 years old as of a few months ago, and I started CrossFit four years ago at the age of 36.

Starting functional training was the second big life-changing event in my life. I describe these events as moments when you might not even realize there is another way to live, but if you accidentally stumble upon or otherwise find out that there is another way… You are in for a treat and potentially something truly life-changing. And that’s exactly what happened to me. It’s never too late to change your entire life, hopefully for the better.

So, why did CrossFit work out for me?

Georgi’s stories

Depending on what kind of a person you are and how you function, you may need some internal or external motivation initially to take that first step. In my case, I had some personal issues to go through and some difficult moments in my life when I was 36. These were mainly around concluding a 10-year relationship with a partner with whom I share a kid (my son was 5 years old at the time).

It was tough. It was difficult navigating this new reality, and I guess to some degree you could say it’s almost a classic trope for men after a breakup: get to the gym and start working on yourself. But for me, it very quickly became so much more than that. It provided me with a way of having fun, gaining a new community, and finding new friends. And not to diminish the importance of therapy, but although I did 6 months of therapy, it was training and CrossFit that really helped me get through it all.

😅 The humbling beginning

I talked to a friend of mine, and he suggested CrossFit. We had actually been talking about it for a few years because he was doing it at the time, and I always found it interesting, but never tried it myself. If, at that time, I had put myself into a normal gym alone to somehow start lifting weights without even knowing what the hell I was doing, I would have probably found it tedious and boring. I would have quit very quickly.

I definitely needed structure and guidance. I also needed it to be interesting enough so that I could keep showing up.

I still remember this incredibly humbling moment the first time I did my on-ramp foundation classes. After a few hours of training over a couple of days, I was exhausted, sore, and cramping up. I was leaving the gym, trying to put my winter boots on, and literally, my calf cramped up so badly that I almost fell sideways right in front of a girl who was watching closely by. It was so funny, but I felt like, okay, this is why I’m here. This is why I need this. It made it abundantly clear that I needed the training.

🏋️‍♂️ The structure, the vibe, and the gamification

I just kept showing up. It was a whole vibe. The classes were interesting and guided, which was exactly what I needed. You have 10, 15, or 20 people in the class with an instructor who guides you, especially through the warm-ups. Good warm-ups have been super important for me and made a world of difference. Given my age and the shape of my body at the time, I really needed them, and I wouldn’t have known what to do on my own.

I soon came to realize that CrossFit is highly diversified and never boring. Even a few months in, I was still discovering new movements in the workouts that I hadn’t seen before. I remember thinking, my God, this is so freaking cool. It played really well with my ADHD (or just the nature of who I am).

Also, the gamification! Counting the reps and following the systems of different workouts (like EMOMs and AMRAPs) works really well with my brain. You follow a specific structure, and things just click.

🤸‍♂️ High-skill movements and the “extra 30 minutes”

One of the things that still blows my mind is learning high-skill movements. Things like handstand walks, the Olympic snatch, and ring muscle-ups. It is an incredibly satisfying experience to learn how to do these skills, even if it takes a few months or even a few years to master them. Some of them are still a work in progress for me, even after four years, which is great. There’s always something to improve and look forward to.

I remember deciding to obsess over some of these skills. It changed my life when I started doing 30 minutes of additional work after classes. I started practicing out of a strong desire to improve, and I saw a lot of progress in my handstand walks, my ring muscle-ups, and eventually my double unders (even though they are still not my favorite movement in the world!).

A couple of years ago, I decided to obsess over snatches. I did a lot of open gym sessions, just focusing on them. It’s such a fun, technical movement, and I’ve seen tremendous progress. Hitting my first bodyweight snatch last year was easily one of the biggest training accomplishments of my life. It feels amazing to be able to yank your body weight from the floor, put it overhead, and stand it up. The better you get at the technique, the easier it is—making it less about brute force and more about technical precision.

📈 Scalability and Community

Another thing that worked super well for me early on is that CrossFit is very scalable. I couldn’t do a lot of pull-ups early on, so I had to start with the rubber band, like many other people. It worked out perfectly. I did banded pull-ups for quite some time, then normal pull-ups, and eventually learned variations like kipping and butterfly pull-ups.

I got a lot of help and practice with other gym members, especially after classes. There are quite a few people who have literally changed my life with just a tip here or there, just by being nice and trying to help me make progress on a complicated movement.

I should also say, CrossFit has always been super fun and a huge vibe. During the classes, especially when we have a nice grindy workout, we have the music blasting. Everybody is working and challenging themselves. It’s plain fun, and it gives you the opportunity to just play like a kid again. A huge part of that is our community at my CrossFit gym. There are so many nice people there, a lot of friends, and I value those folks quite a lot.

🧠 Mindset shift: Training as a reward

All of this leads to a fundamental mindset shift: training at the end of the day becomes a reward, not a punishment.

When you have that mentality, a lot of things change. Instead of thinking, “Oh, I have to go to the gym today,” and being unhappy about it, it’s the exact opposite. I get through my workday knowing that come 5:30 PM, I’m going to hit my CrossFit class, and I’ll be so happy in my element.

🥗 Ripple effects: Lifestyle and consistency

Once you reach the point where you’re just having fun, you don’t even realize how much you’re improving over time. The rest is just a matter of consistency.

Keep yourself motivated with discipline, because motivation can come and go. If you’re disciplined to keep showing up on good days and bad days, doing something small, and taking time to rest, it leads to positive changes that accumulate over time. In fact, in just a few months, you can see big transitions in your body.

All of this can lead to other fundamental lifestyle changes. It definitely did for me. It might make you feel like you should improve your eating habits, and in my case, it even led me to quit alcohol completely.

Taking the first step into functional training can start a life-changing journey. Recognize you have the power to make this change today, just as I did—this is the main lesson I hope to share.

My 2025 year in review

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

🖼️ Theme of the year and overview of the goals for 2025
👨‍👦 Father and son
🏋️‍♂️ CrossFit journey
🇧🇬 One month in Bulgaria
❤️ Love, friendships, community
🌳 Return to (the Bulgarian) roots
💕 I love em both
✨ AI and the spark of engineering
✍️ Content, creativity, inspiration
⬜ Goals for 2026

Journey > Destination. Social animal

It’s been almost a bit scary writing in these yearly posts how much the current year has been better than the previous one for the past few years. And especially so when the previous year had been so, so good itself. So, I’m “happy” to say in its own weird way that won’t be the case this year. Not because this year was not great. It was an absolutely amazing year, I’m very happy with it, there were quite a lot of great moments and a bunch of really cool experiences, progress in various ways… Yet this year also brought a lot of challenges, perhaps a bit more so than the past two. Some stress and other less positive vibes were a part of the picture too, perhaps a level slightly above average. Of course, all of this is through my very own, very personal, very subjective prism (attempting to be objective on the look out of the whole past year from the position of the last month of the year is a bit tricky 😅). Let’s remember not to take all of this way too seriously; in the end, it’s all about having fun, having some thoughts laid out, some light, and hopefully a somewhat entertaining reflection. I should say, much like in all previous cases, I’m of course very grateful to be here, enjoying yet another lap around the sun, all the adventures had and thankful even for the tough times, cause we all know they truly mold us to be who we need to become.

Here’s a picture gallery to kick things off and set the mood:

At the beginning of the year, I had a mini “re-return” to the FPV drone content. I had a company reach out to me for a review on a product, which reminded me of the olden days. I did this for what, 3 years, between 2017 and 2020. I agreed. This was gonna be the last “Hail Mary” and the last test if I was ever gonna go back to making FPV drone-related content. I’m happy I did it. But yeah, it wasn’t the same. I think at this point we leave FPVTips in the past, and all the drone reviews. I’ll always be grateful for those. I learnt a lot during that time, but it just doesn’t work anymore. I wanna make content again, just not about FPV drones.

There were new acquaintances throughout the year, and some stuck around too, and I’m happy about that. Being social on all accounts (because that’s really me and who I am) has been a thing for a while. In Finland, that’s a bit trickier than most other places, but not impossible. There are people who are such a joy to be around, banter with, and just charge you with energy, and I try to do the same.

I had to take some antibiotics for strep throat for the first time in 10+ years, so that was something, but it was a very easy illness, nothing to complain tbh. Training had been good throughout, except for the 2-week episode of back pain in October/November, which was not fun. It was self-induced out of my own stupidity and moving too fast, something I’ll keep working on. Form > Weight any day of the week. I’ve been teaching Anton more Bulgarian as he showed interest, and he blew my mind how quickly he started reading with the Bulgarian alphabet. He’s an amazing kid; he has surprised me in many ways this year, and it’s crazy to see him growing up to be such a big boy nowadays. I’ve cooked a number of Bulgarian recipes this year and really mastered a few. Especially the Banitza and the Mousakka. And we had an AMAZING and pretty long stay in Bulgaria in the summer.

These posts started close to 10 years ago now with these simple goal-setting lists. I’m not sure this is entirely applicable nowadays. Especially with my mental shift of “Journey > Destination”. But, like, fr fr. Six. Seven. (let’s mimic the slang of Gen Alpha a bit :D). Seriously, though, let’s look at the list:

⬜ Goals for 2025:

📝 Continue slowly writing my book - Born in Space
🏊‍♂️ Continue training for Ironman someday
🏃‍♂️ Run half marathon
🏅 CrossFit Open: All 3 events (with better DUs)
🦺 CrossFit Murph: vest again and slightly better time
💪 Participate in a CrossFit competition if opportunity presents itself
🗣️ Connect with people: dedicate time to friends old and new
🛳️ Awesome vacation with Anton (Bulgaria, Greece, else)
🏋️‍♀️ Training camp or training vacation?
🧘 Do a bit of yoga
🧎 Try meditation
🏀 Continue Basketball, table tennis, CrossFit, Swimming with Anton
🎥 Creative skill teaching with Anton: video editing, game making, AI
🥯 Continue some of our baking attempts with Anton
😄 Smile and have fun

I didn’t do much for my book this year; yet, I’ll keep that item on the list for next year too. I’m getting closer and closer to getting back to it, I think. I’ve mentioned many times that I like the setting and the plot of it, I still believe in it, years after I came up with the original premise for it, and that is a very good sign. I did play around with generating some AI images based on texts from my book to help with visualizing the main ideas of it. In fact, perhaps I should drop a couple below just to give you an idea. Those are super crude. I didn’t really bother re-generating them until they felt perfect. Those are literally the first prompts, just based on content from the book chapters, but I like them as they are decent enough for a storyboard and to visualize the novel roughly.

I’ve not done Ironman training this year, and I might still do it someday, but it won’t be for now, as a part of a list. If I decide to go for it, I will. I still like swimming, I’m still gonna work a bit on running, biking being the bigger bottleneck, but who knows, I might get into it. For now, it’s not a big priority for me 😉 Same for the half-marathon thing. It’s really 100% a thing of ”why not be a person who’s finished one, as opposed to a person who’s not”. But sometimes, that’s not enough of a reason to go for it. And again, who knows; stranger things have happened before, I might still go for it if the moment is right and I feel it. These posts and lists are not intended to completely plan out my life. In fact, I’d like to leave quite a lot of room for random stuff 😀.

CrossFit Open and Murph both went well, but more on that in the CrossFit section below. I’ve still not participated in a CrossFit comp, but I think I really want to give it a crack. I’m sure I’ll jump into something when the time is right, and it feels good to do so… And now I’m signed up for a competition in February 2026! Let’s see how that goes, exciting!

The social aspects of life are something I’ll always keep in mind. I’ve always enjoyed it in its many forms. Years ago, I let myself forget about it (prioritizing the wrong things) for a while and put it on the back burner for a few years, something I regret. Never again. Community, friends, family. These social relationships are so much more important than many of us may even realise. It’s been nice to catch up and spend time with old friends. It’s been lovely to make a lot of new acquaintances and friends, too. I don’t say it lightly when I say that I do appreciate everyone I connect with. Truly. I think we’ll expand on this topic in various subtopics below.

We had an amazing vacation in Bulgaria with Anton. It was twice as long as last year, because in his words, “last year we were there for 2 weeks, this year we should go for 4 weeks”. Also, following his logic, it seems we should be there for 6 weeks next year. Hey, I’d love that, I don’t oppose it in any way. Eventually, we are gonna be hardcapped by the length of his summer vacation, which is only 2 months 😅. But jokes aside, we’ll take whatever time we can get. The important part is to make the time count. I’ll expand on the trip in a lot of detail below, but it was a great time!

No training camps and training vacations this year, but something might be coming up next year. No regrets on not having any such camps this year; the choice was simple when it came down to how to spend vacation days this year in the summer - use up all 4 weeks just for Bulgaria with Anton. That was the choice, and it was a good one. As opposed to the 4 trips in 2024. Who knows how things will work out next year?

Yoga, meditation, nope. The problem with life and time is that you just can’t have time for all the things. Now, sometimes, it’s mind-boggling to me that in the entire year, I didn’t find time to go to 1 yoga class. Or I didn’t sit once outside on the terrace in the sun and try to meditate. It’s crazy, it seems so easy to do, yet it just doesn’t happen. I still think those are helpful and important practices, maybe I’ll get there someday, and at any rate, they are not the biggest priority, just fun little things to try out. I have no shortage of ideas on what to try, however, and sometimes those compete for resources with each other.

Anton continued his CrossFit classes, and it’s something he enjoys, which warms my heart. We’ve also gone to the basketball courts plenty in the summer and when the weather has been nice. We also went to play table tennis a few times. We’ve only not found time for the swimming part, but we’ll see how things go next year.

Learning about AI, making a game in Unity, and video editing are things we’ve worked on. Every once in a while, nothing crazy, but it’s nice to see how quickly he picks up new skills and how much he can do alone. He’s editing his own videos in CapCut on his computer, and I post them for him on his YouTube channel. Fun times 😅.

We had a brief baking attempt to make some buns last year. I remember that, and since then, mainly thanks to my friend and the recipe she shared with me for Bulgarian banitza, we’ve made banitza at home so many times! I’m absolutely hooked, because I love that pastry with feta cheese. It’s sooo goood. And I think I’m pretty good at making it now!

Lastly, on the list of goals for 2025 is “smile and have fun”. Yes, yes, yes! I like being serious and focused on things, but I definitely like laughing and having fun. There are a couple of places / people who really make this so natural. During the easy and the hard times. In the end, while we are living on this space rock, hurling around the sun in our solar system, being the tiny, little specks of sand in the grand scheme of the universe, we might as well smile and have fun! It’s a lot more important than we may think. And don’t get too lost in the details of planning out and dreaming of the future; Be present, enjoy the ride and remember that Journey > Destination.

2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣5️⃣

👨‍👦 Father and son

Every year is a special adventure with this kid, and this year was no exception. We did a lot of different things. And our bread and butter was good food, some workouts, lots of gaming and socializing with friends, travels, basketball, a few movies, a lot of books, and more Bulgarian dishes like banitza and mousakka.

It’s been amazing to see Anton’s interest in Bulgarian peak before, during, and after the trip to Bulgaria. He’s, in fact, pretty good at it. He doesn’t know a lot of words, but he’s learnt to read the alphabet and comfortably and quickly reads whole words. I was very impressed by how quickly he’d picked it up. This year has been a bit about coming back to my Bulgarian roots in various ways, this being one of them.

After reading the Winnie the Pooh books quite a few times, this year we finally started something else, and interesting too - the Harry Potter series. Years ago, we read the first book together with Anton, but the 2nd book didn’t fly; he was too young, perhaps, and lost interest. This time around, he had a very genuine interest in the Harry Potter stories, and it’s been great so far. Currently, at the end of December, we are finishing book 4 very, very soon. If you think about it, we started with book 1 at some point in May, so not too shabby.

Watching the Minecraft movie together was a lot of fun. Especially so because we’ve played the game together so much, so we had a lot of common context. We spent time on the basketball court and went on walks on sunny days. Anton really enjoyed the “Bring Your Kid to Work Day at Elisa”. Especially because we missed the one in 2024, but he did join the one in 2023. He was super excited about this year’s edition, and we had a lot of fun again, checking out the world of the grownups, work, AI, our company dragon plushie, among other things 😅.

The Bulgarian trip worked out much better than expected, to be honest. I’ll expand on that a lot more below, but we had the chance to a little bit “wing it”, without any pre-planned and pre-booked hotels or destinations. Ok, maybe 1 pre-organized thing - the get together with my friends in Velingrad. But for the most part, we were able to just travel to different places and kind of did things the way we wanted to and felt like. That was very, very nice. We visited Velingrad, Sozopol, staying in Plodviv a bunch, went again to the seaside, but this time to Kiten.

And after our well-deserved Bulgarian vacation, it was time to get back home and enjoy regular life too! We were excited to be back, to touch a computer keyboard for the first time again in a month, to see if our plants had made it while we were away. Anton soon started school, and now, in the 3rd grade, it was time for him to get used to walking there and back by himself. He absolutely loved it and aced that! I was quite surprised to be honest, how QUICKLY everything changed. Literally in the span of a week or two, it went from always having him dropped off and picked up to… well, him walking there and back on his own. And he enjoyed it too, which was the best part. We live like a 7-10 minute walk from the school, so it does make for a very pleasant walk.

Another thing that started happening multiple times a week on a weekly basis was Anton hosting his friends over. I’m so happy for him. He also goes to visit his friends sometimes on other days. They have a very good group of friends, and this, I’m so happy for him. Not only do they socialize and play games together while talking on WhatsApp or Discord, as previously, but now also hang out together. It’s very nice to see.

In terms of sports hobbies, he’s still had the ball games hobby this year, as well as CrossFit. He likes it a lot and seems to have a lot of fun, and there’s a lot to learn, plenty of different movements and exercises to do. One of my favorites was one open gym we did together with Anton, where he wrote the programming for us <3.

He’s really comfortable with editing videos in CapCut and has been for a while now. I support him with tips, and I’m uploading his videos for him to his YouTube channel. It’s nice to see him working on those creative things. There’s also this other game called “Geometry Dash” and he’s been making levels for it, too. I love that! Reminds me of making maps for games I played back in the day, writing fan fiction, and so on. At the same time, it’s a real-life skill to learn video editing, which makes it extra cool. We’ve also been talking about AI a bit. It’s interesting and very tricky to talk about it tbh. Explaining the power of it and the change it brings, while at the same time fighting to keep the parts of the creative process still human and full of soul and expression.

Another mini story is about his birthday gift to me.

He had put these elaborate set of clues I had to follow around the whole house, like 6-7 of them. And the crazy part is he had been home after school, perhaps not more than 30-40 mins before me :D What a kid! The things he comes up with sometimes blow my mind lol.

🏋️‍♂️ CrossFit journey

Let’s see, before I even check my notes, from the top of my head, what’s been the biggest news in my CrossFit journey this year? The first thing that comes to mind is the first body weight snatch I did in February <3. This is absolutely huge for me and has been one of my biggest goals for the past 2 years. I was beyond stoked to do that 78kg snatch (BW: 76kg at the time). And then an 80kg power snatch 2 months later in April. So, so happy about this! I did do the CrossFit Open and I think I was semi-pleased with my results, however, it’s worth noting I had a strep throat and was on antibiotics for a week, which affected my performance for sure, but I’m still happy I was feeling well enough to show up and do it, and of course, Anton was my number one supporter <3.

Honorable mention to my old grips <3

I’ve had those for 1.5 years, give or take, and they have unlocked BMUs for me. I’ll always be grateful for them. Easily my most favorite piece of equipment. And to think of it, I got them from Australia from a random TikTok advert, but they were really good and worked like a charm. Completely eliminating the grip and regrip struggle and just letting me focus on the movement itself. But in the end, the metal bracket snapped (while I was at the top part of a muscle-up 😅), and it was all over. I’ve used the Velites quad pro all-terrain grips, whatever they are called, grips, and they are good and super sturdy, but they don’t have the cushion for the wrist part, so you get a lot of wrist skin damage with those in longer sets and workouts. Finally, in August, I found something similar to my previous grips - the Frog grips. Well endorsed by games athletes, once again from Australia, so cost about 100 euros to get them to Finland with shipping and customs fees. Pricey, but can you put a price on happiness? However! I’d normally recommend and endorse them as well, but in this case, I will not! I don’t think the quality is up to par. While the grips are sticky, comfy on the wrists, light, and nice, I can’t believe how much they have worn out in just the past 4 months. It’s kind of crazy. In comparison, my previous grips didn’t get anywhere near such wear and tear in the first year, lol. Judge for yourselves.

Frog grips brand new out of the package:

Frog grips after 4 months of use:

A bit grim 😅. No bueno. I’ll be looking for some new grips soon, once again.

I’m happy I did Murph again this year. 3 minutes faster than last year, and I tried to “carb load” before it, which kind of worked out well.

I would say there are a lot of untested things this year, all in all, which is fine, perhaps some nice improvements are coming around the corner in 2026 😉. I’m very happy with my snatch 1RM of 80kg (in fact, just now at the end of the year, a few days before publishing this post, I did 80kg squat snatch again and failed 85kg 3 times), which is awesome. But what I like even more about it is how frequently and on a “good day”, I can pull up at the gym and get the snatch weight up to 70-75kg. I like that consistency. Basically, close to BW snatch on most days, which is really nice (my current bodyweight at the end of December is 78kg). A similar thing I enjoy when it comes to bar muscle-ups. I can comfortably do 40-50-60 in a workout, and I like that for volume. My current record for BMU volume is 70 in one workout in 14 rounds of modified “Mindy” (5 BMU, 5 push-ups, 10 air squats), and I did that in 20-something minutes, which was fine.

Some stats as of December 2025:

Movement	Score	Movement	Score
Snatch	80kg (+4kg 🆕)	BMU unbroken	20 (unchanged)
BMU in a single workout	70 (🆕)	RMU	5 (unchanged)
Clean & Jerk	95kg (unchanged)	Clean	108kg
Shoulder press	70kg (unchanged)	Murph	46:40 (🆕 -3min)
Back squat	142kg (unchanged)	CrossFit Open	~ 65th percentile
Front squat	130kg (🆕 +5kg)	Jackie	6:37 (unchanged)
Deadlift	155kg	DT	11:53 @ 60kg

I think it starts to be obvious that, of course, now that I’m wrapping up the 4th year of training, things are really starting to plato (Journey > Destination), which only makes sense; it was bound to happen eventually. That being said, we’re far from being in the best possible shape, or the best results, etc. It’s just that the jumps in weights, for example, are starting to be a bit smaller, and that’s all good.

But really, in the end, do you know what really matters? The awesome vibes at our North Engine CrossFit gym. The people, the energy, the atmosphere, it’s all a vibe. Everyone shows up for their own reasons, but everyone is there to have fun and get better at something, or even just keep moving. I’d like to be able to keep showing up and having fun and playing like a kid with some of the fun movements :D Progress is important, especially to my brain, but fun, smiles, and happiness are even more important, and who says you can’t have both?

Helsinki Midnight Run

I did the Helsinki Midnight Run for the 2nd time. This year, the weather was even better than last year. No pouring rain, still no wind, pretty nice. The major challenge came from the fact that I didn’t prepare for that run AT ALL. At least in 2024, I had done a few 7-8k runs and 1 10k run. This time - nada. I suppose I thought I’d roll up and just wing it. The worst part was that while I left ahead of time from home, in order to be there on time, and I was more than 50 minutes before the start, I wasted 25 minutes driving in circles trying to park. That was terrible. On top of that, after I finally parked, I had to queue for the bathrooms for another nearly 20 minutes, which basically left me 3 minutes before the start of the run to “warm up” 😅. Despite all of that, the run went somewhat well; I finished in 56:56, which is a bit slower than the 54:08 from the previous year. To be honest, I’m happy with that score, given things were the way they were. I can definitely do better with some training. In fact, the goal was sub 50, but given the situation, yet again, I’m happy with the result. I had to stop and walk a bit this time between 8k and 10k, because of knee pain, and I wanted to prevent potential injury.

🇧🇬 One month in Bulgaria

The month in Bulgaria was truly magical. On one hand, that was our longest trip together with Anton; on the other hand, it felt perfect, didn’t feel too long at all. In fact, I’ll go on to say that because of the length, it felt a bit less like a holiday trip and more of a coming to the other home trip. Which is really kind of the case.

We were able to see family - my sister was back in Bulgaria now with her husband (they used to live in Cyprus). We also visited my grandma, Anton’s grand grandma. It was so nice to see her again <3.

Velingrad

We were able to spend time with friends and their kids, whom Anton had known from the year before, and they got to play together, while we stayed 3 days at this SPA resort in the Bulgarian mountains in Velingrad.

Nice food, plenty of pool time, walking in the mountain town, riding the waterwheels, awesome views of the mountains. We did a mini trip to the nearby mountain of Rila too, and rode some interesting “mini roller coaster” thingies, and had great grilled food.

While still in the Rila mountains, we visited the bear sanctuary where rescued bears live in a natural environment.

It’s hard to describe why the “slowness” of the trip was so special, but because we didn’t have anything pre-booked and we had enough time, it was chill in its own way. By the time we were wrapping up the mountain part of the trip, we started looking into where to go on the seaside for our first of two seaside trips.

Sozopol

We went to Sozopol almost straight from Velingrad. Basically only spent 1 night in Plovdiv in between. It was soooo nice to dip in the sea and swim! Always the best way to cool off in the summer heat.

Sozopol was very relaxing. We went to the beach twice per day, ate nice food in the local restaurants, which were 10 minute walk away from where we were staying. At the same time, our little hotel was nice and quiet and SUPER close to the beach. Basically, we went down 2 sets of stairs and were at the beach.

We found our favorite ice cream place and became regulars there too :). We also went to the Burgas Zoo on one of the days and saw the capybaras! Something we were super excited about!

We were allowed in and to interact with them, to feed them cabbage, and carefully pet them. Very interesting creatues and it’s been our inside joke for a very long time, so really cool to see capybaras in real life!

And after a lot of swimming and diving with our swimming goggles, “hunting” for shells, jumping in the waves, and playing in the sand, soon the first sea adventure was nearly done, and it was time to go back to Plovdiv for a while.

Plovdiv

I’ve always loved this image:

What it is is the view of the Plovdiv hills from afar. Usually, in nice, clear weather, you can see them from as far as 17km away from the city. But this always makes me feel like I’m coming home. I’ve said it many times before and I’ll always say it but while I may not necessarily always miss Bulgaria, I always miss Plovdiv. It’s absolutely one of the most special cities in the world to me.

I should add that we’ve been moving around with Anton with buses between our trips, mostly, and it’s such a vibe! Very cozy, a bit of nice snacks, chilling in the seats, and soon we’ve reached our destination.

As always, there’s a lot to explore in Plovdiv. We were mostly doing about 15-20k steps per day on average. Visiting family, friends, and all the cool spots.

And after last year, we got Eeyore and Pooh, this year we managed to find Tigger and Piglet, which was one of our major quests!

Kiten

Kiten is a cute little town. To be completely honest, I’m not sure if I have ever been here before. And if I have, maybe once at most. It’s even more south than Sozopol along the Black Sea coast.

Of course, the main activity was being happily at the beach again! Sun and warm water, does it get any better than that? And playing around in the sand. Just genuinely relaxing. Kiten had two beaches, and we visited both of them. But we did go more often to the south beach.

Obviously, we hunted a bunch of seashells again…

… but the real highlight was the 2 kittens we found. They seem to be siblings, and they were so cute and super playful. We actually spent literally hours playing with them over 2-3 different evenings. They really liked to chase a stick that Anton and I would drag along the ground. It was absolutely wholesome!

Finding adorable kittens in Kiten, how about that 😅.

And soon it was time to go back to Plovdiv, Sofia, and then back to Helsinki. Where our plants had survived with the water drippers we had set up, our pepper was now red and not green anymore!

❤️ Love, friendships, family, community

Friendships

I’ve made a new friend this year, someone whom I really value and whom I’ve spent a bunch of time with this year. Someone I’ve learnt a lot from, and I hope I have enriched her life too. “My Bulgarian connection” 😀. Apart from all other things, thanks to her, I’ve been talking a lot more in Bulgarian this year, which was very nice in its own way and also connects to my “return to roots” sub-theme of this year. I’ve interacted more closely with a bunch of other people, too, and I say it over and over again, but I do genuinely appreciate all of you. Makes life a lot more fun and enjoyable, sharing it with others.

Family

We all forget to call our parents more often, I’m sure. Well, hopefully we can do ever so slightly better and try harder to do it more often. As visiting is not always an option in my case, and at least not frequent visits, video calls serve a purpose. But this is more about the quality of it, rather than the quantity. Think about that and call your parents today and tell them that you love them, it’s worth it!

Family is always complicated, I feel, but it’s good to try to appreciate each other as much as possible. It was nice to see my sister and her husband back in Bulgaria this summer, after quite a few years in Cyprus. And my parents went back to Bulgaria just recently as well.

Community

What is community anyway? Your local neighbourhood chaps? The people from work, in some cases? Workout buddies? Gaming buddies? All of the above? For thousands of years, humans have been social creatures, and building communities has been a key and profound way of expressing that. Be it necessary for survival way back in the day, or a “nice bonus” in today’s world. There are discussions online about the loneliness epidemic, and that’s not random. There are a lot of challenges in today’s world that support a more isolated and detached lifestyle from other humans. And it’s not always natural to find the right buddies. This is a huge topic, well worth diving into someday at length. I’m also passionate about it and have something to share. But for today I’d just like to suggest and stress the importance of 3rd places. I’ll always remember how in high school I’d come home from school, literally drop off my backpack at home, pick up the basketball, and head to the local courts. Meet friends, hang out, play streetball, and just chill. That’s a 3rd place. I guess nowadays my gym is my 3rd place and I love that. I feel like a kid there too - I can train with the other folk, chat, work out, improve whatever the focus is on for the day, just have fun. But it’s a nice, relaxing, social environment where I think people are just being themselves. So, as one way of being a part of some community, I suggest 3rd places. Find a place, a club, a hobby you can participate in happily, and just go for it.

Love

I think I found her…

The last part of this year has been a very different experience. I don’t know what happened. There’s been a special someone I’ve spent very naturally, gradually, and progressively more and more hours with. In the setting where time stops. Yeah… I’ve already written about this in journals at length. I’ve analyzed and reasoned with it. The pros and cons, the great parts, and the objections. But in the end, when you draw the line and “tally the numbers”, none of it matters. It still comes down to two things - why time stops when I’m with her, and why do I get lost in her eyes when I look at her?

Distilling the thousands of thoughts in my mind to a few simple and short sentences for the sake of this post is very difficult. And the situation is a bit complicated, too. But really, very simply put, at the end of the day, none of it matters. You either listen to your heart, or you don’t. It will either work out or it won’t. Whatever the case, I have no regrets. I have given in to it and made my choice already. Because at the end of the day, when I’m there with her, and I just AM, it’s simple. Beautiful, relaxing, blissful, easy, comfortable, enjoyable, pleasant, simple, honest, real, unfiltered, connected, charged. What happens next, time will tell…

(and while I always try to document events here as they are, this topic is very dear to my heart and I’m saving a lot of special moments and details just for me and her)

I’ll just say that I’m happy I met you, grateful we shared time together in the way that we did, and whatever the outcome, I’d not have it any other way. It’s been so nicely challenging to participate in our witty discussions, which have been so interesting, all the while getting to know each other.

I could write here more on becoming more cynical of love after long relationship breakups, on healing, on truly feeling ready again, on allowing yourself to be vulnerable and be hurt, and on taking chances. But I won’t :D Perhaps another time we can dive deeper into these topics. Cliff hanger, I know 😉

Walnut hugs Fig 💖

🌳 Return to (the Bulgarian) roots

I’m not even sure how to word this, but a number of different events and experiences have fallen under this umbrella this year. My Bulgarian connection, the Bulgarian trip, and Anton’s curiosity towards the Bulgarian language and history are just a couple of specific examples. My dad has always done a great job of telling me Bulgarian history while I was growing up. All sorts of stories from all sorts of ages. From 681 to the 1990s. And I’ve always found it fascinating. In fact, there was a half-year period in 12th grade when I was so interested in Bulgarian history, and I was studying it as my way of applying to law school in Bulgaria. In the end, I did swap that in favor of pursuing Bulgarian and English language tests as the means of university admission. But I’ve been playing my role now. I’ve been telling stories to Anton as well as I can. And there’s a lot of this “return to the roots” thing that has been happening subconsciously.

For years, I thought I’d never want to go back to live in Bulgaria. The reasons are many, worthy of a small post just on this topic. But the gist of it is that last year, at the end of our trip with Anton to Bulgaria, the days before we came back to Finland, while in Sofia, I “FELT” a lot of change. I “FELT” my homeland again. It’s a nice place. It always has been. It’s always just been the nasty, corrupted politicians who drive people away. The nature is magical. The ground beneath your feet - ancient and meaningful. Which, unironically, super nicely segways to…

💕 I love them both

I do. I decided to stop being tormented by “having to choose” in my mind. “I’ll just love them both”. Who said I have to choose favorites? I don’t wanna. I’m talking about Bulgaria and Finland. I love them both. There’s no denying that both are home to me. For better or worse. And yes, I know, I joke around with Finnish weather (actually, I don’t - it’s really shit, but you only realise it if you’ve ever had actual good weather 😅), but I love Finland in her own way. It’s the home of my son and his birthplace. Therefore, it’s my home. Someone special said to me recently something about contradicting herself with different statements. I really liked her expression, and it made me think. Was it contradicting, or was what she was describing basically… balance? And isn’t that what I’m also trying to describe? But why sometimes do we get stuck in the idea of “having to choose” when it’s very much ok to lean into different things in life, have variance in experiences, and just feel how the different things enhance each other as they allow reset and recovery time to the rest. Very abstract, I know. But being curious, always trying out new things, cause you never know what might stick, I think that’s key.

✨ AI and the spark of engineering

It’s been a bit of time since I last developed side projects this passionately. A huge reason why this is happening now and again is Google’s Antigravity. Finally, an IDE that truly uses AI as a tool to enhance the developer’s experience. We’re at an interesting time in history. AI for building projects currently reminds me of calculators in school. You don’t wanna use it in 1st-4th grade, but once you’ve brushed up on the basics and can handle the math yourself, it’s great to use the calculator to do the number crunching and focus on what really matters - figuring out the solution to the problem. Antigravity handles AI as a tool so well. Gone are the times of randomly pasting stuff into ChatGPT back and forth. Antigravity has AI agents you can use to actually go and do the work, literally running your project locally, having their own browser to click around, develop, and test solutions. The artifacts that Gemini creates inside Antigravity are super useful. Both the implementation plan and the walkthrough, with screenshots and videos of the implementation.

It’s been truly very interesting. So I just accomplish features and work and develop the project further, without having to bog myself down with the details of the implementation. At the same time, I can review the implementation’s code, adjust it, and, of course, if I want to, still make manual code changes. I’m curious what happens next, but in this AI world where every company has been trying to utilize AI as much as possible, and a lot of it has just seemed like wishful thinking and unnecessary hype, now this, this is something. Antigravity is a game-changer and an amazing tool! Let’s see what happens next, but it’s definitely interesting times ahead.

✍️ Content, creativity, inspiration

I’ve always liked making things. Mostly as a hobby, in a way, “pretty pointless”, in fact, this here blog post is a good example of that. I just enjoy putting it together, organizing my thoughts and experiences into it, trying to paint a nice picture of what happened. I am also (not currently actively) working on a book - “Born in Space”. I also write travel blogs that are completely private and unpublished. I have made hip hop songs 20 years ago :) I have written fan fiction. I made my own encyclopedia in a notebook when I was 9 :). So there’s something there in it. For a few years now, I’ve been contemplating starting up a new YouTube channel. I wanna make movies again. But this time different. My previous channel FPVTips was a niche venture and focused, of course, on FPV racing and freestyle drones. This time around, I wanna do something different, but more on this later, if it comes to pass, the idea is not completely settled in my head yet.

I started a mini series of stories on Instagram called “Georgi’s stories” where the idea is super simple - post 365 stories, a year of stories. We’re at around 92 at the time of writing this. So time flies :D But it’s been an interesting learning opportunity. What I don’t like about it is that it forces me to open IG every day, not a big fan of that. I’m not a social media hater; I partake, yes, but I believe we all need to be a lot more present and use social media as a tool and not be completely sucked into it and obsessed by it. Anyway, I’m working on accepting that, for the time being at least, I need to log in every day and post something quick, and yes, I know, you can also schedule posts via some third-party apps and whatnot, but I’m not going for any growth tactics on my account or anything. I just wanna have fun with it, and I just try to put something up every day. It’s not always super creative, in fact, most of my posts are just about daily workouts, which I love anyway, and it’s fine by me :) The point is to be real and unfiltered. And I think I’ll use this mini project as a stepping stone to possibly going back to making more long-form content again in 2026. We’ll see.

Inspiration. The past 2-3 weeks have made me wanna create and write like nothing else before. It’s been a long time (if ever) since I last felt like that. It’s hard to describe, but it’s also very simple to describe. I have a muse. And when you do, things happen. It’s such a special feeling, hard or even impossible to reproduce and cue on demand. But when it happens… wow…

2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣6️⃣

⬜ Goals for 2026:

🇧🇬 Bulgarian trip with Anton
📝 Continue slowly writing my book - Born in Space
🏃‍♂️ Run Helsinki Midnight Run for the 3rd time (with prep)
🏃‍♂️ Hyrox
🦺 CrossFit Murph
🏋️‍♂️ CrossFit Competition
🗣️ Community, friends, family
🏋️‍♂️ Training vacation
🏀 CrossFit, basketball, table tennis with Anton
😄 Smile and have fun
♠️ Learn a couple of card magic tricks
📷 Complete Georgi’s Stories on IG
🎥 Make content

So that’s the goal list. Is it complete, finite, and set in stone? Absolutely not. Is it a guiding light with the most important points well covered? Perhaps. I’d like to think so, to some degree. There might be more items I’ve not put on there. Perhaps, some are even pretty important and truly determining the direction of life and development. One thing is for sure - I want to smile, have fun, beam happiness and love to the ones I care about and most anyone else in between. I want to keep doing the things that make me be me, I want to keep finding the moments where I can really just BE. The real moments, where all else dissipates.

Let’s hope for a healthy and nice 2026, full of pleasant challenges, meaningful connections, and building things while having fun. Like a little kid in a sandbox. Step by step, scoop by scoop, and then, a year from now, hopefully, we can take a look back and take note of all the progress made in various endeavors. The plans are there; the execution will come. But I’d like to end this post with roughly what I started it with: Journey > Destination. What good is the end goal, the outcome of all the effort, if in the process you lose yourself, you burn out, or you feel miserable? Enjoy the ride, stop to smell the roses ;) Take a break. Take a deep breath. We’ll get there eventually, but HOW WE GET THERE MATTERS. So many times, the journey is the gist of it; it’s the true essence of the experience. Life, happening all around us, right now. That journey where you still improve and are always hungry for the next step, for the next bite of challenge, the journey where sometimes you don’t even notice how much you’ve improved until later on, when you take a look back after some time has passed.

So the list above is just a blueprint. How the journey will unfold, and where it leads me, I can’t wait to find out! To a great 2026! Love, Georgi.

Review and setup Jumper AION ExpressLRS nano module for Taranis X-Lite

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I have to admit that while being away from the FPV drone hobby past few years I have completely missed out the entire ExpressLRS (ELRS) movement. From what I’ve been able to gather and understand so far since my comeback, it seems like an amazing community-driven open-source project with all of the code on GitHub and allows vendors to use that protocol when building their receiver and transmitter hardware. And there seem to be a lot of ELRS radios on the market, as well as receivers and AIO boards with built-in SPI receivers.

I am really, really simplifying and keeping it short here, but it seems that the thriving ecosystem has led to some really nice hardware that people are very happy with, it delivers really good range and link quality.

Because I’ve had my Taranis X-Lite radio for a while and I still like it, I decided to look for a module that fits it and use that to dip my toes into the ExpressLRS world.

So here is the Jumper AION ELRS nano module I went for:

Fits nicely into the Taranis X-Lite nano slot:

In terms of setup, there’s not a lot to do really. Once you have plugged in the module, we need to do basically two things:

Flash the firmware to both update it and to set the binding phrase we will use to bind our quads
Copy the ELRS script on the Taranis X-Lite SD card

To begin with flashing the firmware first download the ExpressLRS Configurator for your operating system. When you run it, you wanna select the correct device category, device, and regulatory domain and of course, set your custom binding phrase. With all of those set, hit the flash button.

If all goes well you should see a screen like this where you can also download the Lua script we’re gonna copy to the radio.

You will need to disconnect the connection to the ELRS module and instead plug in your radio (Taranis X-Lite) to mount the SD card. You need to copy the elrsV3 lua file to the SCRIPTS\TOOLS location on the radio, as you can see below:

Now let’s boot up the radio and create a new model.

You can use this model for basically all of your ELRS drones if you so wish. Let’s jump into the Setup view. Here we will turn off the Internal RF and we will set the External RF to CRSF.

And for the most part, we are kind of done.

To bind to a drone, plug it in and open Betaflight. In the Receiver tab put in your binding phrase in the field for it.

Remember the elrsV3 lua script we copied earlier? In your radio’s Tools menu you should have an entry for ExpressLRS if you scroll it down a bit.

Apart from allowing us to set the output power of the module and other useful settings, this also provides another super useful option I’d like to show you - BLE Joystick.

And it’s exactly what it sounds like. Say you wanna use your radio with a simulator on your PC, for example, but you don’t wanna use a cable, yes, just do it over Bluetooth. Very handy and super easy!

Once the module is in Bluetooth joystick mode you should see it on the radio’s screen and on the module’s screen too.

All that is left is to connect to your PC via Bluetooth:

And get into Liftoff, setup the controller and play the game.

All in all from what I’ve seen from this module so far and what I’ve used it for, which is still not a whole lot, but still, I’m pretty happy. Works as expected and doesn’t break the bank at its pretty affordable price point. I’m a fan.

Here’s a link if you decide to grab the Jumper AION ELRS nano module.

Happy flying!

Build a 65mm micro drone from the Mepsking kit parts

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

After being a few years away from the hobby I’m making a low-key comeback and wanted to check out what’s the process nowadays when making a tiny micro drone to zip around at home during the winter and outside too. Historically, when I was last dealing with the FPV hobby, I was pretty impressed with where micro drones and toothpicks were headed, so when I got reached out to by a company called Mepsking, I was pretty interested to check out their micro drone kits, so let’s get to it.

📦 Unboxing
📝 Specifications
🛠️ Build
⚙ Setup
🚁 Flying

📦 Unboxing

I received this micro drone kit from Mepsking. The package arrived in a small box with all the parts wrapped in protective bubble wrap and in their own boxes.

And here is everything I got inside the box:

The MEPS SZ F411 1S 7A AIO Flight Controller Analog for Micro Drones 25.5x25.5

Four of these MEPS SZ0802 19000KV micro motors:

The micro drone canopy:

The BetaFPV Meteor 65 frame:

Four of these MEPS SZ1218 tinywhoop propellers:

And last but not least the Caddx Ant camera:

📝 Specifications

For an in-depth specs rundown, check the links to the product pages, but here’s very briefly some of the most important information.

The MEPS SZ F411 1S 7A AIO Flight Controller Analog for Micro Drones 25.5x25.5

It has a built in SPI ELRS receiver and analog VTX

OSD menu

Solder free motor plugs

2 UARTs

Caddx Ant 1200TVL Camera WDR Ultra Light Snail Nano FPV Camera

165 degree FOV

OSD menu

2g weight

MEPS SZ0802 Micro FPV Motor for 65-75mm Tinywhoop Drone 19000KV

Stainless steel solid shaft

Rated for 1S lipo

Max power: 14.1W

Weight about 1.8g - 2g

Plugs for easy installation

BETAFPV Meteor65 Air 65mm Brushless Whoop Frame

Weight about 2.67g

Motor Mounting: 3-M1.4-6.6mm

Flight Control Installation Hole: 26×26mm

Battery Slot Size: 11.6×6.0mm

MEPS SZ1218 Tinywhoop Propeller for FPV Micro Drones Lightweight

Size: 1.2 inch

Pitch: 1.8 inch

Blade: 3

🛠️ Build

With these components, the build is very straightforward, and you could go almost completely without soldering anything. In my case, I still had to do a tiny bit of soldering - the camera cables to the AIO flight controller. It’s not the end of the world, but I would have appreciated it if they went the extra mile to also pre-solder plugs, truly making this a solderless build.

I would also suggest perhaps you first solder the camera to the FC before assembling anything, that way you will avoid any potential issues with melting the frame’s prop guards a bit if not careful.

Another thing to consider at this point in time, while you’re doing some soldering is if you wanna swap out the already provided and soldered battery cable for the other one that comes with the kit, which is with the better performing betafpv connector type. This will be dictated by the batteries you have.

Below you can see how I’ve assembled the flight controller into the frame using the soft-mount rubber grommets and some screws. Pay attention to the orientation of the frame and the flight controller. Both have an explicit “forward” side. So make sure those match. On the frame that’s depicted by the forward-pointing triangle, and on the FC, there’s also a marking for the forward direction.

And here’s how things look from the bottom.

Identify the G, 5V, and CAM solder pads where we’re gonna solder the camera.

The camera all soldered up. Excuse my sloppy work on this picture, you can do much better than this.

Next, we make quick work of plugging in the antenna in its corresponding slot.

And with the camera inside the canopy, we are ready to preview how the build would look. But first, let’s plug in the 4 motors.

Place the motors in the designated slots, secure them with the provided screws, and plug in the motor cable into the corresponding motor plug on the flight controller. Very straightforward!

That’s all 4 motors done.

There was a bit of a surprise to me, as I’m not sure if it was an issue just with my canopy or not, but my canopy didn’t really have side holes where screws would go in and correctly hold the camera inside, also allowing you to adjust the tilt and therefor the camera angle. Hence, I had to find a way to support the camera in other less firm ways. I used a bit of foam for the time being. I’ve seen online the same canopy actually having the correct holes on the side, so maybe just an issue on my side.

And a closer look…

Here was another tiny issue I had which was with the provided props, I couldn’t for the life of me, press those props all the way down on the motor posts, as they are supposed to go. Luckily, I had another set of props from a Mobula6HD from a few years ago that fit just perfectly and went in nice and snug down the motor post and flush with the top of the motor.

⚙ Setup

The bare minimum of setup required to get up and flying is:

Setup a binding phrase (Betaflight & ExpressLRS)
Configure motor rotation direction (Betaflight)
Verify receiver channels are correct (Betaflight)
Setup arm and flight mode switches (Betaflight)

🔗 Setup ELRS binding phrase

This is a two-part process the first time around, like in my case, and then easier every other time, by only needing to add your ELRS binding phrase to a new drone. However, this time, we need to also set it up on the TX module we’ll use.

First, we’ll take a look at the ExpressLRS Configurator. Download the version for your operating system, and connect your module, I’m using the Jumper AION ELRS 2.4G TX NANO Module. I chose that one as it’s a pretty good one and fits my Taranis Xlite NANO module bay. Check carefully what module bay you need for your radio if you’re buying an external module, although most radios nowadays come with some internal Express LRS modules.

So in the ExpressLRS Configurator, you wanna select the correct device category (Jumper 2.4GHz in this case), correct device (Jumper AION Nano 2.4GHz TX), and choose your regulatory domain setting, I’m going with LBT as that’s the standard in Europe. And the most important part - type in your binding phrase. This is what we’ll use to actually bind to different receivers. That phrase has to match in the configuration of the TX module and then in the config of any receiver on any drone you wanna bind to it. When ready, hit the “Flash” button.

Here’s what my config looks like:

And when the flashing is all done you should see this:

We can unplug the transmitter module and next we need to plug in the radio itself to update the LUA script. Note that you can download it straight from the post-flash view in ExpressLRS Configurator. This is a fairly straightforward process, all you gotta do is copy over the elrsV3 file to the SCRIPTS\TOOLS location on the SD card you use in your radio.

🐝 Check the Betaflight configuration

Now in Betaflight with the radio on and the quad plugged in, on the receiver tab we’ll notice we have a connection, and the binding works just fine, provided you entered the binding phrase in the receiver tab.

This flight controller comes with a default Channel Map of AETR1234 and if that doesn’t match your transmitter configuration, you need to change it accordingly. Historically, I’ve always used TAER1234, I think it used to be some Taranis default config back in the day, but in the end it really doesn’t matter, as long as the sticks control the channels correctly. You can test that by moving the radio sticks and observing which channel gets updated. For example, if you fly Mode2 with throttle on the left stick, you want to see that moving the left stick up makes the Throttle channel go above the midpoint, so past 1500 values and pulling it down, makes it go under that. Left stick left and right movement should control Yaw, right stick up and down is for Pitch, and right stick left and right is for Roll. Here are my updated settings:

For bonus points in the OUTPUTS view of your radio, you can fine-tune the trimmings so you don’t get any weird values at any of the stick range. For example, when the stick is right in the middle, you don’t wanna see a 1502, you wanna see exactly 1500. And when it’s at its top range, you wanna see 2000, not a 1998 or smth else. Those ranges and trimmings can be adjusted in the OUTPUTS view.

Jumping over to the Modes tab in Betaflight, here are the modes I setup:

AUX1 is Channel 5 on my radio and AUX2 is Channel 6. Those channels being switches on my radio that I prefer to use for arming the quad and for changing between acro, horizon, angle flight modes.

Motors tab. This is one of the most important things to get right. BEFORE YOU START REMOVE THE PROPS!. We do NOT want to be spinning up motors with props on, ever. Accidents happen and it ain’t nice. First, decide if you’re gonna run in props in or props out setup. There’s not any difference in terms of flight characteristics, but you need to decide, as that will dictate what setting is chosen at the top left and whether the “Motor direction is reversed” is turned on or off. But once you decide that, you now know in what direction each motor should be spinning. And note that diagonal motors match direction. For example motors 1 and 4 spin in the same direction and then 2 and 3 also.

Betaflight has a nice feature for motor direction, use it to adjust the spin directions correctly. Might take a bit of a play around with it, but eventually it will work.

A couple more radio setup items before we are completely ready to fly! Turn on the radio, note the ExpressLRS module works correctly.

In the radio create a new model. This model, unlike previous cases where you had to have a separate model for each drone, now you can only have 1 model for all your ELRS drones. In the setup view change Internal RF to OFF and External RF to CRSF.

If you go to the Tools view and scroll down you can now see the ExpressLRS script:

And running that gives you all the config options for ELRS. Most notably, here you can adjust the output power if you’re flying further away for example. Another nice functionality from here is the BLE Joystick which enables you to connect to a PC and use the radio as a controller in sims, like for example the Liftoff simulator on Steam.

We are officially done! Let’s go fly!

🚁 Flying

All in all, I’m pretty happy with how the little fellow flew, even if in my test flights as you will see was a tiny bit windy on a pretty cold winter day, albeit at least sunny. I’m sure the battery performance tanked a tiny bit as it wasn’t warmer than 5-6 degrees Celsius. Check out the test flights, and you can excuse the vibrations from the not-so-perfectly mounted cam. But if we talk flight characteristics, it did pretty well with these motors and props combo and you can see me turn up the speed in the later flights, that’s why I’ll actually list the test flights below in reverse order - from the 4th to the 1st, just because I got quickly a lot more confident and got used to the craft towards the end and I think that best showcases its capabilities.

Happy flying!

My 2024 year in review

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

🖼️ Theme of the year and overview of the goals for 2024
👨‍👦 Being a dad
🏋️‍♂️ CrossFit progress
🏃‍♂️ Helsinki Midnight Run
🍸 Sobreity continues
🇪🇪 A couple of days in Tallinn
🇧🇬 Trip to Bulgaria with Anton
🇨🇾 Trip to Cyprus for my sister’s wedding
🇪🇸 Trip to Tenerife
🎞️ Movie review
❓ Other topics
⬜ Goals for 2025

”💙 A heart and soul filling adventure called life!”

The older I get and the more I keep writing these posts each year, the more I emphasize happiness, fun, smiling, and “filling your soul” with experiences. I’m pretty sure, years ago the first few of those posts had a heavy focus on skills. What skills were improved this past year? Now it’s more about what is the most memorable thing that happened to you this past year. Which person made an impression on you? Did you make an impression on someone? How did you spend time with your son? Did you have fun?

The past few years have genuinely been getting better and better, and I remember clearly thinking to myself at the beginning of this year:

“I sure hope 2024 will be amazing, and there are already a few things to look forward to, but there’s no way in hell it could be better than 2023. 2023 was pretty freaking awesome!”

Well, I’m happy to report that 2024 knocked it out of the park it was indeed an absolutely amazing year and I’m so grateful for it! Hard to imagine, yet, I hope 2025 follows the same trend.

It’s funny how our priorities in life phase and change over time. Sometimes things that seemed most important before no longer feel so, and new desires and ideas come up if we are open to them. I like that.

And since we keep setting these goals, let’s take a look at what I thought made sense to be pursued at the end of 2023.

⬜ Major goals for 2024:

🏊‍♂️ Train for Ironman 2025
🏋️‍♂️ CrossFit: 10 unbroken RMU, more Olympic weightlifting focus, HS walk fast and easy
🏅 CrossFit Open: All 3 events
🏃‍♂️ Running: 10ks, Half Marathons
💪 CrossFit: participate in at least one competition event in Finland or abroad
🪜 Obstacle course racing: Tough Viking or otherwise, participate in at least one event
🗣️ Connect with people: dedicate time to friends old and new
🛳️ Longer trip 1 with Anton
🚙 Longer trip 2 with Anton
📝 Resume writing my book - Born in Space
🧘‍♂️ Practice meditation for 1 month
🇨🇾 Cyprus solo trip
🇧🇬 Bulgaria solo trip

Some words on the topics. Train for Ironman, wow. I’m still into it, I’d still want to do it. “But why does it have to be before you’re 40?” I remember Emmi asking me at the gym. What an excellent question. I guess it doesn’t, and honestly, it really doesn’t. I’d still rather be someone who completed an Ironman than someone who never tried to. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. I’ve marked it with yellow because I have worked on my swimming and my running this year. Some of those CrossFit goals were very arbitrary already when I put them on that list, but the reason why I’ve marked this item with green is because for RMU I’ve wanted to and I have increased the volume. There are still ways to go, but I’m comfortably jumping up and doing 3 - 4 unbroken RMU for a few rounds, and that’s great! I absolutely put effort into Olympic weightlifting and snatches became one of my most favorite things to train, and HSW also has seen a lot of effort put into it, been fun as hell!

I also managed to do all 3 CrossFit Open 2024 events, which I’m very happy about. The only thing that sucked was that my double unders really tanked my score on the 2nd workout and my total score as a result also. I still need to find a way to improve those! As far as running goes, I’m very happy I challenged myself with my first official run - the Helsinki Midnight Run 10k. That was so much fun and such a vibe, happy I did it! More on that below. I have not participated in any CrossFit competitions yet, I’m not super sad I didn’t, the right thing just didn’t present itself, but I sure as heck want to do it, and I’ll keep on being on the lookout for a suitable opportunity. I did participate in a CrossFit training camp abroad, so that’s maybe kind of counting for something, and it was amazing, so the full details - below. There was also no time and/or opportunity for obstacle course racing this year as well. Maybe in the future.

Connecting with people - this is such a big topic, I’ll expand on it below but I’m happy I can consider it successful for this year, it was definitely one of the top 3 most important and soul-filling things for me! We did 1 amazing, long, and super fun trip with Anton that had many aspects to it, one of which was reconnecting with our roots. Great success! I did somewhat reboot writing my book - pleasantly surprised by how much I had written (14 chapters about), and how the world-building has been coming together. I’d love to continue with that. Even if it’s at a slow pace. Meditation - nope. I’d still love to do it, it just never happens, but I’m sure it’s gonna be one of those things - when its time comes, I’ll do it. And Cyprus and Bulgaria trips both happened, not sure why I’d want them to be solo trips necessarily, they were both family trips - one with Anton and the other visiting my mom, dad, and sister. It was great!

◻️ Minor goals for 2024:

🍽️ Learn more about nutrition, track macros, and see where I’m at
🏫 20 year highschool reunion
🎥 Creative skill teaching with Anton: 3D modeling, video editing, game making
🏀 Play basketball with Anton at the local school
🖼️ Go to more museums with Anton
🎮 Participate in Ludum Dare game jam and make a small game with Anton
😄 Smile and have fun

I don’t know why these “minor” goals are minor, they are every bit as important as the major ones, I’ll probably change the format to only 1 list for next year. The only red item is the 20-year reunion and while yes, the FOMO was rocking me heavily and I would have loved to catch up with the high school plebs, it wasn’t meant to be, I found no suitable flights and quite frankly I chose and preferred to go to Bulgaria with my son a month later than when the reunion would have been. I haven’t still gotten into tracking macros, and to be honest, I might never get into that, but I have been paying attention and listening to my body and what it needs, supplementing, and trying to fuel properly before more strenuous workouts.

Playing basketball with Anton, going to museums, and doing creative skills stuff makes me so, so happy and so, so proud of him! We’ve had so many small moments where we learn about touch typing on the keyboard, and how to make games, he’s been designing his own in Roblox, and me helping out only every so often. He’s also gotten much into video editing, we’ve been using CapCut for that on both his PC and his phone. I love, that he finds and utilizes these creative outlets. Reminds me a lot of me as a kid writing fan fiction, making maps for games, and whatnot. We did visit a bunch of museums which was fun, we did also “mini participate” in Ludum Dare in April - we made a small Unity game about zombies attacking a tower and the tower shooting at them, kind of like a tower defense type of game. We also did some Unity game-making tutorials where we followed steps and learned about programming among other things. So all in all very satisfied with the accomplished goals for this year!

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👨‍👦 Being a dad

I feel so blessed and grateful for getting to experience what being a dad is. For many reasons, trying to be present and there for my kid when he needs me is super important for me. I remember and cherish so many memories with my dad, and in some ways, I do wish he spent more time playing with me when I was little. We did play a lot of board games, he even created our own version of Monopoly which turned out really cool. I also remember when he played StarCraft with me (I must have been 15 ish at the time). It was nice to spend some time with my dad this summer in Cyprus, for the first time in quite some time, perhaps 6 or so years.

I’m not sure where to even begin here; there are just quite a few things to cover. And every day I get to spend with my kid is a gift, and I appreciate it immensely. It sucks to not be able to be there with him every single day, that will always be something that bugs me, but for what it is, I think we’re making the best out of the situation we have.

From going to museums, chatting about space, reading books together, playing games together, table tennis, badminton, and CrossFit together, so many important and cherished moments I could never put into words. It’s interesting watching him grow up, asking more and more interesting questions as he moves through the adventure called life.

I try my best to “teach creativity” or at least the desire to explore and create stuff in various forms - for example making games, putting things together, building stuff. We do that a lot in Minecraft, this year we also did that via a few Unity game engine tutorials we followed together and we made a couple of small games, one of which is even live on his site - https://antonyanev.com.

As a dad, I’d like to show him so many things about life just to create an environment to explore and choose a path forward for himself. However, if there’s one thing, well really 3 things, I’d like to tell my son, these are:

Travel, read books, and create meaningful connections with people

🏋️‍♂️ CrossFit progress

The CrossFit progression this year has been pretty decent I’m sure, and at least it’s felt like it. I don’t necessarily have the numbers behind everything, but at least going forward, we’ll have a comparison of the current state vs the previous year. The first few things that come to my mind are that for the first time ever I started supplementing creatine this year, although a pretty small amount really - 2.5g-3g per day, where the recommended dose is 5g. I can’t say how much of the newly gained strength is accredited to it, but I’m sure it’s helped a bit.

One thing I’ve really wanted to do this year is to completely not use any non-22.5 kg dumbells in workouts, and I’m happy I was able to achieve that. For some movements that change has been easier, for others harder, perhaps the hardest thing still being dual DB thrusters, those are difficult to do for me with that weight, but doable in sets of 4 or so.

The CrossFit Open has been important to me, I wanted to do all 3 events and I managed to do so. I’m happy with my performance in event 1 which was with a lot of DB snatches and burpees, I’m not happy with my performance in event 2 because my double unders were terrible, and I was tripping up even more than I did on average, it was truly bad and actually tanked my total score quite a lot. In event 3 I’m happy I was able to do the very heavy thrusters with 63kg, pretty proud of myself I was able to push through that and do some bar muscle ups. If BMUs were before the thrusters, I’d do even better but it is what it is.

Murph has been also very important to me and this year I did it for the first time with a 9kg vest. Finished with a score of 49:40 with the vest, vs the score from 2023 44:10 without a vest. Very happy with that result. It was very challenging with the vest but I’m happy I was able to push through and finish it! Running with the vest was tricky, had to hold it for the sides which helped, push ups were so hard, pull-ups - pretty easy, and squats got a tiny bit heavy too.

My training schedule has been on average something along the lines of 6 days on week A and then 3 days on week B. Varying a bit here and there, but mostly something like that. And I kept doing some extra stuff at the gym after classes. I like that. Sure, it’s not the most structured well of training, but it’s fun for me and I’d like to keep the fun and not optimize the crap out of this hobby, burn out, and quit. I’d rather keep showing up. This year one of my biggest focuses was the snatch. A bit less so the clean & jerk, ring muscle ups continue to be something I practice and I can comfily do sets of 3-5 for a few rounds, which I’m happy with, but of course, would love to get to 10 unbroken someday. Snatch has been my biggest love this year. Super strongly influenced and inspired by watching our very own Bulgarian boys Karlos Nasar and Bozhidar Andreev win several international competitions, culminating with a gold medal for Nasar at the Olympics and a bronze for Andreev. Super proud of them, and indeed super inspired watching their movement as well as many others on TikTok and Instagram distilling and following every part of the movement. I think I’ve really come a long way this year, but there’s still a ton more to work on.

One thing that “dawned on me” around the middle of the year and I started thinking about a lot was what I call “champion mentality” or “athlete mentality”. I noticed a couple of times I could push through the discomfort even further and do more. A couple of times I didn’t push enough and thought after the workout was finished that I could have pushed more. So it’s all about the realization that sometimes, no matter how hard it is, you can brace yourself and keep going for a bit longer and sooner rather than later it’s all done. That, and “how bad do you want it?”. That question is fundamental to some of the bigger successes and every time I’ve been able to do that, I’ve been very happy after, cause, of course, it doesn’t feel good at the moment, but heck, it feels AWESOME afterward!

Another big revelation for me was that I used to think that “things will surely get easier someday since I’m training, so in the future, it will be easy”. That’s really not it. It’s not gonna get easier. It’s all about how much pain and for how long you can tolerate while doing work. And I like that revelation. It completely gets rid of the expectation that there ever will be a workout where it will be “easy”. It’s ok to be hard, manage it and push through!

I’ve a number of small wins which I’m very proud of. For example, going for 30 unbroken butterfly pull-ups during the first Jackie test! Doing 20 unbroken bar muscle-ups during the pulling test. Getting up to 72kg snatch. Apparently, I’ve noted 50kg for the snatch towards the beginning of the year. And 75kg for the clean & jerk, and now that’s at 95kg. Handstand walk progression keeps getting better which is nice! Very happy with all of those!

The training camp in Tenerife was an entire thing of its own, super amazing to train with legends like Jonne Koski and Emilia Leppänen, but more on that in its own section below as it was truly incredible!

Some stats as of December 2024:

Movement	Score	Movement	Score
Snatch	72kg	BMU	20
Clean & Jerk	95kg	RMU	5
Clean	108kg	Murph	49:40
Back squat	142kg	CrossFit Open	~ 65th percentile
Front squat	125kg	Jackie	6:37
Deadlift	155kg	DT	8:15 @ 50kg
Shoulder press	70kg

To top it all off, I was awarded the “most improved athlete” in our gym for 2024, something, that means the world to me! I so, so much appreciate this! It’s hard to put into words how much this means to me!

And some more training-related pics without which any improvement would not be possible. Special credit to the training clothes laundry and grocery lists 😅

🏃‍♂️Helsinki Midnight run

Helsinki Midnight Run was my first ever official 10k run and it changed how I look at some Helsinki city streets forever! I remember that evening very clearly and vividly. It was such an amazing experience! Despite it being mid-september, the temperature was relatively high and there was no wind, which was absolutely key because there was however a torrential downpour. Only slightly exaggerated, but all jokes aside, it was properly raining. I have never been more soaked in my entire life, there was quite literally nothing dry on me, yet, thanks to the lack of nasty cold wind and thanks to the relatively warm temperature of around 15-19 degrees.

The square was full of people, thousands of, the event was soon about to start, and rain was pouring down, yet everyone was hyped up. I remember chatting with my colleague Era, who also signed up and was about to run the event, wishing each other good luck. And soon, we were off to the races. Because of the bottleneck due to the amount on people on the first couple of kilometers, I was somewhat forced to start much slower than I normally would, however, I think that was great and it played a huge role in my being able to finish the race the way I wanted, because thanks to that, I was a lot less gassed out by the time I reached the 4th and 5th kilometer. The course was awesome, taking me to a place I like a lot, down to Eira, close to my CrossFit gym, through parks, past the sea, slowly and steadily moving along with some interesting stalls every 1 kilometer or so. Some checkpoints had a DJ playing music, a couple were aid stations. The vibe was on, people were running and enjoying.

I became one with the water. Really lol! Jumping in and out of puddles, water splashing, but it truly and really did not matter, in a weird way it felt so freeing, the only thing that mattered was to just keep running. The pace was nice and pushing, but being able to breathe, was good for me for sure. Soon we rolled out past the Silja line boat, then down around Kauppatori and went into Vanha satama and around that island / peninsula. That was somewhat the final stretch. I was able to push and increase the pace the last 2 kilometers too I think, only the last 1km my left knee started to be a bit iffy, so I was hoping it would all be fine until the finish line and thankfully it was! So I finished with a time of 54:08 and was so happy! My secret goal was sub 1 hour, but sub 55 minutes pleasantly surprised me even more!

🍸 Sobreity continues

I’m not sure what to add to this section, just wanna mention that it carries on, and I like it. I’ve been to a lot of social events, big and small, with a person or many, or with hundreds, and yeah so far this is ok. The weird social understanding that the only way to have fun is to drink alcohol (as ancient as this may be, predating ancient Roman times etc.), has to go. I’ve seen it time and time again that it’s absolutely unnecessary, luckily, I’m more and more surrounded by very like-minded people and I absolutely LOVE THIS. It feels awesome! So many ways of having fun in life, you don’t need to drink in order to hit the dancefloor and dance, to joke around and have fun chatting or anything else in between.

🇪🇪 A couple of days in Tallinn

The first adventure and a mini trip this year was to Tallinn, Estonia. I hadn’t gone there since 2012, funnily enough, even if it’s so close and just a 2-hour boat ride away. So super randomly, I did go this year. There was a long weekend opportunity around the 1st of May, so I took it and went to Tallinn for a few days. What was funny about the weather this year, was that all the way till the end of April we had snow, and then in May we went instantly into summer, quite literally there was no spring in between, but hey, I appreciate the warm May for sure. So I got good weather in Tallinn as well. The trip was a lot of fun with visiting 2 of the local CrossFit boxes on different days, some stake dinner out in Town, massages, relaxing, tons of walking around 20k steps per day, enjoying the sun and the atmosphere of old town Tallinn among other things. It was funny to see Elisa and Prisma shops there as well, and despite being there only 2-3 days, this time I got really kind of immersed in it, as much as possible, despite the short trip. Just being out and about, being present, exploring, walking, and talking makes all the difference and gives a whole other angle to traveling.

🇧🇬 Trip to Bulgaria with Anton

It was soon going to be time for Anton to go on a well-deserved vacation from school, and also it would be time for our Bulgarian trip! I was pretty excited about this one, most of all, because the previous year we had done a couple of shorter trips now, and that really validated and confirmed that Anton was beyond ready for even bigger adventures. That and the fact we were going to visit the homeland, made it extra exciting, so soon the time came and we left. We had a nice trip, Anton made some friends on the plane and chatted with a boy his age, they played some games on their phones and talked in Swedish and English. I had arranged a transport for us from the Sofia airport to our apartment in Plovdiv and it all went pretty smoothly, so around 11 something in the night we were home. We were kind of hungry so we even went to get a delicious kebab before hitting the sack. That first night was so hard for both of us to sleep as we weren’t used to the heat just yet and the Plovdiv apartment had no AC. The funny thing is that after a couple of days, we got used to it and slept just fine. But mid-June temperatures in Bulgaria are not to be underestimated if you’ve been living in a cold country like Finland for the past 10 years. Another interesting thing was that there had been apparently an earthquake of 4.3 in Plovdiv a bit before we landed in Sofia.

I’m not gonna go over the entire trip, I have those days written in separate private posts, which I may or may not publish someday, but I wanna mention some of the highlights. Perhaps the biggest and most important was to see little man connect with his homeland. He was instantly used to most things, it’s hard to describe in words what exactly, but the basic idea is that this is half his heritage and he should be feeling that and exploring that part too. And so we did. It was amazing to catch up with friends and family, and awesome to see Anton hanging out and playing with Damian - the son of a friend of mine, but they played very nicely together and had fun! It was nice to see my cousin’s kids and hang out with them a bit, they are so big nowadays, and see Anton chat a bit with them too! The future generation, what a great bunch of kids!

We did so much exploring of Plovdiv, the ancient roman amphitheater, the ancient roman stadium, the old town of Plovdiv, the city center, the central park, the hills, the kids’ train in the youth’s hill, the natural history museum, the artsy Kapana neighborhood and just wandering about and taking the city in. Plovdiv has always had that SPECIAL vibe, that AILYAK, that’s impossible to describe but makes you relax and chill like nowhere else. Just being at peace, exploring the city, and taking part in various events around the city center, which seem to happen every day of the week in the summer. I always used to say that I don’t miss Bulgaria that much, as much as I miss Plovdiv. It is the most special place for me and it will always be so! In the end, it was nice to hear Anton blurt out: “Dad, can’t we live in Plovdiv and just go to Finland every once in a while?” while we were saying goodbye to his “2nd cousins”. Of course, we can son, why not, who knows? We got a bit emotional saying goodbye to the bear in Central Park, but it was just a goodbye for now.

We had been reading the Winnie the Pooh books lately and we liked the characters a lot, so the story about how we got Eeyorie was very special to us. We basically played this claw machine and with 2 coins of 1 lev each (2lv = 1euro) we got 3 plushies out of the machine, which was insane. 3 plushies out of 5 tries, and 1 of those was a super cute Eeyorie!

After a week in Plovdiv, the trip continued with a week by the seaside at the Black Sea coast, specifically in Melia in Sunny Beach. We had a really nice time there too! It was awesome to go to a sea with nice warm water, splash in the waves, swim, relax on the beach, enjoy good food, and chill. I think we both really enjoyed that. Going to the beach twice per day, exploring around in the evenings a bit too, including the beautiful Nessebar nearby, making friends with our cat friend in the hotel, taking pictures with parrots, riding double deckers, taking pictures, among other things.

The last part of our adventure took us to Sofia for a couple of days, which were also pretty enjoyable. We had a nice Airbnb right in the center, not too far off the National Palace of Culture, which gave us easy access to some nice parks close by, as well as the Vitosha boulevard where you could just stroll down the pedestrian street and explore the center of Sofia so to speak. Sofia’s a big city, obviously, but still, we managed to walk around quite a bit during the two days there, had some nice classic Bulgarian “mekitzi” for breakfast (deep fried pastry with some toppings), took a lot of pictures and saw some of the key points, including the St Alexander Nevski Cathedral.

Finally, at the airport, we had an interesting situation where we found the perfect Pooh plushie too!

All in all, two weeks of adventure and fun exploring our other homeland 💙!

🇨🇾 Trip to Cyprus for my sister’s wedding

The Cyprus trip and how it worked out, I’m very happy with. On one hand, it was planned very much ahead of time - I had promised my sister I’d go there for her wedding, already in January. On the other hand, because of hassles with dates and uncertainty, I still didn’t even have tickets a few weeks before that. Luckily, I was able to get a flight at a decent date so I was there a day before the wedding, then I stayed in total for a week to catch up and see my family.

Landing in Larnaca is always interesting, mainly because it reminds me of the time I lived there, 3 summers in total: 2010, 2011, and 2012. I’m not gonna go on a tangent to talk about that time, it had its challenges and ups and downs. But whatever the case, it was an important part of my life, and if we consider the consequences of actions, perhaps, one of the, if not THE most important time of my life as it would turn out, as that’s how back then I met Anton’s mom. Anywho, my mom came to pick me up from the airport, which was really nice to see her then, we had a bit of food, relaxed, chatted, and the adventure began. Quickly got a bus for Limassol where soon after we transferred to another bus all the way to Paphos, essentially traversing the entire island east to west within the span of a few hours.

I got soon to see my sister and my dad too and the poodle Erika. Fun times. The weather was great, just how I like it, nice and hot, absolutely love that!

The following day we had the wedding and everything went fine, without major issues. There was some minor hassle around the church ceremony, but luckily everything fell nicely into place and went smoothly. The wedding entourage was a colorful bunch, speaking 4 languages, quite a mixed bag, and hell of fun 😅. There were people speaking Bulgarian, Greek, English and French. Really quite the funny mix and we had fun anyway!

The rest of the trip was hanging out with my family, going to the beach to make the most of it - very pleasant to swim in that water, the Mediterranean is nice and warm at the end of August, and very clear so with a pair of swimming goggles, very pleasant to dive and explore a bit too. I did some really nice long-ish freestyle swims and got some tan, gotta love it. A part of me wished I brought Anton with me, but his school had started so that wouldn’t have worked out. All in all, in the end it worked out really well, the main goal was accomplished of attending the wedding, and as a bonus getting some sun and swimming was a nice touch too.

🇪🇸 Trip to Tenerife

The Tenerife training camp with Jonne Koski was one of the most amazing things that’s happened to me in quite a while. The main reason why was the complete mix of how everything worked out. But first, a sentence on how we got there. It’s actually a relatively short story - in March a colleague of mine at work told me about the existence of these “training holidays” and it sounded to me like such a smart and cool idea - you go somewhere on vacation, but in addition to getting the sun, sea and nice food, you also get to focus on training in decent facilities and have fun with like-minded people. I checked a couple of such trips online but hadn’t decided on anything, although there were a couple in May I was eyeing. And then came the post from either Jonne Koski or Turkutuomiopaivat on Instagram. I think I booked it instantly when I saw it. Not only was it exactly the same concept as what I had now been searching for, but on top of it all you got to do it alongside CrossFit Games athlete Jonne Koski! Holy moly! I was super excited, so despite the event being all the way in November and therefore meaning I had to wait for 6+ months, I signed up regardless, it sounded like a perfect fit. And the best part about it is that now, in hindsight, yes, it was a perfect fit and beyond! This event made me so happy on so many levels!

The trip there was nice, I ended up chatting for nearly the entire flight with this nice Ukranian lady. It’s not often you meet people that match you in vibe and energy, so that was really nice actually - we legit talked for almost the full 6 hours. The funny thing is, the whole thing started because we bumped into each other in an R kioski at the airport before boarding, so then when she came to sit next to me, we started chatting. Very friendly and nice person.

The weather in Tenerife was awesome! I had expected it to be warmer, obviously, but I had no idea it would actually be literal summer with temperatures from 22 to 26 and so on. Unbelievable! I had been previously in warm places in October and November, like Cyprus, like Nevada, but well, it’s been a while first of all, and second of all, this felt so weird coming from the contrast of Finland into it, and then also going back to Finland after it. Literally, my brain felt a bit confused for sure. As if seasons really swapped and whatnot.

Another element to the trip was of course the people in the camp! Everyone was super nice and friendly, very like-minded, really genuinely super nice people, it’s hard for me to describe. It felt like we were there cause we wanted to be there and nowhere else at that point in time. It was amazing. We also got to hang out together quite a bunch, since not only did we train twice per day, but also ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, playing table tennis, and taking saunas. A lovely bunch of folks!

And of course, a super important element was the training itself! I had been very curious if I’d be able to do it - train twice per day. Super happy to report that not only did it work out well, I also got 2 new PRs (deadlift and clean), and many new awesome tips on lifting, handstand walks, and pull-ups. So the results were there, the fun was there and the body wasn’t too tired either, which I suppose makes sense when you only eat, sleep, train, repeat, and have no other responsibilities. It felt absolutely amazing, to be honest! The training was very diverse too. Not only did we do our regular CrossFit stuff - snatch, cleans, DUs, rowing, ski erg, assault bike, BMUs, t2b, burpees, deadlifts, etc., but also we had swimming training, CrossFit workouts with swimming, running, uphill sprints, and tried even the Flume swimming machine to test and observe swimming technique.

We even went on a hike on the one day off and saw a boomerang banana peel among other things 😂. All in all, the insane vibe is probably how I could sum it up as short as possible. Absolutely insane vibe! All of our CrossFit athletes were super cool, focused, and putting in the work, but also helping each other and giving valuable tips, and of course Jonne Koski and Emilia Leppänen were absolute legends!

🎞️ Movie review

It’s not been the best year to watch nice movies in a cinema theater, so the list is MUCH shorter than last year’s:

Movie title	My rating
Agent Argylle	8/10
The beekeeper	7/10
Dune 2	10/10
Kung Fu Panda 4 (with Anton)	8/10
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire	5/10
Civil War	3/10
The Fall Guy	7/10
Furiousa	8/10
Deadpool & Wolverine	10/10
The Wild Robot (with Anton)	10/10

Agent Argylle - funny, ok, The Beekeeper - classic Statham movie, Dune 2 - absolutely amazing and epic, exactly what I’d love to see in the cinema, Kung Fu Panda 4 - nice, entertaining. Godzilla x Kong - i wasn’t sure what I had just seen, what was that? Civil War sounded very promising as a title, but the delivery was absolutely underwhelming and the ending was terrible lol. The Fall Guy was some take on a rom-com, okay-ish. Furiousa was rather ok. Deadpool pleasantly surprised me by a long shot. Very, very funny movie, pretty nice! And also The Wild Robot was a really nice movie! We now might buy the books, as apparently there are 3 of them, so that’s nice!

I did rewatch some TV series this year, which I hadn’t rewatched in a while or in some cases ever. Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and Gotham are some of those.

❓ Other topics

I want to mention the deaths and honor the memory of Iohan Guergiev and Lazar Dukic. The first one is a Bulgarian guy living in Canada and traveling with his bike from Alaska to Argentina. I loved and watched his YouTube videos, I was very sad to find out he had taken his life. We need to always remember to be kind to each other and help or ask for help when we struggle with challenges in life. Lazar Dukic was a CrossFit Games athlete who sadly passed away during event 1 during the CrossFit Games 2024. This event made me think a lot as well. It’s very sad to see a young, awesome, and smiley person gone like that. I remember watching that first event live on YouTube, literally stopping the stream to drive with my car to the gym as I had a class, and later finding out what had happened. It felt surreal. Disgusting, to be honest. I did not watch any of the rest of the events of the CrossFit Games 2024, and this comes from someone who in the past 3 years watched nearly everything there was to watch about them historically. But this kind of thing is absolutely unacceptable for events of that caliber, there has to be support, supervision, and help for these legendary athletes at all times. RIP amazing people!

(Online) dating

I’ve never really been a guy to chase “dates”. They usually came to me / happened naturally, however, when I was last single, I was in my mid-20s and quite frankly times were different too. I’m not a big fan of this online dating thing, it’s very fake and superficial and especially if you’re looking for something more than a random hook-up or someone to chat with for 2 hours, it’s really not it. Either way, I have to say, for whatever reason, I was more active with it this year, especially around the midpoint of the year, and it did lead to some interesting experiences. I’ll leave it at that.

Connecting with people

There are quite a few connections this year that truly bring a smile to my face, or like I titled the section in the beginning “fill my soul”. I don’t know what it is, it’s just funny like that how with some people you just click, it feels like you’ve been friends for 20 years, and the smiles and laughter follow soon after. I can think of quite a few such interactions with such people. Absolutely amazing. I’m not gonna list names here, but I will say that if we’re hanging out, you mean a lot to me. I’m way past the time of hanging out with people I feel indifferent about. If we’ve shared a moment, a joke and a laugh together, or talked for 6 hours straight when we met, or did handstands in the sand, or walked around Helsinki, or …, - I appreciate you!

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⬜ Goals:

📝 Continue slowly writing my book - Born in Space
🏊‍♂️ Continue training for Ironman someday
🏃‍♂️ Run half marathon
🏅 CrossFit Open: All 3 events (with better DUs)
🦺 CrossFit Murph: vest again and slightly better time
💪 Participate in a CrossFit competition if opportunity presents itself
🗣️ Connect with people: dedicate time to friends old and new
🛳️ Awesome vacation with Anton (Bulgaria, Greece, else)
🏋️‍♀️ Training camp or training vacation?
🧘 Do a bit of yoga
🧎 Try meditation
🏀 Continue Basketball, table tennis, CrossFit, Swimming with Anton
🎥 Creative skill teaching with Anton: video editing, game making, AI
🥯 Continue some of our baking attempts with Anton
😄 Smile and have fun

So, that’s the list for next year. Will it transform over time? Most certainly, and that’s the beauty of it. One final thought from me is about nostalgia. I used to say in my early 20s “to experience nostalgia of the past means only one thing - you are not creating good enough memories in the present”. And it’s true, I believe it to this day, in fact, perhaps even more so with being present becoming so MUCH MORE important looking at all the “plugged in” people in the Matrix staring at their phones all the time with headphones on. And this comes from a guy who loves technology, yet it’s undeniable the effects that these technologies have had on us socially. This year I have another interesting nostalgia-related revelation. It’s likely most of us have experienced that sometimes going back to something you did 20 years ago feels good and like something long gone had come back, and when that’s the case, it feels great. However, sometimes, when you try to force something you no longer feel it doesn’t really work, or try to go back and you get a result that you did not expect. And that’s ok, it’s ok to leave some things in the past. Not everything can be brought back, even if you had the fondest memories of it back then. It’s ok to leave it there in the past and feel no guilt, you don’t have to try to bring it back now if it no longer fits your life or who you are. You can still cherish and appreciate it, but leave it in the past where it belongs.

So with that in mind, with the thought of “how bad do you want it”, and with the desire to fill my heart and soul with experiences and meaningful connections, I raise a toast to 2025, let’s hope it’s gonna be a good one, let’s smile and have fun and enjoy the wild ride called life! Cheers!

My 2023 year in review

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

🖼️ Theme of the year and overview of 2023’s goals
🏋️‍♂️ CrossFit
👨‍👦The best father I can be
🏃‍♂️Embracing running
🥈 Helsinki Tough Viking
☀️ Finnish weather in 2023
🍸 On being sober for over a year
🇩🇪 Trip to Berlin
🇪🇸 Trip to Spain
🛳️ Cruise trip to Sweden with Anton
🥑 Health
💻 Work, professional life
💰 Finances and budget
🎞️ Movie review
📈 My success stories of the year
⬜ Goals for 2024

“The best dad I can be and double down on CrossFit skills”

The obvious reason why I enjoy doing these retrospectives is that many times when you look back, it’s a very motivating way of recognizing the progress in something. It feels great. There’s another side to it, however. Sometimes you look back and you notice how things have changed - you didn’t go for the initial plans you had, instead, you went for something else, new or old, but either way, taking priority and becoming a focus over the planned items. And that’s ok too. In the end, life is about the journey, it’s about enjoying it and making sure we live every day as we would like, as much as possible.

⬜ Major goals:

💰 Improve the monthly budget to a neutral or positive state
🏘 Move to live closer to son’s preschool and future school
⚽ Sign up Anton for football, swimming or other hobby again
📚 Become full stack - create 6 new projects
🕺 Join a Latin / hip hop dance class
🗣 Create/join communities - people to hang out with similar interests, language, hobbies, w/e
🌵 Embrace discomfort head on
🇪🇸 Travel to Spain
🇪🇺 Travel to a random EU country (Adventure 1)
🚙 Rent an RV (Adventure 2)
🛳️ Go on a longer boat cruise (Adventure 3)

After taking a look at the major goals for 2023, set in 2022, let’s expand a little bit. Unfortunately, the monthly budget has not been improved to be at least a neutral state. There have been several bigger “home upgrade” types of improvements, and the trips to Germany, Spain, and Sweden, definitely impacted the budget as well. I can’t say that I overspent on something I didn’t need, for the most part, spending on some travel and experiences is always worth it. There are certainly some items I could have done without, like some massages here and there, but they were helpful for training recovery. The biggest “win” however, was the apartment move in February 2023, when I started paying 1000e rent instead of 1400e, so that’s great.

This also brings us to the 2nd point in the list - moving to live closer to Anton’s school. This worked out really well and coupled with the fact that for the first time in many years, we got warm weather from early April, it enabled many football, basketball, and just in general hanging out on the sports premises of the school after school with Anton. Very fun, and very nice! Anton has been also signed up to a hobby where they tried different types of ball games, and also to an ice hockey hobby, so those went well too and he’s having fun with them, which is amazing!

Becoming “full stack” and making 6 new projects, it’s a nice thought, but there never was time for this. At one point I even recall making this calendar view, where I plotted all the hours I’m doing something, just to give myself clarity, and it becomes immediately obvious that it’s very challenging, to say the least, to “create time” for something bigger like that:

And I know the image is “washed out” and whatever, but anyway, the point is that when you plot in a weekly calendar the time spent sleeping, working, crossfitting (including extra minutes after class to work on skills and commute times), then a few raid nights per week with the boys and finally an hour or so of watching YouTube videos and relaxing before bed, there’s really not much left. And that example is on a week Anton is with his mom, things are quite different when he’s home with me. What a long way to finding an excuse for yourself for not doing some of the extra things! Nah, that comes from me - someone who deeply believes that if you really wanted to do something, you would do it. Anyway, there was just no way to prioritize and spend time with those potential full-stack hobby projects.

As far as joining more communities and people with similar interests, and also perhaps a Latin dance class - I still find that interesting, I’d still want to do it, and if I see the right opportunity I might, but honestly, not even as an excuse, time is a factor. There are time and logistical constraints to what is possible each week. Who knows in the future though? Cause the thing is, that kind of music does fill my heart in a very special way and makes me feel so good and alive. Why not try learning to dance and be with other like-minded people, it might work out someday.

On embracing discomfort head-on, the point was to not necessarily always try to make everything super comfortable. Many times, I’d go out of my way to preplan everything to such a degree, so there would be nearly 0 chance of any (unwanted) surprises. The problem is, this also gets rid of the nice, pleasant surprises. So this extends on the idea of being present, in the moment, living, smiling, enjoying, chatting, looking, talking. I’ve not marked this as green, cause there wasn’t some resounding success, and I am still very VERY guilty of planning and preplanning everything to a crazy extent, but I am aware, and I am definitely very consciously working on it. We’ll get there.

I did manage to travel to Spain and my 2nd wildcard adventure ended up being a trip to Berlin, actually that happened even before the Spanish trip. I’ll expand on those below in their dedicated sections. “Rent an RV” did not happen, but there’s a big chance of it happening next year because one of the things I learnt this year was how much fun was the trip with Anton on the boat cruise to Sweden! He’s such a big boy, ready for adventure and we both had so much fun, to this day he keeps saying that was the best day of his life. I’ll expand a lot more on that below too, because I have a lot of thoughts about it.

◻️ Minor goals:

🇪🇸 Sign up for a Spanish language class
🇸🇪 Sign up for a Swedish language class?
🇫🇮 Finnish citizenship?
📺 Stream once a week on Twitch
💵 Diversify income streams (platforms build up, year 2/5)
🛋 Cozy and comfy in the new apartment
🎶 Create 1 hip hop or or techno / EDM song

The main underlying “excuse” for most of the above not happening, is the same reason I described above - time and I suppose not making them a priority. The thing is, those things are hard to take presedence over something like focusing on my training or spending time with my kid in a present and active manner. They are some decent ideas in there, but yeah, this year was not the year they would happen.

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🏋️‍♂️ CrossFit! Double down on skills!

This might be one of the biggest topics of 2023 for me. Something happened and from liking and enjoying CrossFit I went full in love with it and beyond. February this year marked the 1 year of CrossFit anniversary for me. I was already plenty fired up from the previous year, some lifting numbers were progressing, and some skills were too, but a lot of skills were lacking too.

Then came the CrossFit Open. An yearly event (I had no clue about), that some folks from the gym said I should sign up for, and the idea is simple - you pay 20 bucks, and you do 3 workouts in 3 consequtive weeks, which are plenty challenging, but also not too crazy. Then you get scores and that’s getting added to your profile. Of course, the best athletes use that as qualifiers for the CrossFit Quarterfinals, then the CrossFit Semifinals, and finally the CrossFit Games.

Due to time constraints, there was no way I could do all 3 events sadly, so I missed the first one, but I did do the 2nd of the 3 CrossFit Open workouts, and boy did that excite me! We did it together with Matt, judging for each other. The workout was about doing 5 burpee pull-ups (increasing by 5 each round) and then 10 shuttle runs of about 10 meters each give or take. I did well for myself and I was happy with my result, although I’m sure I could do a lot better nowadays 😀 But that workout sparked up a fire. I’ve always been competitive but now knowing about this event, it really got me hungry for more.

Then came the 3rd event and I thought I’d love to do it, even though it would be hard to organize the time for me to do it. The only thing I was hoping for, was that there wouldn’t be any double unders, as I could do no double unders at all. Then, the event got announced and there were double unders involved 😂. So I couldn’t do it, but that then took the spark I mentioned above and turned it into a fire. I decided I really need to start working on my skills and that I’d like to compete in some (however small) form at some point.

A couple more things put extra fuel in that fire. Watching Mal O’Brien ABSOLUTELY KILL the 23.3 - the third CrossFit open event, inspired me like nothing else… It was just about that determination and the push she went through the entire thing with. There was a moment around that time when watching her do the wall walks and the strict handstand push-ups, inspired me super much, and soon I was working hard on improving those, and actually saw a TON of progress in them. There were other examples of inspiring people, many from our gym, and at that time I also started watching older versions of the CrossFit games, so definitely kept an eye on a lot of the famous athletes and got cues on how they did specific movements and so on.

The last piece of the puzzle was when I asked Charli, the owner of our gym, if it would be ok to do extra time before or after classes and he said it would be ok. So, my format, ever since about March 2023 till this day, has been “go for the CrossFit class, and whenever possible, spend 30 extra minutes after working on skills”.

And it all started with extra work on double unders, cause I was so annoyed I couldn’t do them. Not even 1 or 2 in a row. I whipped my hands quite a lot, and my legs too, but slowly and steadily I went from nothing to the first 5, which felt insane. Now I’m at a point of doing most times about 13 before tripping and have done a few times 20+ or even 30. I’m proud of it, but of course, it requires a lot more work and I’m here for it.

In fact, that’s the best part about CrossFit - all these skills you can work on and learn, it’s so much fun!.

Then came handstand walk work around April / May and beyond. Every time after class, when I could, I was practicing. And it worked out! Over months and months, I can now say that something, that was unthinkable to me earlier, I can now walk some meters on my hands. That too still needs work, to be even better and faster at it, but the progress has been huge. Those and strict handstand push-ups have been some of my biggest strengths. Additionally, I learned how to do the kipping version of HSPUs too, which was something I thought I’d never do, but hey here we are.

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Finally, in the summer I started getting some ring muscle ups and that was super exciting! I went from nothing to sometimes doing 4 in a row kipping, and many times 2s and 3s. This is something that also needs more work, but I’m happy I’m able to chug a few on a good day after class, it feels great. Just getting some reps in and working on it!

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And the latest, just as of mid-November or so - butterfly pull-ups. I got a bit afraid of this, thinking it’s gonna take quite a while to get used to it, but somehow, something clicked and I already used them for the first time in a workout, which felt amazing! Got a lot of good tips there from Ville, Elisa, and Ida, which really helped me a lot!

So while, there’s still tons to work on, more strength to be built, a lot more technique and practice, it feels kind of really nice that this year I went from not being able to do so many things, to now having every crossfit skill necessary. I’m still super excited about the work and improving, because make no mistake, I’m far from perfect, there’s a lot more to be desired, but it feels good, that I can at least do the movements!

I’ve received a lot of support from coaches in our gym, as well as other members, for all of which I’m very grateful and it has made a real difference. Ranging from Veera recommending me grips that would actually fundamentally change my muscle-up game to so many more various tips about DUs, butterfly pull-ups, ring muscle ups and handstand walks, I’m so happy with that support!

👨‍👦The best father I can be

I can easily say this is the chapter closest to my heart, this year and always. I love being a dad. Sure, sometimes it could be very challenging, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. Watching this amazing kid grow up and explore the world, from day one I realized that was a ticket to be a kid again for me too. We’ve done so many, MANY new things together this year, I am really happy about it and most importantly - Anton is too. He’s been telling me so many times, now months later, that the Silja line cruise trip to Sweden was his best day ever. Hopefully, we have many more such and even better days coming up in 2024 and beyond.

I think being present and using the time together well is one of the most important things, especially in our case where I went from spending 100% of my time with my kid to 50% of the time for the past couple of years. It’s tough and many Sundays are sad when he goes to his mom’s place. But it’s important for him to have both parents in the picture, even if in such a configuration. For my part, I try my best to spend quality time together being fully present. We’ve played games, board and computer ones, some really fun co-op games like It Takes Two, Unravel Two, Portal 1 and 2, Minecraft. We did spend a lot of time outside doing some sporty activities, climbing, playing football, playing basketball, took him to ice hockey practice for the past 3 months. We had some very special fun days together like the bring your dad to school day when I spent a whole day together with Anton in his school and that was so fun for him and for me 😀. We also had a bring your kid to work day at Elisa, so he really enjoyed that as well! We’ve had some athletic events organized by his school where he ran 40m sprint, that was amazing to watch and I’m so happy I was able to be there in person! We also had of course our Turku and Moomin town midsummer trip, our Silja line cruise trip to Sweden.

And we’ve also had many various small, little random goof arounds and learning mini projects - from growing avocados from seeds to disassembling and cleaning up and reassembling our computer keyboards, to “computer class” where I teach Anton something small about computers every day for 20 minutes. There are so many fun things, like how we read National Geographic’s Little Kid’s First Big Book of … encyclopedias as bedtime stories, and even after re-reading all 16 or so books we have quite a few times at this point, I still couldn’t make the case to read some stories or fairy tales for a bit instead 😅. I wonder if Santa’s bringing us some new interesting books and child encyclopedias to read this year?

I also bought us two Museum Cards in the summer for 130e for a whole year for both of us and we’ve been visiting various places like the Natural History Museum and Heurekka.

So all in all, I’m pretty happy with this, and let’s see what else is to come in 2024.

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🏃‍♂️Embracing running

During my first year of CrossFit I recognized getting better at running was not my priority. There was a lot to learn in CrossFit, a lot of fun to be had, and running wasn’t among the top interesting things. In 2023, a couple of things changed. First, I recognized that I should really get at least a bit more comfortable and better at running. During one of the partner competitions in our gym in November 2022, while running with a friend, I wish I was at least a bit better, to be at least not slowing us down. Additionally, in early 2023, I started thinking about someday potentially training for and doing the Iron Man triathlon challenge. I started watching a few YouTube channels that provided more specific information on running and Iron Man, the most influential to me being Natasha O’cean ‘s channel. I learned a lot and got inspired a lot from her channel. Finally, the weather was very favorable in early April, and so, running it was. Started off slow with a few shorter barely 3k runs, I think my first run was 2k in 16mins with a pace of 8:27 per km, very slow and very “easy”. There must have been some walking on that one. The 2nd run was already 2.2km in 13min 44s with a 6:15 pace a week later, then another 2.38km in 14m42s with a 6:11 pace. My last short run was a 3.17km in 18m12s with a 5:44 pace. Then I moved on to a bit slower, but lengthier runs aiming for 5-6k. I did a 5.94k in 37m30s with 6:19 pace, then:

6:09km in 38m55s with 6:23 pace on May 21
6.38km in 37m19s with 5:50 pace on June 11
5.02km in 27m8s with 5:24 pace on July 29

The good news is that I improved a lot, getting pretty comfy with running 5ks. The bad news is that as you can tell from the dates, the runs got really spread out and there wasn’t much running since. Definitely will continue working on and improving next year, the goal will be to get very comfy running 10k with a pretty decent pace.

There were a couple more noteworthy mentions when it comes down to running, first during the Murph hero WOD in May, there is 2 x 1 mile run in it, and I was pretty ok this year with that, so I’m happy for that. The other thing worth mentioning was the Helsinki Tough Viking obstacle course race I took part in September.

🥈 Helsinki Tough Viking

It was a lot of fun, and a lot of the challenges were easy to overcome when it came down to climbing onto something, ladders or using upper body strength to muscle up onto a platform, carrying logs, metal tanks, etc. There were a couple of “climber” challenges where you had to hold onto very tiny things, those were tricky for me, and of course, the hard 80kg ball-shaped weight was tricky, if it were a sandbag with that weight, I’d have no problem. I was very concerned with the parts of the race that dip you into the cold water and definitely the ice bath dive and go under in the end. I’m very proud of myself for how I dealt with these, it was very doable, it was a bit cold, but definitely doable, and the weather was favorable with the sun shining on a decently warm day for September. The icebath, when I got to it, together with one other girl, It was nice to have that “pseudo company” for support, but basically, I decided not to think about it, so I just immediately sad on the edge, then just plunged in and dove underneath and popped on the other side and jumped out. I just remember not remembering anything from it, as it all just blacked out, it was very cold, but ok, some deep breaths and it was over, and so was the race. My time? Kinda bad - 1 hour 45 minutes. The main reason - calf cramps like no other from the 8th to the 10th km of the race. This also was the reason for my disappointment in not making that 1 very high platform in the end, cause I could just not run at my full speed and reach it. I’m surprised and happy I attempted it at all given the condition I was in. I kind of hoped the cold water would help with the cramps but it did not, very weird, because I thought I should have been ok, I had loaded up on carbs the night before and had enough electrolytes, maybe I should have had more electrolytes DURING the race, I’ll prepare for that next time, but I really wanna run this again without getting the cramps, I’m sure I could do at least 1 hour 15 minutes that way. With some luck maybe even sub 1 hour. Anyway, I’m still happy and proud of this!

☀️ Finnish weather in 2023, a rare long spring + summer

I’m really not the biggest fan of Finnish weather. Everyone who knows me knows that. And anyone who tries to convince other people that Finnish weather is nice is high on something. That’s not my subjective opinion, that’s a fact. However, this year, for the first time in the at least past 11 years since I’ve been here, spring really came early and came to stay which is even more important. We are not talking about occasionally warm days, temperatures actually got nice and warm in April and stayed that way, that was a very big deal, because it’s so rare, but also coincided with my running efforts, so it played a major role in me being inspired to run, but also having the capability to do so (and no, I don’t care you can run in all kinds of weather with the right gear, I’m not there, and I don’t care for that).

It would have been nice if summer lasted longer and the autumn would have been extra warm too, which sadly was not the case, but I’m not complaining and I’m very happy. I need a lot more April to be warm, then October. That’s most important for my sanity while living in Finland, because every year the hardest time for me is the March / April period - a time when all my friends living in warmer places start posting pictures wearing t-shirts in a sunny day with flowers and blossoming trees around them and here everything is still frozen solid, and even having temperatures sub zero and occasionally even -15 to -25 on a March day is not unheard of. It’s the sad reality of Finish weather. Unfortunately for me, at that time of the year after 6 months of cold weather and winter, I’m so worn out that I just can’t deal with it anymore! I’m beyond ready for some nice warm weather!

This is all just to provide context on why the weather being so good from early on this year was so important for me. That and the fact that we had moved apartments to live a lot closer to my son’s school, enabled some really awesome fun times! Nearly every day I’d pick him up from preschool at the time we would go to play football in the field right next to his school, or climb and do muscle ups, or do dips, or later on also play some basketball. Such a nice time and a nice feeling - me, my kid, some sporty activity, nice warm weather, so, so good!

🍸 On being sober for over a year

Quitting alcohol and admitting to myself I quit was an interesting one. Now, it’s hard to attribute this solely to 2023 itself, but let’s say the main change manifested here and the recognition of the fact that I had quit. But why? Well, this had been a long time coming…

I suppose in a way this had begun already to some degree 7-8 years ago when my kid was born, because I had hardly been “hardcore” drinking since, and going out drinking had been pretty rare. Obviously, the focus was on becoming a dad and I genuinely wanted to be home and spend time with my son, even in some work outings and other occasions. Not drinking was also supported by the fact that I live far from the city, so I have to drive and one thing that I noticed early on, was that despite I used to think you need to drink to have fun during parties, the few times I went to some not drink, if the company was right, it was still a lot of fun, so drinking was not really required.

Another thing that played a role was that I was not necessarily tempted to drink, cause I’ve had my 20s pretty wildly with many different parties and heavy drinking, so it’s not something I was gonna miss out on - I had done it for years, so settling down and calming down was actually a nice change of pace.

So for quite a while, the only “drinking” I was doing was a couple of beers on the weekend. In August 2022, however, I asked myself randomly one day at the shop, hey, what if these beers are just a product of habit, do you really want them? Do you really enjoy, enjoy them? So I ran an experiment that I didn’t buy weekly beers, and much to my surprise, I have not purchased a single beer, wine, or any other type of alcohol from the shop since August 2022. Kinda funny like that lol.

So with all of that context in mind, and understanding where I was at in the beginning of 2023, what happened then? Well, although I stopped buying alcohol at all, I didn’t consider myself as I had “quit drinking”. Going out with friends, I’d still have some drink, usually I’d enjoy a nice whisky sour or an old fashioned. But the thing is, something that happened in March 2023 led me to admit to myself that I had actually quit drinking. We had a company-organized hackathon, and we had a great time, I had a really solid team, we chatted and had fun building things, and on the first evening there were some IPA beers. I used to enjoy IPAs in the past. I wondered if I should have one, I decided you know what, let’s go for one. I had 2 sips exactly, and I put it away. I just didn’t enjoy it and I almost felt weird about it, but it was really time to admit, that I had quit. It sounded weird in my mind, but I tried not to think about it much, just let myself be and see how it goes. But, yep, I had quit drinking, apparently.

To understand additionally why this is so weird and such a big deal to me, you do have to understand that while I was never a super heavy addicted drinker, I did have my party years during which we did drink a lot and enjoyed it too. I enjoyed nice whiskeys too. I also was a passionate smoker and really loved that, but after 11 years of smoking, I quit 8 years ago when my son’s mom got pregnant. In the end, I believe in “phases in life” and that’s how I’ve experienced mine. There are different phases and times for everything. And that’s ok and provides diversity and it’s nice. Don’t overthink it 😀.

Finally, I’d lie if I said that learning about alcohol being detrimental to gains from workouts didn’t influence my decision as well. I love the progress I’ve made in CrossFit, I love that sport and all the fun things you can do, I enjoy it a lot, and yeah that’s another additional thing to help me quit. The thing is, quitting something or starting to go to the gym or starting any other type of habit - it has to come from within and with a drive. No one else can make you do it, no one else can do it for you. You just have to feel like you want to do it like you need to do it and allow yourself to go for it. Yes, external support helps a lot, but the drive must come from within. That’s at least how I feel about it.

In the end, I’m happy with this change, I enjoy it a lot, and I’m also not putting any hard restrictions on it, if I wanna have some drinks I will. But honestly, most likely I won’t in most cases 😅.

🇩🇪 Trip to Berlin, Germany and the CrossFit semifinals 2023

I’m really happy with my travels this year! I wished to go to a couple of new destinations and I did just that. The Berlin trip specifically was for an event - the European part of the CrossFit semifinals. It was such an actually awesome experience! Anyway, at that point in time (this happened in early June), I had really gotten into CrossFit with my extra practice work on skills and what not, I was watching a lot of the previous years’ worth of competitions with many various CrossFit athletes, so it was so nice to see some of them live! Like Laura Horvath, Annie Thorisdottir, Jonne Koski, and a TON of others, I’m not gonna make a whole list, I appreciate every one of them showing up and competing and inspiring us fans!

My day would start every day around 8 or so in the morning with breakfast in the hotel I was staying at, followed by a nice 30-minute walk to the competition venue. It was very chill. The day would start, and it would be exciting to watch the different events, then I would have lunch and go back to watching. The best, most special part, however, was on 2 of the 4 days I participated in the CrossFit Throwdown and it was absolutely amazing!

Not only was the throwdown actually pretty cheap to participate in, something like 12e or so, but it gave us a chance to do similar workouts (to some degree) as what had been happening on the competition floor that day! The atmosphere was awesome, the people who participated were fired up and excited, and the coaches were nice! Just so good, so fun!

On the first throwdown I had to do 3 things I had never done before, like AT ALL. Talk about taking you out of your comfort zone! The event was something like this:

1km echo bike
?? meters sled hand over hand rope pull
800m assault runner run
1km echo bike

And at that point in my CrossFit “career” I had never touched the echo bike, the assault runner, or even the sled rope pulls, to be honest. I was confident with the sled pull, they showed us the technique, and I thought, ok, I’m sure I’ll do fine with that one, nice and easy, scale accordingly and do it, no problem. Assault Runner, no idea what to expect, I know it’s demanding, but if I pace it, it’s gonna be fine, no big deal, and I’m curious to see how it is. But the big question mark and concern for me was the assault runner - mostly I was thinking to myself, how the heck do I not fall off of that thing and make myself a fool, since I have no idea how to do it, what to expect. I remember even telling the coach and asking him if there was like anything special about it, or some strategy I was unaware of, or any tips, as I hadn’t done it before. I don’t remember his exact answer, or was he telling me to potentially scale with something else, I do not recall. But, the workout started, and I moved through the paces, I think I did very decently on the echo bike both times, I did well on the sled pull I could have had a bit more weight on it, but it is what it is, it was fun anyway. Finally, the run came up, and … I did fine. The coach did give me some tips on how to lean forward etc., and I was able to do it, it felt a bit weird, given it was the first time I ever did it, especially since getting off of the thing was funky, but I did fine, I ran decently, and most importantly, I did not fall 😅 Good. I finished top 4 of people, so I’m happy I kept a decent pace of the rest, and I’m happy I had fun with it and did some entirely new things, I had never done before. So cool!

The 2nd Throwdown involved teamwork work and I partnered with this nice girl called Laura. We did pretty well overall, she was definitely fitter than me, so I did my best not to slow her down too much. That event included some amount of:

Ski erg for 1 partner and rowing for the other partner
DB snatches with 1 heavier weight and 1 lighter weight (I think it was 22.5kg and 15kg)
Alternating box jumps on a pretty high box (we were both good at this though, so that was extra nice)

That was a super fun event to do together! I also ordered a throwdown t-shirt but they never had them there to be picked up and eventually they said they would ship them to participants, but later on, we got refunded and never got those t-shirts. Oh well, what can you do 😀

I think for me watching the competition live and participating in the throwdowns was the absolute highlight of this 4-5 day trip. Specifically also trying out new things in the throwdowns!.

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But there were other noteworthy mentions, like visiting a local CrossFit box called CrossFit Werk, which was very nice! Did some bar muscle ups, double unders, and actually my rope snapped lol, some light runs, and something they called “man makers”, which was basically like a devil’s press plus a thruster all in one. Challenging and a good workout, fun! We also had a nice evening out with a buddy of mine - Matt, that was a lot of fun with plenty of interesting chatter about all sorts of life topics, very enjoyable!

🇪🇸 Trip to Spain

I enjoyed the trip to Spain, but I had very mixed feelings about it. Because it was during the summer vacation, it was of course on a week I didn’t have my son over, and before our vacation together the week after, so although the trip was enjoyable, there were a lot of thoughts in my mind going back to Anton and even thinking to myself he would have loved it there. There seemed to be a very nice entertaining program for kids in the evenings in my hotel, and I couldn’t help but wish “What if Anton was here, he would have so much fun”. For better or worse, those thoughts were pretty dominant. In the end, I’m “happy” I miss my son so much, which means we have a solid bond and we have a lot of nice fun adventures together. But it felt pretty heavy at times, pretty sad.

Otherwise, the trip was nice and smooth. I met a girl called Judie on the plane and we chatted the whole way, she was cool. I had a taxi pre-booked to my hotel, which was a pretty long trip, so I offered her if she wanted to tag along and we drop her off at the stop where she was to meet her friend, I think it worked out well for her, instead of having to figure out how to get there. At the same time, it was on the way for us, so all good and the taxi driver didn’t seem to mind. Many taxi drivers, as it turns out - zip English, like, nada. Oh well.

I enjoyed some Spanish music from the first taxi ride already. Had to shazaam some song, cause it was so good. The vibes were vibing, and the music was great, I love listening to Spanish in general, I really like the language. Probably my second favorite after English. I had to learn to say “grathias” instead of how a Mexican would say gracias for example, which I was more used to because of my time in the southwestern USA.

The hotel was nice all in all, pretty cozy, except for the night with the giant gecko incident 😀 Which was no big deal, but they moved me to another room, cause there was a gecko in mine and they couldn’t find/catch and remove it. Haha, no big deal, just a funny one though. The pool at the hotel was awesome, really nice for swimming, long laps around, lounge around in the sun getting tanned. Of course, sunscreen was a thing this time around and it was plenty warm as you can imagine of Spain at the end of July. Amazing, I loved it.

Of course, nothing beats the sea! It was so nice on the beach, I really enjoyed it. The sun, the sand, the seawater, absolutely amazing! Got an umbrella though, cause the sun was defo shining, but it was very pleasant. The funny thing was, what surprised me, was that the current of the sea was so strong in that place in Alicante. You get in, and if you just float, it always drags you down the coast pretty strongly. Interesting, hadn’t experienced such a strong current so far from all the other places I had been to. Another “funny” thing was that I lost my swimming goggles in the sea. Twice!. Ai, ai, ai. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson after the first time, but yeah, took me by surprise both times. Was just having some fun in the waves, and for a moment put my goggles up on my head - rookie mistake. Wave slammed me, goggles - gone. Same thing the next time a couple of days later, I felt so silly lol, I decided to not buy a third pair for the rest of the trip, as I indeed felt so silly. Not my strongest moment, but a little bit funny in hindsight 😅

I enjoyed a ton of ice creams from the many Eladeria’s around town, I enjoyed the nice hot weather, damn, I love hot weather. Swimming, chilling and relaxing. I also dropped into a local CrossFit box, as it started becoming customary now during my travels and I love this new tradition. This time, I went to the CrossFit Playa San Juan, chatted with someone on WhatsApp, went there, and got received very warmly, specifically Ophelia who welcomed me was an absolute legend! What a fun and amazingly friendly person, we clicked from the first few seconds. Another instructor was leading the class in Spanish, and it was so much fun! It was a tough one - 3 x 800m runs outside in the heat of the evening sun around 7 pm and in between 24kg KB American swings and some bear walks. It was a good workout and I’m happy I challenged myself with the Rx weight and it went well, but maaan, am I not used to running in heat nowadays since I live in Finland? It was so different! Reminded me of my childhood spent in the summers on the basketball court in the heat, so in a way, it felt awesome, familiar, and tough at the same time. Either way, very happy I did it and I’m definitely planning on dropping into local CrossFit boxes anywhere I go, it’s such a fun thing to do and get a mini glimpse of how the community is at that specific place.

🛳️ Cruise trip to Sweden with Anton

Having done a few trips together at this point, when it came time for our cruise trip to Sweden, I was very curious how that would work out and had heard mixed reviews of that specific boat trip to Sweden. I was super pleasantly surprised at how it worked out for us and what we made of the trip. There were a lot of activities for children to do and almost immediately after boarding we started exploring and noticed that there was a scavenger hunt quiz of sorts. The goal was to find specific hidden questions around the ship and to answer them. That kept us busy and exploring for a while. Our cabin was pretty nice, and we had an overview of the street inside the ship and all the different shops. We went around and got to watch the ship disembark the harbor and start our trip, we had food breaks, all in all, nice and cozy. Played some arcade games among other things, there were a couple of children’s centers where you could also play some table tennis, climb and run around, and enter a drawing competition. In the evening there was also some program for kids and Anton became quickly a big fan of Harry the Seal 😀.

After a good night’s sleep, we were in Sweden in the morning. Of course, in hindsight, maybe it would have been better to spend more time there, but maybe next time we go for a longer trip. Even as is, Sweden was pretty nice. Somehow in my head, I didn’t expect much of it, but the parts we went to actually surprised me positively. The areas around Gamla Stan particularly. We walked a bunch and explored, took pictures, had some food, bought some souvenirs, and fed some pigeons chocolate balls 😅. It was kind of funny to not have a clue what things cost because of their currency and to pay “blindly” with the card. However, most things were actually a bit cheaper than in Finland.

Eventually, we had to go back to the ship and so we did and had another fun night full of activities, good food, and relaxation.

🥑 Health

Health is something very important to me and I suppose to all of us. For the most part, I feel fortunate and am grateful for how things have been this year. No major issues. Also with CrossFit no major injuries, as far as I’m aware. I’ve had a couple of pretty “interesting” strong muscle spasms/cramps/soreness, whatever you wanna call it, for example at the beginning of the year, after benching some 70kg and I think 80kg? felt fine while doing it but my back and chest were so soar, it was pretty crazy, like it hurt when I was breathing, was not fun at the time, but luckily passed quickly. Another couple of times with some lower back strain due to poor form on deadlift, one time on 58kg power snatch complex, and some on squat cleans. But for the most part, I’m very happy I can’t complain about any major injuries.

For the most part, things have been fine, we’ve been eating well and healthy with Anton, and frequently enjoying apples during our weeks which I’m very proud of, because a few years ago we used to buy fruit, keep them for a few days and then unfortunately throw them in the trash. So eating fruit consistently is a big win.

We’ve had to deal with the lice situation from Anton’s school and have both our hairs fixed with the solution, although I think neither of us had them, but just in case, when they had the outbreak in school.

Then in October Anton was a bit sick, we had to go check it out at the doctor, and it did turn out to be streptococcus, so antibiotics for 10 days was not the most fun experience, but we made it work and that was soon over. I also got sick a bit this time around, which again, for the most part, is pretty rare for me nowadays which I’m very thankful for.

💻 Work, professional life

Working has been going well, this being my 2nd year at Elisa, a lot of things have happened this year. Many projects were tackled, worked with many people from many different teams, and all in all I’m pretty happy to be working at Elisa. There are a lot of things that “click well”, one good example is the culture of always learning and wanting to improve ways of working. That’s a big topic and it resonates with me a lot.

One of the most interesting things was the Elisa Camp Hack in March, where we teamed up with a few people and had a 2-day hackathon exploring various topics and coming up with solutions, leading up to presenting the solution and at the end it even made it to end customers. I’m very proud of that one, as I had a lot to do with the architecture of the solution and the actual implementation. It was a pleasure to work on it with our team and we had a fun time working together and chatting about the project among other things. I’m definitely looking forward to having more, similar events in our company in the future.

One “fun little thing” I did was in March I started using and learning VIM keybindings in my VS Code editor. Instead of always wanting to learn and never learning, I decided I’d just learn it. It’s been many months of learning and using those and it’s been pretty fun, actually quite powerful what you can do with VIM keybindings once you get used to them. This also ended up as one of those things where when you put a little bit of effort every day, the end result amazes you a few months down the road.

We’ve had new team members join the team which is always great, and some unfortunately leave. I also went to a couple of HelsinkiJS events, it’s nice to see those reboot, unfortunately, quite a few ended up on weeks I could not attend, but the ones I was able to - I went to and enjoyed a lot being again in my favorite community, listening and syncing with other folks from other companies. It’s always a good time.

💰 Finances and budget

I’ve been using my budget tracking app since the beginning of the year. I loved writing this app quickly, and it’s actually been working very well. It’s simple and allows me to quickly add expenses and quickly see at a glance how things are looking for each separate month.

I would definitely like my finances to be in a better state, but it could be worse and I’m not complaining. For not holding back on things I need or want to get, I’ve been going on a negative budget per month for quite some time now.

One thing that helped things a bit positively was the change of apartments in February. By moving to my current place rent went down by €440 give or take, which is pretty huge. Of course, I ended up driving a lot more, but in the end, it still made sense and this had been mostly a big quality of life improvement that led to so many positive changes in time spent with my son, specifically playing outside after school.

I did decide to ramp up the student loan payments and finished that one off finally in September, so that’s nice, as the interest rate for whatever reason changed from a negligible 1% or less to actually quite a few more percent.

All in all, I can’t say finances excite me, I want things to be well, so I keep an eye on things, but my priority in life is to smile and enjoy the days, not to focus on these numbers.

🎞️ Movie review

A couple of years ago I revived a tradition I had with my dad when I was very little - he took me very frequently to the movies and it was amazing! I still remember we had this one piece of paper where we were writing the name of every movie we went to. Over a few years that piece of paper was filled up to the top with the names of all sorts of movies, it was so nice! So starting with Dune in October 2021 I’ve been visiting the cinema every so often and I really enjoy that! Here’s my list of movies for 2023 and also as a fun mini-game I started rating the movies. It’s a simple scale from 1-10.

Movie title	My rating
A man called Otto	7/10
Ant-man and the wasp: quantumania	6/10
John Wick 4	10/10
Dungeons and Dragons	10/10
Super Mario (with Anton)	7/10
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3	9/10
Fast X	2/10
The little mermaid	7/10
The Flash	7/10
Indiana jones and the dial of destiny	3/10
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One	10/10
Elemental (with Anton)	8/10
Oppenheimer	8/10
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (with Anton)	7/10
Gran Turismo	7/10
Expendables 4	4/10
The creator	3/10
Killers of the Flower Moon	9/10
The Marvels	6/10
The Hunger Games: The ballad of the songbirds and snakes	8/10
Napoleon	6/10
Wonka (with Anton)	8/10

I should mention I’m a sucker for a good story and I’ve mentioned in various places before I do want to write a book and tell an amazing story someday as well, and have made some steps towards that dream, but more on this some other time.

As far as the above-rated movies go, even if most times I’m mostly optimistic and very forgiving when it comes down to crafting good movies, some of the very poorly rated ones really abused how many cliches they can fit in and delivered a very predictable and mediocre story at best. On the other hand, though, most movies were fairly decent and there were some outstanding ones too! From the 3 movies I gave a 10/10 rating, I’d have to pick Mission Impossible as my favorite movie this year, as it was really good, and despite that, you might expect a lot of cliches in it as well, it was done very tastefully and delivered a great story. John Wick 4 in comparison, although I’m a big Keanu fan, was also an amazing movie, but delivered exactly what you would expect it to with tons of action scenes. Nothing wrong with that approach, but I’d have loved a couple more story arcs intertwined making it even more interesting. Still, a great movie nonetheless.

And while talking about good stories, two games to be highlighted for this year that I played and enjoyed the story of immensely: The Mass Effect trilogy - while it is an older game, I haven’t played it so far, and absolutely loved playing thru the 3 games. Awesome story! Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty was the perfect excuse to go back to the Cyberpunk universe again and play through the whole game plus the expansion pack. I went for a very different playthrough this time and it was once again a very enjoyable and immersive experience and a great story.

📈 My success stories of the year

So in conclusion, what are my main success stories of this year? Enjoying life as much as possible and spending it and connecting with people you love and enjoy being around. A huge portion of that time spending goes to my son Anton! Loved all of our adventures together this year!

Moving to the new apartment and closer to his school gave us the freedom to be a bit more relaxed and shift focus on spending more time outside on the playing fields nearby.

I really fell in love with CrossFit this year! I learned so many new skills and improved a lot! I always have an awesome time at the gym, I love the community and the people who train there, going through the workouts together is very motivating and inspirational. So many things excite and impress me from how I went from not being able to string 2 double under together and then managing 15s, to doing 8 unbroken bar muscle ups in workouts in multiple rounds, to doing some decent handstand walking, to doing 3-4 ring muscle ups. I love that hobby and I hope and plan to carry on going and having fun with it!

The trips I went on this year worked out well for the most part and were fun experiences. Looking forward to more of that in the future. I’m proud I signed up for and finished the Helsinki Tough Viking event, I wanna do it again and faster without cramps, I’m proud I started long distance running training and wanna do more and am hopeful I can complete an Ironman in the near future.

I’m really happy with all the cool human beings I met this year!

2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣4️⃣

Ok, so going into 2024 then, what’s next? Honestly, the more time I do these, and perhaps I’ve changed a bit in my perception of life and the world in the past few years, but the less I care about the specific goal lists, and the more I care about the good times, doing what you enjoy and having fun with it all. That being said, still, nice to set some goals, because it’s always fun and motivating to look back and see what you thought was the most important stuff. With some things that have come along my way and gotten on my list of “potentially wanna do this” I sometimes can’t help but wonder if it’s really something I want or if it’s just some form of FOMO (fear of missing out). For example, since the beginning of the year, I’ve low-key decided I wanted to complete an Ironman triathlon by the time I’m 40. But is it something I really want, or did I just get hyped up cause I saw some videos about it on YouTube? I don’t know, I think I really want it, and quite frankly, I could always be someone who hasn’t done an Ironman, but why not be someone who has done an Ironman instead?

⬜ Major goals:

🏊‍♂️ Train for Ironman 2025
🏋️‍♂️ CrossFit: 10 unbroken RMU, more Olympic weightlifting focus, HS walk fast and easy
🏅 CrossFit Open: All 3 events
🏃‍♂️ Running: 10ks, Half Marathons
💪 CrossFit: participate in at least one competition event in Finland or abroad
🪜 Obstacle course racing: Tough Viking or otherwise, participate in at least one event
🗣️ Connect with people: dedicate time to friends old and new
🛳️ Longer trip 1 with Anton
🚙 Longer trip 2 with Anton
📝 Resume writing my book - Born in Space
🧘‍♂️ Practice meditation for 1 month
🇨🇾 Cyprus solo trip
🇧🇬 Bulgaria solo trip

◻️ Minor goals:

🍽️ Learn more about nutrition, track macros, and see where I’m at
🏫 20 year highschool reunion
🎥 Creative skill teaching with Anton: 3D modeling, video editing, game making
🏀 Play basketball with Anton at the local school
🖼️ Go to more museums with Anton
🎮 Participate in Ludum Dare game jam and make a small game with Anton
😄 Smile and have fun

One theme there wasn’t really a dedicated chapter on above is people and relationships. And although I like being as transparent as I possibly can be in these posts, it feels a bit awkward to write about other people. To name them one by one and risk missing someone out. I will only say, that without these people many of the other things would hold no meaning. I love being a part of every community I’m a part of and I’m really grateful to be able to share stories, chat and laugh with those people. All of you! Thank you, I appreciate you a lot!

All in all, if there’s one word to describe how I feel about this past year, it’s the word FUN. There are always some ups and downs in life, but overall, I’d like to finish this with this thought:

Focus on myself, focus on my son, be present, be there really in the moment, smile and joke, so that if I was to go tomorrow, I’d go being happy of how things have been.

Enjoy this beautiful adventure called life and remember to be kind to yourself! To an amazing 2024!

Road to Ironman 2025

Sun, 21 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

For the past a little over 1 year I’ve been very much in love with CrossFit. And I’m not planning on changing that - strength, conditioning and gymnastics as nicely coupled together by the CrossFit way of training are still my primary focus and something I enjoy a lot. However, I did recently decide I’d like to give Ironman a shot and complete one before I hit 40 in November 2025.

📚 Story and why

I mean you could always be someone who didn’t complete an Ironman challenge, but why not be someone who did complete it?

All silliness and cockiness aside (although that’s very much how I feel about this), I think it’s an interesting challenge to strive to accomplish, there’s a lot of health benefits to be had, a lot to learn, and frankly I wouldn’t be the first one to do it. But I want to try and I want to enjoy my journey!

So here goes nothing!

🏋️‍♂️‍ Preparation

Coming soon…

🏃‍♂️ Running

1️⃣ April & May 2023

These are my first few runs as I started in April 2023.

...

🏊‍♂️ Swimming

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🚵‍♂️ Cycling

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My 2022 year in review

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

“The year of G”

A friend of mine called this year “The Year of G” and I like it. It fits very well for what this year has been about, so I’m gonna use that as the main title for this post. I frequently admit how much I enjoy these retrospective look backs, because it’s just so easy to forget so many little details that drastically change the big picture combined together. Even now, thinking back and reflecting on the past 12 months, I thought I remembered most details, but just looking through some pictures from about a year ago made me realise a whole eternity of time has passed and so many things have changed for the better.

It will never seize to amaze me how much you can do, slow and steady, over a period of time, if you just keep going, one step at a time, just be consistent and keep going. And if there would be one take away from this post, I’d like that to be it:

Whatever you want to accomplish, just start today and do many tiny steps every day, you will be amazed by your progress when you look back at it a year from now.

If I close my eyes and think about this past year these are the words that pop up in my head to describe different parts of it:

CrossFit, Athletic Greens, good food, airfryer, master’s degree, school, new job, Elisa, back to the office, end of the pandemic, war, new apartment, amazing summer, footbal with my son, swimming with my son, tent on the balcony, eating well, better nutrition, protein intake, working out, running, crossfit competition, meeting people, dates, after work, London trip, Bulgaria trip, best party night of my life, beach party, relaxing, enjoying cocktails, going out with old friends in Helsinki, fun times, social life, being present, smiling more, my old social self, quality time with my son, getting used to week on week off schedule, having the corona, ginger, lemon, honey, garlic, graduating, therapy, travelling, online friends, gaming, ice cream at the harbor, jungle juice smoothie in redi, cinema and movies, meeting old friends from F-Secure, going to events, company party

Before I dive into the goals set from the past year, I’d also like to take a moment and just think - from the top of my head - what are the things I feel have changed the most?

CrossFit and healthy lifestyle, consistent work outs and good nutrition
Better cooking, less food thrown away, eating more fruits, cooking more diverse and fresh meals
Realised I had lost myself and going back to my more social, more happy and adventureous self
Doing my Master’s degree

I’m gonna go in depth on some of these topics, but first let’s take a look at the goal list set from last year.

⬜ Major goals:

💹 Have a net positive situation with Anton and a minimum negative impact from family events on him.
🎾 Sport hobby with Anton (tennis).
🏋️‍♂️ Do crossfit and lose the gut.
📝 Finish my Master’s degree.
🛂 Get Finnish citizenship.
🤝 Meet genuine and emotionally mature people <3.
👨‍💻 Professional development focus.
😊 Personal development focus.
💶 Diversify income streams.
🎥 Back to YouTube.

◻️ Minor goals:

🕺 Have fun ;)

Looks good overall, and I’m happy I achieved nearly all of the goals I set for myself.

Given our big life changing situation a huge focus was set on quality time with my son and just in general making sure he has an amazing environment to thrive in and lacks nothing. I’ve put A LOT of effort into this and I think it had gone well. From simple day to day things, to cooking even more and more diverse meals, having great nutrition, going to the movies together and for ice cream in the summer, signing him up for his football practice and going there together both in the spring and in the autumn, taking time to play lotto, memory, various made up games, Minecraft, Raymond, read 14 kids encyclopedia books as bed time stories cause he wanted 😂, birthday party with an awesome cake, and so much more. I love spending time with Anton and while it is sad that I am only able to do that 50% of the time, we make it count!

Sport hobby with son was a success as already mentioned. It was nice to see how in the beginning running for too long was a bit tricky, but he got used to it overtime, and he had a lot of fun with that practice, which was the best. CrossFit has been absolutely fundamentally life changing for me, I’ll go in more detail on this, but yes, this had been a success from the set goals. I did finish my Master’s degree. In fact, somewhat quick, but in the end things really worked out pretty well for me to wrap up the studies and credits needed and finalize the thesis in order to graduate within just 1 school year. Finnish citizenship is one of those things that I don’t really have the presure or need to get, it’s more a matter of integration, but it’s definitely not out of passion and as such I didn’t make progress towards it this year. We’ll see if I will try next year or “when the time comes”. I don’t take it as a fail, more like, something I didn’t see value in focusing on at this point in time, and other things taking precedence and higher priority for my time.

Meeting cool people, both old friends and new acquaintances has definitely been a lot of fun and can be deemed a success. There has been so many situations this past year from the most random places to places of common interest and I’ve met a lot of people passionate about life and what they do, which is in and of itself inspiring. The professional development focus has been marked as a success too, there’s a lot that goes into that, but simply put - the job change, the going back to closer to the web projects (from the previous world of desktop apps with Electron for a couple of years), the re-igniting of my dev passion and desire to learn more and do more fullstack stuff, this is a journey that started this year, but is only beginning. And the personal development focus has a similar main theme - a lot has been done, a lot more is to come. I’m most happy for taking the time and having the balls to do some actual therapy, which lasted about 6-7 months and was very beneficial to dig deep, figure out stuff, learn more about myself and take it from there. There are many more small things that are hard to describe but make up the big picture - things that play a role in how I think, see the world and interact with it, some of those topics will be discussed in depth below. Besides that, I’m very happy to have gone to my previously outgoing, social self, someone I used to be, but had forgotten and was neglected for waaay too many years for no good reason.

Diversifying income streams is one of those goals that I can a “5 year goal”. I didn’t expect to do much about it this year, but rather start realising how it would be accomplished. There are still a few different ways or potential things in how to do it, but no, that has seen no major focus this year, since other items were priotitized over it. Back to YouTube as a topic also has not seen a lot of success, but there are things around just getting back into posting to TikTok about adventures and other things of interest that had been done. YouTube, especially as my FPVtips channel (which just crossed over 1000 subscribers, to whom I’d like to thank a lot), I don’t think I’m coming back to that. I tried going out and flying once in the summer, but yea I don’t think I’d be getting back into it at this point in time.

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🏋️‍♂️ CrossFit? Lifestyle change!

I first ever heard of CrossFit from a friend at work when I was working at F-Secure - Christian. That was quite a few years ago and sounded somewhat interesting and for a while I was curious but never really went for it. Somehow, casually chatting on a cold December day at the end of 2021, CrossFit came into the conversation again as I was considering some sports hobbies to do and Christian recommended that gym - North Engine CrossFit. They were supposed to have a foundations class starting in January, so the timing was perfect and I wanted to sign up. Only problem was, the country got locked down for a month again then… The last COVID lockdown at the time, at least it was just for a month. Finally, in early February I was able to do the course. best 250e I had ever spent, which included a month of subscription to the gym and so I started going whenever I could. At the time, our schedule with Anton wasn’t even week on / week off (that came in May), so it was tricky and I had to do all sorts of classes whenever I managed to find time and fit it into the schedule somehow. But I was having fun, I was determined and I wanted to improve. The atmosphere, the instructors, the people in the gym were awesome. I got my 3rd COVID shot in February too and after that last lockdown, even though some places like shops you would still wear a mask, the gym felt extra good and like “back to previous life” in a way, cause there was just you and your gym equipment and no masks. Just people working on themselves to improve on what they had previously done. Amazing! And I should definitely mention that classes were in English and that’s a BIIIIIIG plus and a huge reason as to why I’m there, driving 40 mins each way and still thinking it’s worth it.

There’s certainly a cost to it, both in terms of time investment and financial investment. Getting some equipment, paying 120e per month, gas to the place and about another 40e in parking fees alone, but I’d not change it for the world. Honestly I love that place, and I hope I only feel the same way for many years to come. The time investment can be very tricky at times. Nowadays when we do week on / week off, at least when I’m free I’m going 4-5 times a week and I love it. Then if possible try squeezing in 1-2 classes on the other weeks. Logistics. Back to the story. It’s been fun to see some of my bigger improvements - from being able to only do 2-3 good pulls ups early on to doing 6-8-10 on most days nowadays in a row. From not knowing the technique and not having strong enough arms to do rope climbs, to doing 3 in a row without issues, nice and fast. From not having a single muscle up to being able to actually do some nowadays. Squatting my first 100kg. From that third day from the foundation class when I literally fell after my left calf cramped while trying to put my shoe on while leaving 😂. It’s been a long trip, I’ve come a long way, but it’s only just the beginning really, A LOT more to go, a lot more to do. It’s nice we just had in the beginning of November a competition at the gym where we finished 5th in the RX track with a buddy. I thought we’d do worse, but happy we did how we did. Running is a bit of a limiting factor for me at the moment but I can improve (and already have a lot). Just the mere fact that I ran 2.5km during the first part of that competition, I deem that a success on its own. I’m also happy my rope climbing skills came into use during that competition, including being able to give advise and explain the technique to my team mate. Did well with box jumps too, but the 45kg weight on the other hand was way too much for me for 5 rounds of 12 deadlift, 9 cleans, 6 push press for time. Was good fun, can’t wait for the next competition.

I could probably go on and on about CrossFit, but the key points really are that it was a fundamental life changing shift. It lead to me taking in more protein, trying to eat even better, reducing sugar and sugary drinks (not that I was having a lot of those anyway), and even to literally quitting beer in August. I’ve not bought beer at home since then. Up till that point I was sometimes having a beer or two on a weekend. Now, I just drink when going out with friends and even then sometimes. It feels good. Feels natural and not forced and I love it. All in all, it’s a great hobby to have, it’s fun to do, the gamified elements of it make it interesting, the music adds to the fun, the targets and improvements, the fun workout warm ups and so on. And I feel about this the exact same way I felt about smoking after quitting it - in hindsight it just feels like such a no brainer, like why hadn’t I done it even earlier, so if you’re on the fence of starting a sports hobby of any sort - go for it and have fun with it, if you do, you will most likely stick with it and feel great while doing something nice for yourself. Also unironically, no offense to any therapist out there, but sport is the best therapy and the best thing to clear your mind for a while and reset. Highly recommended!

❓ Finding myself / I had no idea I had lost myself…

This may sound a bit as a cliche but it’s exactly what happened this past year. I think sometimes we can be stuck in a way and not even realise we are stuck. I’ll try to illustrate with one example from nearly 10 years ago. When we first moved to Finland in 2012, I was 27 at the time, and applied, got accepted and started studying in university for my bachelor’s degree in information technology. Funnily enough, having just come here, not realising how important life-long learning is to people here and what big part of life it is, I felt “old for it” initially. Like, “what the fuck am I doing, I’m 28 years old, why am I bothering to study at this age” old. I quickly realised this is nonsense and my mentality and approach rapidly changed, but it is a fact, that before I knew better, before I knew there was another way, because of growing up in Bulgaria and with that mentality initially, where people do 1 degree straight after highschool and then never study for the rest of their lives, it made sense I believed what I believed, which again, is not necessarily true.

Sometimes we don’t even realise there’s another way.

Two other, slightly different, examples are with when I quit smoking and when I started working out (CrossFit). Both of these were mind blowing moments, where months and years later, looking back you’re wondering: “Wow, why was I not always doing that? Why did I ever smoke? Why had I not been working out this entire time?“. And they feel like there’s no really good answer to it.

This whole finding myself bit is a bit abstract and made itself present in so many different ways, but the main, key part was really the realisation, that I had neglected myself, the things I loved for a very, very long time.

Now don’t get me wrong, that’s not to say there was some realisation that I had been unhappy or whatever, or to complain about past choices, I’m still aware of what and why I chose what I chose, especially in terms of family life and the past relationship, but the fact of the matter is that by prioritizing always first and foremost thinking of other people - my ex spouse, and by prioritizing always on being a dad, again, something I’m not sorry for, there should have been time to focus also on the things I loved. To a certain degree there was a bit of that in the sense of this blog, FPV drones, YouTube channel, things I did before the pandemic hit.

But this year, this manifested in a lot of other, tiny, subtle ways across many aspects of life - from how I carried myself, to confidence, chatting with friends, the way I smiled, joked, flirted, the events I went to, the groups of people I got involved with and so on.

😌 Be present!

I could probably write an entire post on this topic alone, but it was one of the main ones for me. Being present sounds really simple but it can be very tricky in many ways. Many people have issues with staring at their phones all the time. Nowadays it seems there’s another trend in not being present - AirPods in your ears. Everyone wears them, keeps walking, no one stops or cares, watches or listens. I’m not gonna single handedly change society, but I definitely appreciate people who recognise that and are not a part of the sheeple. Don’t get me wrong, I too walk with my AirPods many times, but there are times you turn em off, put them away, etc. Same and even more so for the phones. For me personally, this is nothing new, I’ve noticed this a long time ago and in situations where it made sense I didn’t bury myself in my phone - in events where I socialized and chatted with people. This is one of those things I already did pretty well, but I still wanted to prioritize this this year and make sure, I’m always present. This also manifests in other ways, not only in not staring at your phone. For example in the conversations you have with strangers - how relaxed you are, how much in the moment and chatting about then and there, rather than other random bullshit.

🤯 Getting out of your head

Which leads us also to this - getting our of your head. This I could write a lot about too, but in a nutshell, it’s about recognising when we are spiraling out of control overthinking specific aspects. There are a lot of things to this - from the realisation that in the end, we have no control over life, life will keep happening anyway and regardless our choices, being present, and so on tie together. I’ve not gone into some weird “anarchistic dystopian life doesn’t matter” logic. I still think about my actions and choices and I still think they matter quite a lot, but just in general, teaching yourself (especially if you’re a natural overthinker such as myself) how to take it more easy, how to think a bit less to reduce stress, how to go with the flow, reduce expectations, follow the adventure and see what happens next. All of that actually, trully pays off.

🤔 Therapy

I did do about 6 months of weekly therapy sessions with a professional shrink. I like to think it was beneficial. For the most part, it was a way to share and dig deeper into things and just learn more about myself with various exercises we did. It’s hard to put it in a few words, and while I do believe it was beneficial, I can easily say that other things did way more for me and changed my interpretation of life and things a lot more (for example CrossFit). Therapy, I really mostly did to a huge degree for the experience of it and to see what it’s like and how it would go. I’d still recommend it if you can afford it, but I also wouldn’t sweat it if you can’t do it.

☯️ Duality & Balance

A big topic this year was also duality and balance. Duality was felt most prominently when after May 2022 we changed the schedule with Anton to be 1 week on and 1 week off. Up to that point we were still changing up every few days. I was a bit worried about this one, but it seemed to have worked pretty well. I don’t enjoy not being able to see him a whole week at a time, but I keep reminding myself that he needs his mom too of course. It is a bit sad at times for sure for me, but as said, he seems to be doing well, so you try to learn to go with it. That duality was most pronounced in exactly this weekly split where 1 week you are a proud parent and that feels familiar, you know what to do, what chores to handle, what things to do together, the cooking, the family time and so on. Then you have the complete opposite, the single, childless week where you can do anything else. I’ve learnt to appreciate both, especially thanks to CrossFit, I do 4-6 work outs on the “free” weeks, cause anyway I can’t do as much on the weeks when Anton is at home. I believe that this split also creates some weird form of a positive balance and diversity, while also maintaining the solid bi-weekly schedule. I don’t know, maybe it’s a placebo, but it seems to work and you get used to it after a while.

📈 My success stories

I think it’s important to recognise and remind yourself of the things you do well and are happy with how you handle them. This should provide a positive feedback and reinforce your life choices and decisions. Here are some of the things I think I do well:

Trying my best to be the best dad possible to Anton, working out and generally being very good at maintaining positive habbits, nearly quitting drinking completely (and might literally do so in the very near future), not relapsing back into smoking, being content, juggling work, parenthood and personal life, actually starting to eat a lot of fruit regularly this year, cutting out a lot of sugars from my diet this year, higher protein intake and overall better macros, focusing more on what I WANT, having fun times out and partying, completing my Master’s degree.

I’m good at not staring at my phone much and especially in social situations. I don’t drink soda or have cravings for it, I nearly quit drinking beer since August. House maintenance - stocking up on food, detergents, things have specific places, shopping lists are easy and clear to do. I’ve been ordering no food take out since August, and we’ve gone to no Burger King or McDonalds since.

🏰 London baby!

I loved that whole thing - from casually talking about it and it being a vague idea, to actually making it happen. It was nice to see many of the peeps we’ve been playing with online and chat and party together. I honestly had a blast!

Of course it was great to travel and visit London for the first time, I am a fan, definitely enjoyed that, especially at that time just the feeling of being somewhere where English is the main language, not having to constantly think and decypher stuff. It’s just such a nice feeling. And despite this being just a 4 day trip, I’m definitely “hungry for more” and want to include more trips next year, destinations to be decided.

🌊 Bulgaria trip

Going into the Bulgarian trip with little to no expectations, catching up with an old friend and literally ending up in quite literally the best party of my life on the first night there, wow…

Then and there I knew that would be very hard to top and who knows when it actually would be topped. I can say now, in the end of the year, after having been at the Helsinki Friends party at the 8 Bit Brewing in Espoo, with that lovely bunch of people I met there, that was fun too, but still didn’t top the Bulgarian summer party.

It’s simple - so many things clicked perfectly together. I was in my homeland, I was at the beautiful sea, at the beach, the weather was awesome, the vibe was there, the people were friendly and fun, one of my oldest and best friends was there, we had some casual drinks to begin with, there was a bonfire on the beach, the music was this perfect mix between 90s, hip hop, 2000s, r&b, new music - spanish and afrika songs, just freaking awesome.

Had plenty of drinks, relaxed, danced and enjoyed the vibe throughout the whole night on another level.

It was so nice to swim in the sea 💙 too once again. And of course once we got to Plovdiv, spent there a number of days, catching up with more friends and just chilling, or in Bulgarian “ailyak” 😁.

🥑 Health

So after 2 years of not getting the good ol’ Covid-19, I finally got it when I left the UK. Started sneezing in the plane on the way home to Helsinki, and sure enough, testing for it after I got home it was positive for the first time. I did have the 3 vaccination shots and my covid was rediculously easy. Literally a bit of muscle craps for 2 days, and I was mostly all fine and dandy soon enough after. It did take almost 10 days to get a negative test, and I did loose my smell sense. I noticed cause when I would open the dishwater tablets bag, which normally smell pretty strongly, I smelled nothing. At some point after, the smell sense came back. All in all, pretty easy on me, and I’m very happy for it.

What I’m not happy with is the bald spot on my head at the top so I should explore options what to do about that.

All in all, I’ve felt very healthy this year and the few times a minor cold would start creeping up on me, eating foods with garlic, onion, ginger, lemon and honey really seem to help out in those early stages, on tops of me already taking supplements like Athletic Greens (which I started in March and continue to this day).

I also lately started taking some extra magnesium every so often and a bit of extra zinc on a less regular basis.

Feeling better physically has manivested in a lot of ways, but especially two come to mind - where previously I used to start breathing a bit heavily after 2 flights of stairs, I noticed a few months into working out I was no longer doing that. Additionally, things like lower back pain etc., completely gone - for example bending over to pick up something and noticing how my body doesn’t hurt. I’ve never had a huge problem with that in the first place, but I can definitely notice the improvement. This is especially important if you work long hours at the computer. I’ve as always alternated standing and sitting, but still with working out, lower back pain is out of the window.

It was also pretty remarkable to me the few times we had to run some longer distances at the gym as a park of a workout, for example 3 x 800m in between other exercises or during the competition in November the 2.5km run. That alone would have been unthinkable previously, but I’m happy I managed and I did so at a decent pace.

Might sound a bit like a cliche but it’s true - I’ve never felt better physically in my entire life.

🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏼 People

I’m happy to have met and connected with the following people this year (listed randomly, in no particular order): Era, Mitko, Kalina, Stenli, July, Random people at the Bulgarian beach party, CrossFit gym people, Charli, Milan, Matt, Mari, Mari the designer from work, Eelis, Roope, Olli, Hannu, Jouni, JP, Annina, Minna, other designer folks from work, Henna, Nathan, Amalia, and other folks from Helsinki Friends, Krasi, Niina, Emily, Liam, Lyudmil, Robert, Ruth, and everyone else from the London meet up, Marine, Frida, Christian. As always this is not about quantity, but quality and it has been awesome to share moments and stories with many of you. Makes me trully happy!

🐉 Adventures and random stuff

Having to do random unplanned and planned stuff is definitely fun and worth mentioning. Some of those that I loved doing this year include:

Signing up Anton for his first sports practice - starting football in April - June. That was a lot of fun, and we did a 2nd round of it in August - September. It was amazing to see him have fun, but also to see him make so much progress - from being able to run less in the beginning to being able to run a lot more and more comfortably later on. Absolutely amazing!

I’m not gonna list all the stuff we’ve done, but we’ve tried many things from hanging out on the sunny balcony and painting, to “camping” there, to being out in the snow, being out in the sun, going to the local park and playing, going out to swimming pools in the summer and winter, his swimming classes this autumn, reading tons of encyclopedias, going to play table tennis together, playing some games together like Minecraft and Heroes of Might and Magic 3, watching football matches together.

Deciding to buy a ticket and randomly go to Helsinki Synthcity and to the Helsinki Friends Christmas party was absolutely the right call and a lot of fun and very worth it. Same with the London and Bulgaria trip. And same with meeting Manol and Olya and playing table tennis.

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So that’s all fine and dandy and I’m very grateful for this past year, but what about the future going forward?

Well, somehow, this past week I’ve ended up in a situation of moving apartments again. It was something I knew I had to do at some point, but it’s funny how all of a sudden it became a thing of “ok, now we do this”. I hope it works out for the best and smoothly as it’s still a work in progress, but the underlying idea is to move closer to my son’s future school, so back to “South Hill, city of the elderly” 😂 (lil inside joke tangentially connected with my book). The other main point is to fix my monthly budget. What started as me keeping track on a monthly basis of my financials over the past year, has offered a lot of insight, and long story short, I pay waaaaay too much money for the current apartment which basically means I’m on a roughly -350e per month budget, and while I can support that for a few years, it’s very demotivating to think that just living life normally, and despite other very good efforts to not spend money on pointless stuff, you’re still on a negative monthly budget. So, now we’re moving.

Below is the list of major and minor goals for 2023

⬜ Major goals:

💰 Improve the monthly budget to a neutral or positive state
🏘 Move to live closer to son’s preschool and future school
⚽ Sign up Anton for football, swimming or other hobby again
📚 Become full stack - create 6 new projects
🕺 Join a latin / hip hop dance class
🗣 Create / join communities - people to hang out with similar interests, language, hobbies, w/e
🌵 Embrace discomfort head on
🇪🇸 Travel to Spain
🇪🇺 Travel to a random EU country (Adventure 1)
🚙 Rent an RV (Adventure 2)
🛳️ Go on a longer boat cruise (Adventure 3)

◻️ Minor goals:

🇪🇸 Sign up for a Spanish language class
🇸🇪 Sign up for a Swedish language class?
🇫🇮 Finnish citizenship?
📺 Stream once a week on Twitch
💵 Diversify income streams (platforms build up, year 2/5)
🛋 Cozy and comfy in the new apartment
🎶 Create 1 hip hop or or techno / EDM song

In closing, I’d like to make one final retrospective. Last december I was in the middle of my Master’s studies, having just barely picked a potential topic for the thesis, just moved into a new appartment, worrying how my son will trully do with the new changes to our ways of living and schedules, being single for the first time in 10 years (with all its positives and anxieties), had not done any sports in more than 10 years, had been eating ok, but not great, had a bit of a belly and “saggy boobs”. This december, I feel great, confident, I had long completed my Master’s degree, I travelled to London for the first time, had an amazing vacation in Bulgaria, spent time focusing on myself, had been working out doing CrossFit for 9 months and loving it, got involved in 2 awesome communities, met a lot of nice people, reconnected with some old friends, I have no belly and no saggy boobs, and infact I have put on quite a bit of muscle, I feel great physically, my lower back and shoulders no more randomly hurt, my legs and all my muscles are more fit than ever, I eat great - a lot of fruit, not much sugar, and overall a pretty decent died, including some additional vitamins, pre- and probiotics, I have a great time with my kid - took him to football club lessons, swimming, playing table tennis, playing games at home, playing in the snow, playing outside in the summer on the playground, at an outdoors pool, to the cinema and for icecream by the harbor.

All in all if there’s one word to describe how I feel about this past year, it’s the word FUN. There are always some ups and downs in life, but overall, I’d like to leave you with this thought:

Live your life today such, that when you take a look back a year from now, you’d be happy and proud of everything you did and not feel regret or wish you had done something else.

To an awesome 2023!

Cybersecurity in Smart Homes

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I. Introduction

The term “Smart Home” has quickly become a lot more mainstream and common over the past decade. There are many devices labeled as “smart” by simply having the capability to connect to your local WiFI network and usually provide some form of a remote control, usually via a mobile app for your phone. On the other hand, you could also have a completely autonomously ran system, where the entire home collects data from sensors, builds machine learning models to analyze and learn about the home’s usage and actively applies adjustments - for example warms up certain rooms before your arrival home, turning off lights when no people are in the room and perhaps handling even more complex scenarios. For the sake of this paper we would also consider the simpler connected devices as a smart home, because in the end, especially when it comes down to cybersecurity in smart homes, more often than not the attack vector would be a connected device.

There are a majority of open source solutions available to manage the devices in a smart home. One such example is Home Assistant[1]. It’s a piece of pretty versatile software allowing you to setup and connect devices, gather data, monitor sensors and also setup interconnections and automations between devices that would otherwise be not possible to integrate.

Finally, the rise and improvement in capabilities of personal voice activated assistants such as the Google Assistant[2], Amazon Echo (Alexa)[3], Apple’s Siri[4] and their integration into smart speaker devices has also played a significant role in the growth of the smart home sector. The simple voice activation that these devices use allows users to quickly turn on and off lights, and issue other commands in their homes.

II. What is a Smart Home?

What really is the definition of a smart home? As mentioned in the introduction, as of the early 2020’s this term’s definition can be still pretty loose. For the sake of this paper we will consider a smart home any home with more than a few smart devices. We do this mainly because the focus here is on the cybersecurity side of things, and not so much in debating whether a simple remote interface for a device makes a home smart. In the end, when it comes down to security, any device with some form of connectivity to the internet and out of the home could be a potential weak link and lead to breaches.

In their paper Stanislaw Piasecki, Lachlan Urquhart and Professor DerekMcAuley describe a smart home as “a contemporary application of ubiquitous computing that incorporates intelligence into dwellings management for comfort, healthcare, safety, security, and energy conservation”[5].

In general, my opinion is that a smart home is any home with any type of sensors or IoT devices that provide functionality and value that the homeowner appreciates. This can be subjective, but just to provide some example, it could be anything from providing advanced statistics about the home’s air quality (CO2, other harmful gases), thermostats, human presence detection via motion detection sensors, functionality and ability to toggle on and off lights and other devices via a smartphone, by asking a voice assistant such as Google Home, Alexa or Siri or by utilizing home automation based on data and event triggers.

Another slightly more complex example would be a smart home automation system such as Home Assistant which can be ran on a Raspberry Pi and is a single place for managing all your smart devices and can provide the capability to do more complex automations such as opening your blinds at sunrise and starting up your coffee machine in the morning based on custom logic and triggers.

III. Smart Home case study

In 2016 one of my hobbies was to tinker with various embedded devices, which in turn quickly led me to the world of smart home automation. Starting from smart light bulbs (Philips Hue, Ikea Tradfri, Yeelight), smart outlets, custom made sensors (temperature, humidity, motion sensors), Google Home, Alexa, and running the open source software Home Assistant to consolidate it all and create automations between devices.

Figure 1. Home Assistant’s user interface with sensors and switches.

I genuinely enjoyed some of my automations I had set up, some even more so than others, for example, I had a morning coffee automation setup that I ran for literally 1.5 years while I had the smart home setup going. It was great. The sound and the smell of the brewing coffee definitely adds to the morning wake up experience. My smart home configuration is open source and available on GitHub for inspiration and others to learn from [6]. During the time I ran my smart home setup I had no complaints and there was always room to improve, to add new devices and automations. If anything, there hardly ever was enough time to do it all because new projects and ideas kept popping up. Smart home automation projects can be for the most part still very time consuming, expensive in some cases, and not very straightforward to implement.

IV. Challenges with IoT devices

Having any smart home being pretty much set up with IoT devices, it’s important to take a look at the current IoT devices market and state. Whether we are talking about a full-fledged smart home, or just a normal everyday home, the fact of the matter is that in most homes some amount of IoT devices are present. With some 7 billion IoT products in 2018 and projected to have up to 21.5 billion products connected to the internet by 2025 [5], this is a very fast growing market and many devices are coming online every day. While some people find some of these devices useful and others do not, it is a trend, it is a reality and it’s happening as we speak.

As any emerging technology, there have been and still are some challenges with smart devices. One example to point out is with pretty much any Chinese traditional manufacturing company. For example, a company that had manufactured fridges for a long time, might not necessarily have big cybersecurity traditions when it comes down to now producing “smart” fridges that are able to get on your local network and make requests outside of it and now offer potential attackers an easy attack vector to exploit, because of overlooked security.

These issues could be “on purpose” technically speaking, because the company is trying to save on cost and using cheap and lower quality components, or it could be completely unintentional because security is not a priority for them and they do not have the necessary personnel to test the products and verify that they are secure and safe to use and comply with certain standards. In some cases, this security oversight might simply be due to the lack of experience and simply not being aware of and not considering cybersecurity scenarios. However, whatever the case, it’s a fact that this still happens with many consumer products and companies. Sometimes even bigger companies face similar challenges.

Another challenge with smart devices is the market fragmentation. Of course on one hand having competition is good, because we want companies to compete with each other which drives further innovation and ideally leads to lowering the cost of consumer products. On the other hand, a heavily fragmented smart home device market and lack of communication standards thereof leads to very poor user experience both when setting up the devices and when simply using them on a day to day basis.

Luckily, just a couple of years ago many companies that produce smart home devices formed the Matter project [7]. Matter, formerly known as Project CHIP, is focused on creating more connections between devices, simplifying development for manufacturers and increasing compatibility for consumers.

Figure 2. Project Matter’s architecture overview

Having solid communication standards that manufacturers could follow goes a long way towards ensuring interoperability as well as improving security of IoT and smart home devices. That is certainly a step in the right direction and is going to alleviate some of the problems with smart home devices. However, as of the time of writing this article, the market is still largely fragmented and many over the counter devices simply lack good user experience, have security issues, or lack options for the user to improve the security of the product themselves. One final challenge with IoT devices I’d like to mention, is really more of a challenge with some end users. Many everyday consumers don’t necessarily have deep cybersecurity training or even just technical know-how to understand certain aspects of how their new smart device functions, or why a particular functionality might be a security concern. Users often don’t even change the default passwords on their modems, let alone a new security camera they bought to monitor the baby at night. At the same time, lists of default passwords are pretty frequent and easily available on the internet and that makes a bad actor’s job quite a bit easier.

V. Smart home and IoT device attack vectors

In terms of security, some of the more common issues that we will take a look at in this paper are simply born out of poor security practices by manufacturers or end users. In many cases the security is an overlooked aspect by manufacturers or simply cut down in order to save on cost and keep device prices low. From the end users’ perspective, there’s many times negligence when it comes down to security credentials - ranging from weak or reused passwords, to just leaving the default device password as it comes from the factory without changing it. These dramatically simplify the work a bad actor needs to do in order to gain access to an IoT device. One way to categorize possible IoT attacks is described in Herman Heriadi and Geraldi Catur Pamuji’s paper “Cyber Security in IoT communication (Internet of Things) on Smart Home” [8]. In a nutshell, they specify five types of attacks:

Physical attacks. Which is basically literally destroying the hardware. For instance an outdoor mounted security camera.
Side channel attacks. This is utilizing side information to make conclusions and educated guesses about encrypted parts of the system. For instance this could be time attacks, power analysis attacks, interference analysis attacks, electromagnetic attacks, and environmental attacks.
Cryptanalysis attacks. Attacks focused on attempts to crack the encryption, figuring out the encryption key . Some examples include Ciphertext-only attack, a Known-plaintext attack, and a Man-in-the-middle attack.
Software attacks. “These are the primary source of security vulnerabilities in the system. The software attack exploits the vulnerability of implementation in the system via its own communication interface. Such attacks include exploiting buffer overflows and using program Trojan horses, worms or viruses to intentionally inject malicious code into the system.”[8]
Network attacks. Wireless communication systems are vulnerable to network attacks due to the broadcast nature of the transmission medium. There could be passive and active attacks. For example monitoring and eavesdropping, traffic analysis, and camouflage are considered passive attacks. While denial of service attacks, subversion nodes, node corruption, node capture could be considered active attacks.

Ransomware among IoT devices is something that has seen growth lately [9]. Ransomware is a kind of malware with the aim of rendering a victim’s computer unusable or inaccessible, and then asking the user to pay a ransom to revert the destructive encryption. Ransomware attack growth rate results show that the number of attacks for Cryptowall and Locky ransomware are notably increasing therefore, these ransomware families are a potential threat to IoT devices. Ransomware attacks can be pretty devastating if the user loses access to their information. As a good practice measure it is recommended to keep back ups of all of your data, and a few copies for redundancy at that. Ideally, you want to always have another copy of your data on site, as well as at least one backup copy off site. Ransomware in the case of a hacked IoT device could also mean not necessarily loss of data or access to data, but it could be a loss of control over a service or the device itself. Being prevented from being able to adjust your thermostat if the weather is too hot or too cold outside is just one example that comes to mind.

Some network attacks or software level exploits against particularly sensitive devices, such as smart home hubs that may in turn contain IP address maps, lists of all the devices on the network, mac addresses and sometimes even authentication tokens, could be quite devastating. Recommended counter actions are to always practice using long strong passwords, ideally random generated, never re-used between other services and devices. Keep all network ports closed that do not need to be open on your main gateway, use two factor authentication whenever possible, be careful what devices you allow access to your internal smart home network, and run regular checks for intruders on the network. There are many guides and open source projects to help secure your network further, as well as prevent tracking by completely blocking access to third party marketing sites. At the very least the use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) is also highly encouraged and using firewalls and similar devices to further strengthen the network’s security is also a good idea.

VI. Conclusion

In the end, everything in mind, the fact is that as far as smart homes are concerned, it is still very early days and most of the benefits are yet to be discovered and implemented. I firmly believe the smart home can deliver orders of magnitude of value the more sensors and devices are connected and only after we have real AI or Machine Learning based solutions in place, to the extent where the human has to do hardly any adjustments to the home’s systems.

In a future where a home could be largely sustainably powered by solar, wind, thermal or other renewable energy source, having a smart home making the decisions on when to turn on and off devices, how to optimize their power consumption during different hours and heavy load hours, could be not only immensely beneficial, but also sustainable and economic. This would allow us to only consume energy and water that we actually need and avoid any excess overconsumption.

I’m sure smart homes could be perhaps considered as a controversial topic by some, and perhaps some purists would never even want to set foot in one. But in the end, whatever your personal preference, there’s a lot of value to be had in smart homes (and definitely even more so when it comes to these smart buildings being a part of smart cities too). The environmental impact could be considerable based on the energy savings across millions of households, the time savings and quality of life improvements could be very significant too. The changes could have a significant impact on saving countless hours for every human, when you no longer have to put cognitive effort into thinking what you should set your thermostat to for the night, or go around the house and flip switches off to turn off all the lights before bed, just to name a couple of simple examples. With AI models monitoring and adjusting house systems, you could have fridges that maintain the perfect temperature in different compartments of the fridge, based on the type of food stored there, or even just adjusting how the temperature is maintained based on the amount of items in the fridge.

So objectively speaking there’s a lot of benefits to be had from having a smart home, but cybersecurity is and will always be a concern as long as we are talking about anything connected. Cybersecurity should never be an afterthought in this day and age and it’s important that all parties take it seriously - from the manufacturers of the devices to the end users taking them into use. I strongly believe that this will improve in time, as security measures and concerns have already improved since the dawn of the Internet to this day. More and more users become more security conscious, as we move all of our lives online we more and more realise how powerful and important our data is, and so we value and secure our connections and devices better. There’s a lot more everyday people nowadays who know what a VPN’s benefits are and actively use password managers to keep their credentials for different sites safely stored.

Cybersecurity in smart homes should and will be an increasingly important topic in the near future, especially as homes become more autonomous and capable. It is important that manufacturers now start doing due diligence and improve security implementations across the board. There have to be dedicated security tests for even the simplest of IoT devices and it should never be overlooked. And taking the time to secure our devices is an important step that will prevent a lot of damages and headaches down the road and would allow smart homes to truly deliver the value they are capable of in the long run.

References

[1] Home Assistant [Internet, cited 2021 December] Available from: https://www.home-assistant.io/

[2] Wikipedia [Internet, cited 2021 December] Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Assistant

[3] Wikipedia [Internet, cited 2021 December] Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Alexa

[4] Wikipedia [Internet, cited 2021 December] Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri

[5] Stanislaw Piasecki, Lachlan Urquhart, Professor DerekMcAuley. Defence against the dark artefacts: Smart home cybercrimes and cybersecurity standards. Computer Law & Security Review, Volume 42, September 2021, 105542

[6] GitHub [Internet, cited 2021 December] Available from: https://github.com/jumpalottahigh/YAR-Home-Assistant-Configuration

[7] Matter [Internet, cited 2021 December] Available from : https://buildwithmatter.com/

[8] Heriadi, Herman; Geraldi, Catur Pamuji. Cyber Security in IoT communication (Internet of Things) on Smart Home. IOP Conference Series. Materials Science and Engineering; Bristol Vol. 879, Iss. 1, (Jul 2020).

[9] Asma Zahra; Munam Ali Shah. IoT based ransomware growth rate evaluation and detection using command and control blacklisting Publisher: IEEE

My 2020-2021 years in review

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

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❔ But why

I guess this post has to start by addressing the elephant in the room - why did I skip writing a year in review last year at the end of 2020. There’s no super simple answer but at the same time it’s also not immensely complicated, and yes, it does have to do with the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown. Additionally, looking at my 2019 year in review, honestly, it would be pretty hard to top that. Like, you have so many special elements in that year - from a trip to my hometown of Plovdiv in Bulgaria, to a job switch and career progression, to delivering talks at events, writing my book and participating in Nanowrimo, producing a ton of content for my FPVtips YouTube channel and drone review articles for my blog, having an amazing vacation time also in Finland, after the Bulgaria trip.

Just, all of that together set the bar really high. And I’m not someone looking for an excuse or afraid of high bars, but all of this definitely made things more intimidating when it came down to writing an year in review post at the end of 2020, when we had been on lockdown since March 2020, I had barely done anything, besides work, and the whole thing was a huge mindshift if anything, because it was not only me impacted, it was everyone. So looking at the list of goals I had set for myself in 2019 for 2020 most probably failed. Let’s see.

⬜ Major goals:

🎈 Have a fun time with the family.Quality vacations whether in Finland or away.
💻 Build and work on cool projects. Learn new and get better at current software development skills.
👨‍🎓 Learn, teach and play around with new things with Anton (Legos, robots, game dev with Unity, RC boats, ??)
🎥 Release 3 videos per month for FPVTIPS on YouTube
📝 Produce at least as much content for the blog in 2020 as in 2019 (~ 33k words, ~ 17 posts ballpark)
📚 Diversify blog content further - articles on CrossFire radios and transmitters, long-range drone setups, Jumper radio, DJI digital FPV system
🌿 Health. Work out, eating better. More focus on this, please!
🚁 Fly FPV drones as much as possible 💙
🏡 Buy a house

◻️ Minor goals:

🚤 Do at least 2 fun projects - RC snow glider / RC boat / RC FPV car
🍿 Watch Avatar 2
📈 Reach 500 subscribers on the FPVTIPS YouTube channel
🤞 Watch Space X crewed launches
📼 Get better and more efficient at video production
🎤 Improve audio and video capture quality
🎮 Play some nice new games if any come out
🧪 Finish testingjavascript.com course
👨‍🏫 Finish at least 5 courses from leveluptuts.com
💻 Build our first computer with Anton

As you can tell, it’s far from optimal. Now, I’d also like to mention that 2020 was not a complete disaster either. There were parts of it that genuinely went well still, despite the failures in other areas. One positive thing that should 100% be mentioned is about my professional life and my job. When the lockdown hit on March 13th 2020, we were sent home to work 100% remotely from that Friday onwards and the next time we popped by the office briefly was perhaps in the summer one time, and probably a total of 2 or 3 times for the whole of 2020. Remote work was definitely a bit of an adjustment at first but I quickly got used to it and it really worked out well for me. I should mention that my daily commute to work was about 45-55 minutes each way, so by definition this change saved me almost 2 hours per day in commute time alone. On top of that, the first 6 months of the lockdown my son was full time at home with me, which was absolutely amazing and reminded me of the time when Sofia started going back to work in 2017 and I had 1 month at home with Anton before he started going to daycare. Was so much fun. Work wise things not only worked out well, but I was able to work efficiently (in fact I was doing too many hours at first so had to learn to tone it down and do a normal amount of hours). I was working on exciting projects and was learning a lot, mainly React, Redux, TypeScript and Electron at the time.

Most other bigger goals did not see any big improvements. And for some goals, like for example thank god I didn’t buy a house, and you’ll understand why a bit later. I have to say the thing that makes me the most sad is that I kind of dropped the ball on my growing FPVtips YouTube channel. I’m not going to excuse myself, if I wanted to I would have found a way to keep it going. Was I really a bit more busy? Yes, especially the first 6 months of lockdown as mentioned, yes I was. Could I have still made videos? Most probably yes. We were in lockdown, but I was still able to go out to a field and fly if I wanted to. However, no flying with my buddy was on the horizon for example. Again, not an excuse, but just facts. The thing about the pandemic and the lockout was that it was pretty much unprecedented, at least from the perspective of a 35 year old. So there were and are a lot of subtle things about it.

The whole first year I’d say the world was kind of adjusting. To some, it was a gift from heaven - the idea to stay at home and not go anywhere and work from there and wow, so cool. To others it was probably horrific - to stay home all the time and not be able to go out, yikes. I’d say I was perhaps more into the first camp than the second. Besides the nearly 2 hours of saved daily commute time, I was also saving up probably 400-500e per month on gas and lunches. So that got reflected in my savings too, definitely not an insignificant amount of money. Add to that the fact that I was able to be at home with my son, even if he’s playing with toys, iPad or on his computer and I’m working, but still, hanging out together, was definitely my favorite. But all in all, diversifying blog content, flying more FPV drones, focus on health and working out just did not happen. To some degree I understand why, as mentioned maybe I could have somehow made it work, but honestly, in the end, I don’t push myself too hard over it; it is what it is. Most of the goals on the minor goal list still got ticked off, since they were mostly fun little things to do here and there.

2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣1️⃣

🤷‍♂️ More of the same? Not quite

And since there was no year in review last year, then what about the goals for 2021 and what did happen in 2021? Nothing much more special or different really. Most of the stuff carried over as it had been going on from 2020. Working 100% remotely, still decently interesting stuff to work on and learn, a bit more heavy on the managerial focus - managing backlogs more, tasks, product releases, notes, communicating, all on top of the actual app development and taking and acting on feedback. This has been something that I’ve been and am thankful for and one of the things to keep me sane - my job. There have been some very difficult things to work on every so often that feel like banging your head against a wall for a while, until you eventually make it work somehow. And so many learnings of different things. Besides that, in 2021 we’ve been going between lockdown and not being in one, between going to the office once a month for lunch with colleagues and signing new work agreements - going from full remote to 1 day in the office per week. And then back into full remote, because of pandemic restrictions tightening again.

🎮 💬 Games and online communities

Besides that, I’ve been socializing in the only possible way - online - mainly by playing World of Warcraft Classic with a bunch of folks I’d be happy to call friends. Many wholesome people we’ve been playing together with since late 2019 and being a part of that community makes me so, so happy. One of the reasons why I’ve ended up logging in nearly every evening to play with those folks. To understand why this is important we would need to go back a bit, but long story short, playing games with people has been one of the ways for me to unwind and relax. After moving to Finland and starting school and work at the same time back then, however, I was only playing some MOBAs every so often, and ended up basically only playing Heroes of the Storm matches while watching YouTube educational videos and tutorials. I did that for about 3-4 years, because one of the things I wanted to accomplish at the time was to immerse myself completely in software development stuff and there was just so much to learn in the beginning and I wanted to move quickly. So even when I was “playing” games it really wasn’t the main activity. There are PROs and CONs for each one, but in the end, after constantly pushing yourself to learn more and more and become as good of a developer as you can be by constantly watching, learning, and building things, finally, it was a nice change of pace to play a few games to just relax and be immersed in the game and truly let your brain unwind. Games like The Outer Worlds and Cyberpunk 2077 definitely helped in that regard and provided a relaxing experience while enjoying the story and playthrough of the game…

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Relationships and “belonging”

I’ve never been an overly materialistic person. In fact, in the past few years I’ve been progressively getting more and more into minimalist living. Like, there’s so much garbage around us we don’t even need. Super unnecessary, leading to waste, pointless spending and clutter. Reason why I’m mentioning this is because I’ve been wondering and thinking a lot about “what does really matter then?” I think everyone has to answer that question for themselves, but for me, it’s relationships with people. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is how you live your life - what kind of relationships you form with people, how they see you, how you see yourself, how you connect, how you spend time together. It turns out this one is actually pretty big for me. I’ve also been thinking about why spamming memes in Forsen’s Twitch chat felt so much fun all these years ago. Or doing other “group” activities, being a part of a “community”, doing something together with other people. Turns out this sense of belonging somewhere, to a group, hanging out with other people, is also big for me. So it absolutely comes as no surprise why I did go back and log in to play the game, show up for weekly and seasonal events with our guild, as well as other mini communities I’ve become a part of within the game. It was the main and only way to socialize during the pandemic. Mind you, over the years, with a focus on being a parent, and just becoming more introverted by living in Finland for 10 years, I’m not the most outgoing of a person at the moment (subject to change in the near future), so it fits well, and indeed, this online socializing worked out pretty well in my opinion. It has been fun to play with these folks and I appreciate them a lot. We even had some online parties, where we literally laughed our asses off.

🏊 What to do? Can swim.

In the summer of 2021 we still could not go anywhere however, so even in vacation time, we pretty much chilled around the town where we live. It was quite a warm part of the summer and the sea water was very swimmable so we did a lot of that, including going to a new nice spot with some cool rocks and pretty chill for swimming overall. Besides that, there’s not been much more to add really. We’ve been having a lot of fun with Anton to build different things and have different adventures in Minecraft, went to some rope climbing activities (looking into signing up for Tennis practice, but more on that in a bit).

🎓 Maybe study again?

I did apply, got accepted into and started studying for my Master’s degree with Metropolia. And it has felt really nice to be back in school, albeit with these different conditions with masks and pandemic. We’ve been having 1 in-person and 1 remote day of school each week and that has worked out well in my opinion. For the most part, the school has been going along nicely and I’m confident with completing my Master’s thesis swiftly next year.

💔 It’s over now

And finally, a 10 year relationship was kissed goodbye in September of 2021. I could write tens of pages on this topic alone, but this is “year in review” and I’ll keep it short here. In the end what difference do the details make when 1 person does not want to be with the other anymore? Regardless of overthinking or over analysing, if that’s the case, you’re better off finding out about it now, rather than later, and “convincing” or fighting for something like this is pointless. If a person wants to go all the way to not being together anymore, trying to convince them otherwise is a waste of time. One of the things that helps me cope with this is the fact that I’m ok with what I’ve done for the past 10 years and if I could go back in time, I’d do it all again. I wouldn’t change anything and I’m happy for my actions. I grew a lot from a boy who used to be so much more into arguing back in the day to being the one TO ALWAYS try to calm down the setting and try to get us to talk constructively about things. However, it does take 2 to tango, and communication is a 2 way street and when that’s not on point from both parties, it just doesn’t go anywhere. And our communication wasn’t on point. I’m sure I could have learnt something more and be even better, but honestly, I’m happy with what I’ve learnt and how I’ve been communicating, and for the most part this has felt as a one sided thing where only 1 person is interested in improving and that just doesn’t work out. It still hurts to lose a person, who in the end, despite her shortcomings, was someone very, very special to me, but I am forced to move on and dwelling on past stuff is just pointless.

I had a saying / proverb I created myself in my early 20s, which actually and surprisingly, lives up pretty fine after all the years: “Feeling nostalgic about the past means you’re not creating good enough memories in the present”. And it’s true. Focus on your present moment. You have no control over the past and no control over the future, but you can decide how to spend your present, so go for it. Of course, I wanna make sure I don’t sound like some wise-ass because in the end, I’ll admit, this transition has been very hard for me. Loving someone unconditionally despite her shortcomings and having to move on is not an easy task and takes a toll on you. Back in the day, I’d just drink for 2-3 weeks and go out and move on. Now, it’s different; A number of things make this transition extra hard, from where I live, to never having been single in Finland, to having a kid together, meaning you gotta keep seeing the other parent, so this is definitely interesting and something I’ve had no experience with before. In a way regardless of moving on, we’ll also be a family for the rest of our lives, and it’s weird to think about it that way, but in the end our focus is on our kid and making sure he’s as unimpacted as possible. Time will tell how this will all work out.

So that’s the main reason why I mentioned earlier, thank god I didn’t buy a house. Would have added more crap to deal with in the aftermath of this, and trust me there’s been plenty to deal with as it is. One “funny” thing that I just can’t wrap my mind around is the amount of crap we threw away from home. I mentioned already about being more and more into minimalist living. Honestly, I can’t believe the amount of stuff I’ve thrown out from our home. Since the break up was in September, giving a notice to move out from our apartment takes 3 months, and we moved out after 2 months already, so those 2 months have been preparing the move and during weekends we would clean and package and throw away stuff. I filled up 2 huge trash containers with crap. Plastics, vases, chandeliers, kitchen stuff, never used christmas gifts, it’s honestly crazy. Even now, looking at how much stuff I took with me in this apartment, knowing how much stuff she took to hers and how much stuff we tossed in the garbage, and the 3 trips to recycle metal, wood, and other stuff too. Genuinely insane amounts of crap. Sorry for the rant, I just still don’t get it how it is possible :D

So I’m writing this now in December 2021, when we’ve been living in the new apartment for 3-4 weeks, and it’s been fine. Time to set the goals for 2022 and set sights on the future, so here we go:

⬜ Major goals:

💹 Have a net positive situation with Anton and a minimum negative impact from family events on him
🎾 Sport hobby with Anton (tennis)
🏋️‍♂️ Do crossfit and lose the gut
📝 Finish my Master’s degree
🛂 Get Finnish citizenship
🤝 Meet genuine and emotionally mature people <3
👨‍💻 Professional development focus
😊 Personal development focus
💶 Diversify income streams
🎥 Back to YouTube

◻️ Minor goals:

🕺 Have fun ;)

I’ve been already taking some solid steps towards some of those goals and many of them are actually not something you can accomplish overnight. So definitely slow and steady, baby steps, but consistency is key I guess and we can get it done. And while it’s nice to have super specific items on the list to try and check off, really in the end, things fall into about 2 main categories. One with a focus on Anton - wellbeing, education, spending time together, food, just making sure we do things right and have fun. And two - focus on myself. Improve some general level things with a deeper focus on the future, make sure I take time to relax and have fun as well, and continue learning and developing myself and hopefully, meet someone who appreciates and respects me, just as much as I do them. Here’s to an amazing 2022!

DJI digital FPV system: Review, Activation, Firmware Upgrade, Complete Setup

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been pretty curious to dip into the HD FPV world for a while now, and after thinking about it for a short while, patiently waiting for the end of the winter and then another 2 months to get past the shipping issues around the COVID-19 pandemic, I finally made it!

I got the DJI digital FPV system, and I’m so happy I did it!

In this article, I’ll walk you through everything you need to know and do to get set up and go fly the DJI digital FPV system. Let’s go!

📦 Unboxing
🥽 DJI digital FPV system setup
🚁 Flying
🔝 Upgrades
📑 Conclusion

If you prefer watching, check out the full video on the FPVtips YouTube channel:

📦 Unboxing

The unboxing experience was pretty solid, the entire DJI digital FPV system came in a big package wrapped with some heavy-duty air bubble packaging. Inside, the 3 parts of the system were each in its box. Some of the boxes were slightly beaten up but no damage to the items inside.

DJI FPV Air Unit

The smallest box is for the DJI air unit.

The air unit consists of the FPV (and recording) camera and the unit itself that deals with transmitting the video signal to the goggles, as well as being able to receiver controller signal from the DJI FPV remote controller.

Inside the box, you will also find 2 MMCX antennas and a cable for connecting the air unit to a flight controller. You plug the antennas and the flight controller cable here in the back.

You can (and should) insert an SD card here. Below the SD card slot are the status LED and the link (bind) button.

And you can update the firmware with the DJI Assistant 2 software by connecting the air unit to a computer via the USB Type C port and the provided cable (in the goggles package).

DJI FPV Goggles

In the box with the DJI FPV goggles, we discover the goggles themselves, a short user manual, and a small box with accessories.

Those include a carry pouch, 4 antennas, an XT60 to DC barrel jack power cable, a USB Type C to USB cable, and the head strap for the goggles.

Carry pouch and head strap unwrapped.

And here are the goggles upfront.

And a few more shots from different angles.

From the top, we can see the hooks where the head strap will go through, the OSD control buttons.

On the left-hand side, we can see the quick access channel adjustment buttons, as well as an LED grid that will display the current channel you’re on.

On the bottom left side, we have access to the SD card slot for recording that live 720p HD footage, as well as the USB-C port for upgrading the goggle’s firmware.

Not a whole lot going on on the right side. Just the OSD control buttons on the top.

And under that, we have the DC power jack as well as the Audio / AV IN port.

Here’s a look inside. They look like most any other goggle, the lenses come protected with a small film you should remove before using.

And if we take a look under the goggles, we see the interpupillary distance adjustment sliders.

DJI FPV Remote Controller

Finally, in the third box, we discover the DJI FPV remote controller sturdy packed inside its box with foam on the sides to keep it safe.

I’m convinced this kind of packaging works very well indeed to protect the unit from any unwanted impact.

The controller feels high quality as do all the items (and they better, at this price), but I was pleasantly surprised how comfortable the controller felt.

On the bottom, upfront we see the USB Type C port for charging and updating the firmware.

Foldable antennas on the top and a small metallic stand.

The DJI digital FPV remote controller has a total of 4 three-position switches, 2 on each side. There is also a dedicated “Record” button and a dial that is also a push-button.

On the upper right-hand side, there is a dedicated “Back” button.

Initially, I thought the controller would look and feel light and plastic, but happy to report that’s not the case. It does feel high quality and it works pretty well. I didn’t think I would be flying it more than a few times but I ended up enjoying it even though the Taranis X-Lite with a smaller form factor had been my daily driver for quite some time at this point.

🎦 Setting up the DJI digital FPV system with the Holybro Kopis2 HDV

The first time I set up the system I did it with the Holybro Kopis2 HDV quad and in general there was very little to do when it came down to connecting the DJI digital FPV system to the drone.

There are several steps to execute in terms of general setup. In some cases, the order of how you perform the steps is important too. That’s why I wanted to put together a guide that goes through everything from start to finish. Here we go.

Make sure one of the first things you do is to charge your DJI FPV Remote Controller. This is one of the most time-consuming steps as it can take anywhere up to a few hours.

To get started setting up the DJI digital FPV system you should have the following gear available:

DJI digital FPV controller

DJI air unit

DJI digital FPV goggles

DJI digital FPV goggle accessories

You will also need to have a couple of batteries to provide power to the goggles and the air unit.

4S LiPo batteries

The DJI digital FPV goggles accept voltage from 7.4-17.6 V, so a 2S to 4S battery will do. Don’t go above that though!

You are provided an XT60 to DC barrel jack cable to allow you to use one of your drone 4S battery packs. Alternatively, you could grab a Fatshark battery case for a couple of 18650 batteries. I’m just going to be using a 4S lipo battery, which allows me to keep it in my pocket and reduces the overall weight when having the goggles on.

You will also need 1 more battery and that could also be 4S to 6S as we will plug this one into the quad (if your Holybro Kopis is also the 6S version). Don’t plug in 6S batteries to equipment rated for 4S.

Let’s get started!

Charge the DJI controller and batteries for the DJI goggles and air unit

This is important because we’re going to be upgrading the firmware and you don’t wanna be doing that on anything but a fully charged battery ideally. To charge the DJI radio, just plug it in via the provided USB type C cable and wait a few hours. It will take some time, so be patient.

Charge a 4S LiPo for the goggles and another 4S or a 6S battery for the drone, depending on which version of the quad you bought.

Install goggle antennas, head strap, air unit antennas

Installing the head strap is not a requirement for the setup, but you might as well do it now since you will need it anyway eventually.

However, installing the antennas is very important. Never deal with video transmitters without having installed their antennas, as this is an easy way of frying them in some cases. Quite possibly the goggles may be totally fine even without antennas since they just receive the transmitted video signal, but why take chances. To install the antennas simply screw them in in all 4 slots.

For the air unit antennas, it’s absolutely mandatory that you install them as the chance of frying the unit if powered on without antennas is much higher!

I also plugged in the air unit cable that should connect to your flight controller. You should have one cable that came with your air unit (on the left in the picture below) and a similar cable that came with your Holybro Kopis2 HDV (on the right).

I used the Holybro provided cable as this setup is solderless since the cable is designed and intended to fit and connect perfectly the DJI air unit to the flight controller on the Holybro Kopis2. There is a port for that in the back of the flight controller.

I do recommend you power on the quad with a LiPo (NO PROPS) before you connect the air unit. That was you can test it for any potential issues and in the case that something smokes, you at least won’t smoke your DJI air unit along with it.

Download and install the DJI software

There’s no flying before we activate the DJI products. Go to DJI’s site and download the DJI Assistant 2 software for your operating system.

Activate products and update firmware

You will need to activate and update the firmware on all 3 products separately. However, this is much more straightforward than it may sound.

By now your DJI remote controller should have charged, so you can connect it to your computer and power it on by short pressing and then press and hold the power button. Startup the DJI Assistant app, create an account, or login and you should see the DJI FPV Remote Controller in Connected Devices.

Click the device to start the activation process.

Click through a few end-user agreements and your device should get successfully activated.

Next, you will probably get the firmware update prompt. Confirm you want to install the latest version to start the update. This is highly recommended as DJI has released a few quite important improvements that you definitely want to have.

The firmware update is going to go through 3 steps. Downloading…

… transmitting …

… and updating.

In my case, the entire process took about 5:30 minutes.

Unplug the radio from the computer and power it off by double press and hold the power button.

The next step is to do the same thing for the goggles. Plugin the DJI FPV goggles to the computer. Then power them on via a 2S-4S battery and the provided XT60 to DC barrel jack cable.

Once you do that, you should see them in the list of connected devices in the DJI Assistant 2 app.

The activation and the update process are the same as what we did with the remote controller. Activate the goggles and complete the firmware update. Then unplug from the computer and power them off.

Finally, do the same for the DJI air unit. The only thing to watch out for is that the air unit WILL GET VERY HOT. That’s normal, but try to keep this part as short as you can, don’t fiddle around with anything else. Plugin the air unit to the computer via its USB Type C port, power on your quad via its XT60 connector, and a LiPo (NO PROPS), go straight into the DJI Assistant 2 app, click the newly discovered connected device, activate it and update the firmware.

After the update has completed successfully, unplug from the computer, unplug the LiPo battery and let the air unit cool off a bit.

As far as I know, the air unit shouldn’t fry too easily if kept longer, but again, why risk it. This is also not to say that you should stress to be super quick about it, go at a normal pace, but don’t, I don’t know, leave it plugged in and go grab a coffee or something. Get the job done and turn it off.

Believe it or not, we are almost done!

Bind DJI goggles to air unit and bind DJI remote controller to air unit

The order here is important if you are going to use both the DJI goggles and the DJI radio with the air unit. Always bind the DJI goggles first.

Optional side tip: If this is your first time with HD FPV, and you want to save your WOW moment for when you get to the field, then keep the camera protector plastic cap on. That way the video is still going to look somewhat bad-ish through the goggles while you’re setting things up. I’m happy to have done this by chance and in my opinion, it was worth it 😅

To bind or link (as DJI calls it) the goggles with their antennas installed, power on the goggles. Then power on the air unit by providing power to the quad. The LED on the air unit should be green. Press the bind button next to the LED and above the SD card slot (you will need something thin to access the button, like tweezers). The LED should go red to indicate we are in linking mode.

Then press the bind button on the goggles (it’s right next to the power jack). You should hear a few tones and the air unit’s LED will go green to indicate a successful link.

With the goggles linked, it’s time to link the radio transmitter. Press the bind/link button on the DJI air unit to put it in linking mode. Power on the remote controller. Press at the same time and hold shortly these 3 buttons on the radio: record button on the top left, C button right next to the power button, and the dial switch at the top right.

If successful, you should hear a few tunes being played to indicate the radio was linked to the air unit. If you don’t have props on you can try to arm the drone with the SA switch. If you have any issues make sure the throttle stick is down, otherwise, it won’t let you arm.

It may be a good idea to connect the flight controller to Betaflight, go to the receiver tab, and make sure that the inputs on your sticks match what you see displayed as channel values. If you go for it, make sure you don’t spend too much time with the air unit on.

You can also change the switches and configure flight modes, but for now, I won’t bother with that as I would like to evaluate the stock configuration. By default, you can change flight modes with the SD switch. If left untouched it leaves the quad in the default acro mode, which is ideal.

Flight preparation

If you haven’t yet, now is probably the best time to put the quad back together. Mount the camera upfront in the TPU mount bracket using the provided screws.

The air unit should be fit nice and snug with the antennas guided through the back and the side TPU antenna mounts.

Do that on both sides.

And here’s how that looks from under the quad.

Put in SD cards in the DJI digital FPV goggles and the air unit. It needs to be a recent card of decent quality, so some older cards may not work. Mine are some 32GB “high speed” cheepos but haven’t betrayed me so far in a couple of years. You can and you should format the cards from within the goggle’s interface to avoid any disappointment with missing footage.

To display the OSD menu, press in the joystick on the top right-hand side of the goggles. Then navigate to Settings -> Format SD Card and format both cards. You can go back to the upper levels of the menu with the button right next to the joystick.

Besides formatting both SD cards, I recommend you do 3 changes that I didn’t do before my maiden flight.

Settings -> Camera and set the aspect ratio to 16:9. By default, it’s set to 4:3. I find 16:9 more immersive in terms of flight experience and the end footage is ready to be used without any post-processing. At 4:3 the screen feels a bit far away in the goggles and gives me a “cinema” experience. Don’t hate it, but don’t love it. Then you would need to post-produce the footage, but while in 4:3 you will get the full height of the camera sensor, you will lose resolution when you adjust the footage to 16:9 before uploading to YouTube.

Settings -> Preferences and set to high quality (instead of low latency). The latency difference is negligible between the 2 modes, and the quality improvement could be slightly more useful.

Settings -> Device -> Max Power and set to a higher value. I’m in the EU and by default, the DJI goggles come configured to 25mW and locked into that value, but there are ways to fix this. The higher the power output, the better picture, and the further away you can fly. If you are legally allowed to do so you can allow higher output power by doing the following. Create a file called naco.txt on the air unit’s SD card, open it with Notepad, and write the number 1 in it as its only content. Add the SD card to the air unit. Once powered on and the file read, the air unit and goggles will change their settings and you will have access to more channels and more power output options. Once changed, it’s ok to get rid of the naco.txt file, it’s not required to keep it on the SD card at all times.

The last thing to do before we go out flying is to put on the props. To do that correctly you need to know what’s the direction of your motors. You can arm the quad without props and touch lightly the motor on the sides with a finger or with a piece of paper to identify the rotation direction.

You want them to rotate in the direction that is shown in Betaflight on the Configuration tab. In this case, it’s the so-called “Props In” mode, because the props should move in towards the quad.

So if you put the quad in front of you facing up and away, as in the diagram, your front left motor is motor 4, front right is motor 2, back right is motor 1 and back left is motor 3.

The trick to putting on props correctly is once you know the direction (and have confirmed it), put the props on such that the pitch (slant) on the prop goes from low to high in the direction of the rotation of the motor.

It may sound like a lot and a bit convoluted, but I promise you once you’ve done it a few times it will make sense and you will probably never put props on in the wrong direction ever again.

Also, take note that you only need to know how to put on 1 prop with the correct pitch direction. If you put on prop 2 correctly, then prop 3 should be the same type and direction and props 1 and 4 should be the same to each other, but different to 2 and 3.

With those rules in mind, you can put on props all day!

Here is how my setup ended up looking. Make sure you tighten the prop nuts down nice and snug.

That’s all of it! Let’s go for a flight!

🚁 Flying

Anytime flying a new quad I highly recommend starting with a line of sight test hover before you get into full-on FPV mode.

I am so happy that I did this because I actually discovered an issue during my test hover and I fixed it quickly, where had I not, it could have resulted in some broken props at best or other broken parts at worse, and to be honest would have simply been a huge downer and disappointment, given how much I was looking forward to flying HD FPV for the first time.

So what happened? Well, I set up everything for the test hover, I armed the quad and heard a weird grinding and rattling noise. Luckily I didn’t punch it into the skies, I just took off very slowly, so after hearing the weird sound I reduced the throttle and landed right back down. On closer inspection, it turns out I didn’t completely tighten the prop nuts and there was a bunch of wiggle room between the prop nut and the base of the motor. Super rookie mistake, and I could have sworn I tightened them properly. Either way, a quick job with the prop nut tool and all of them were properly in place nice and tight.

Moral of the story is: don’t skip the line of sight test hover, no matter how advanced of a user you think you are.

This time the hover test worked fine and it was finally time for the first HD FPV experience.

If up to this point you have followed along, make sure you remove the plastic camera protector. Footage will be recorded to the SD cards by default as soon as you plug in a battery and will be saved when you unplug, so no need to do anything manually if you hadn’t changed the default settings.

Maiden flight: CNHL 4S 1300mAh battery, 25mW air unit power output, T-5143S prop (lower pitch), 4:3 aspect ratio

DISCLAIMER: Do not judge the Holybro Kopis2 HDV’s flight performance from the maiden flight! It’s a 6S quad and I did the maiden on 4S batteries while waiting for my 6S batteries to arrive because I was very excited to try out the DJI digital FPV system.

With that out of the way, the quad still flew superbly. As expected from this type of a motor and battery combo, the quad was very timid and super easy to handle, but of course, naturally, it lacked some performance which was due to the 4S batteries used.

I did 2 flights on 4S, and each time I got over 6 minutes of flight time. Admittedly I wasn’t in a rush to push it around like crazy or anything, just cruising around taking in the view and enjoying! It was a really fun experience, to be honest. I could start seeing some pixelization from the poor connection as I went towards the far end of the field and with the antennas completely hidden from sight while on 25mW. I attribute this effect to the power output. I am curious to see how it would be with higher power output, even without fixing the antennas position.

Flight #2: CNHL MiniStar 6S 1000mAh battery, 25mW air unit power output, T-5143S prop (lower pitch), 16:9 aspect ratio

In the second set of flights, I flew the Holybro Kopis2 on 6S batteries and you can tell the quad performed better, as expected. I was punching the throttle more frequently but still mostly cruising around, enjoying the experience of the DJI digital FPV system, discovering things, and getting used to the new controller. The other thing I changed at this point was the camera aspect ratio, so now I fly in 16:9 which I’m much more used to and comfortable with.

We are still evaluating the flight experience at just 25mW output power on the DJI air unit and the lower pitch props that come with the Holybro Kopis2 HDV (T-5143S). I caught a pretty dramatic looking pre-storm day, where half the sky was clear and light blue and the other half dark gray and navy blue. While I flew there were some pretty strong gusts of wind, so take note of that, but in general, the flight conditions were not very bad.

Flight times were still pretty decent at over 4:00 - 4:30 minutes. The cool thing about 6S batteries is that there’s no voltage sag even towards the end of the battery. Overall the power feels more consistent throughout the entire flight.

Flight #3: CNHL MiniStar 6S 1000mAh battery, 700mW air unit power output, T-5147 prop (higher pitch), 16:9 aspect ratio

In the third set of flight tests, I changed the power output of the DJI ait unit to 700mW. Immediately all artifacts and pixelization we had while flying on 25mW were now gone. With that drastic improvement in quality, the flight experience was even more enjoyable, and in the next couple of videos, I dared to go farther away than I had ever been before when flying my huge open field tests.

I ended up mostly cruising and taking in the view during the first of the flights and got a flight time of about 6 minutes again.

I also lowered the camera angle to about 35 or so degrees. I should report that I’ve been getting cut off footage on the air unit. The recording on the goggles is always there and in full. It could be an SD card issue (I have now tested with 2 different SD cards, but will also test with a high-quality brand new one). It could also be that I’m unplugging the quad too soon and I lose a few seconds of footage. However, in some of the flights, the footage is gone after about a minute of flying.

🔝 Upgrades

DJI digital FPV system best faceplate foam padding

The one upgrade I strongly encourage you to do is to grab this DJI goggle foam padding.

It solves the light leakage problem and makes the goggles a LOT more comfortable to wear. At the time of writing, I couldn’t find the foam with any other vendors so linking to DJI’s store. Even on their site the foam was somewhat hard to find and you might have some shipping charges, but even so, it was worth it in the end. Do check your local vendors if they carry this item, or if it’s available on Amazon.

The installation is very straight forward. First, carefully detach the stock foam padding from the goggles.

Then attach the new foam.

Antennas

I haven’t yet played around and tested different antennas, but also from what I’ve seen online, for most use cases you shouldn’t need to do this.

One particular use case where a patch direction antenna setup can help is perhaps if you are going to do some long-range exploration flights and then upgrading the antennas could make sense.

📑 Conclusion

I’ve only been flying the DJI digital FPV system for about a month at the time of writing this conclusion and here’s my current situation, experiences, and thoughts about the system.

I love the HD experience. That’s all there is to it in the simplest terms. It’s great. I’m not saying analog is dead, but I’m absolutely certain, that if (when) the technology gets to a state where analog and HD come at comparable weight and latency there will be no choice at all. Everyone will prefer HD in equal conditions, that’s really just a fact. You just really see so much more and it is even more immersive in terms of FPV experience.

I did have one major issue though that I’m currently investigating and have no answer for: I had a failsafe flying over a small island (luckily the drone did not fall in the sea 😅). You can see that at the end of this video.

You probably notice how I did a flip, them the quad goes sideways as it failsafed and then you hear how the flight controller restarted.

Quite weird and I have no idea what happened. I was a bit far away from myself and my antennas were in a way pointed more out at sea, than in the direction of the quad (so almost 90 degrees angle), which is suboptimal, but there was no indication that the link quality would be bad in the OSD. Perhaps I’m missing something but I will let you know as soon as I have figured it out.

The quad was fine from the crash, except for the MMCX connectors on the DJI air unit. I found both antennas unplugged from it. One was unplugged clean without damage, the other had ripped the innards of the MMCX connector of the DJI air unit with it. That’s suboptimal.

This damage is repairable to the best of my knowledge and I have now ordered spare antennas as well as small female MMCX connectors to replace the ones on the air unit. I am wondering if the antennas came off during the impact on the ground or before that, as if they came off mid-air, that would explain the failsafe too. I think I had them mounted very nice and sturdy though and there was no indication in the OSD that the link quality had gone bad, but who knows.

I will be experimenting with different and better mounting positions for the DJI air unit, once I’ve repaired it.

Another interesting issue I had was with missing footage on the air unit. I’m not sure of the exact reason yet, but giving the air unit itself the benefit of the doubt, it could still be a poor quality SD card (admittedly I’m not using the best, branded ones right now, and I’ll be buying a high quality, branded SD card soon and see if the issue manifests further). I haven’t had issues with those cards before and using the same cards I never had missing footage from the DJI FPV goggles. Just the air unit. Another possible reason could be if I’ve unplugged too quick the battery and that leads to missing footage? Is that a thing? Let me know in the comments if you know.

But in the end, even with those issues, I still love my DJI digital FPV system. I just genuinely enjoy the experience of flying with it. I yet also have to try out flying with my favorite controller (Taranis X-Lite), but even with the DJI FPV remote controller, it is a pretty enjoyable experience. Looking forward to ripping a lot more packs on it this summer.

Happy flying!

GEPRC Skip3 HD: Max performance HD toothpick drone

Sun, 03 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been looking forward to this review for a while. My current main search and passion is to find a performing, HD cinewhoop that flies like a toothpick. And the short of it is, that I think I found it, and that’s why I’m going to be reviewing, setting up and flying the GEPRC Skip3 HD.

As a simple micro cinewhoop, I’ve loved flying the Mobula7 HD for over a year now, and to be fair I can still recommend it today, for some use cases. What I wish it did slightly better would be to have just a tad more performance at mid throttle.

On the other hand, getting into toothpicks last year with the GEPRC Phantom and the Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle was a very fun experience. These little quads fly and handle superbly and are to date my favorite toothpicks. They are such a joy to fly but cannot record full HD videos.

So the obvious question was “can we have that performance but also enjoy a 1080p HD video recording from a split camera”. And this is the use case the Skip3 HD is trying to cover: give you full HD recording while flying like a racer.

📦 Unboxing
📝 Specifications
⚙ Setup
🚁 Flying
📑 Conclusion
🕔 Post evaluation

If you prefer watching, check out the full video review on my YouTube channel:

📦 Unboxing

Having unboxed a few other GEPRC products so far, the unboxing experience is pretty consistent and minimalistic. You get a GEPRC branded box with the items inside.

While on one hand, it’s nice to get a higher quality carry case (like you do with some drones), if the goal in GEPRC’s case is to reduce the price by simply providing a box, then I’m on board. I can also confirm that although I always expected myself to toss the box aside after the initial setup, I always ended up actually keeping it and using it to transport the quad and its spare parts by tossing the box in my backpack.

The contents of the box are wrapped in protective foam from all sides and the quad comes wrapped in plastic film too.

Here is everything you get inside: the GEPRC Skip3 HD itself, a vtx channel table, FrSky XM+ receiver instructions, GEPRC stickers, 8 3 inch bi-blade propellers and a pack of extra items.

In the additional items pack, you can find camera configuration joystick, screwdriver, hex tool, landing leg sticky foam padding, an extra battery velcro strap, spare screws, antenna tubes, and tube end tips.

Here are the props unpacked:

And of course the drone itself:

📝 Specifications

The GEPRC Skip3 HD is 120mm motor post to motor post.

The dry weight is just 69 grams.

The weight with four of the stock props is 72.3 grams.

And finally, the all-up weight with a GNB 4S 520mAh battery is 127.3 grams.

I also had a Turnigy Graphene 4S 500mAh battery lying around, which came in much heavier at 149.7 grams all up weight. I’m a much bigger fan of GNB batteries, so besides for a few test flights, I probably won’t be flying the Turnigy battery.

The quad looks gorgeous overall, but let’s talk specs.

The Skip3 HD comes with the same motors you might have seen earlier on the GEPRC CinePro 4K - GR1105 5000KV. At this KV this a quad intended to run on 4S batteries, although you could go as low as 2S. Whatever the case, however, the product page warns about not running tri-blade props, since those would draw more current and you could burn a motor. I’ll probably test that for you, so you don’t have to take the chance, but more on that in the flying section below.

The props that the GEPRC Skip3 HD comes with are 75mm bi-blade propellers that weigh just under a gram (0.9g).

The motor wires are braided which is a nice touch if you’re into that sort of thing. More importantly, they are held securely to the frame arms with a sturdy “cloth-based” sticky tape. The motors are plugged into the all-in-one (AIO) board with a connector (not directly soldered). Some people say there’s some extra performance to be had with the direct solder approach, I think that’s nearly negligible in this case and min-maxing, but if you want to squeeze every little bit of performance, you could consider direct soldering. For me, that’s an overkill at this point.

The camera is the Caddx Baby Turtle V2. This is a “split” type camera that is used for the real-time FPV feed, as well as to record onboard 1080p 60fps footage at ~ 30 Mbit bit rate. I dare add that it’s one of the best split time cameras nowadays (2019 / 2020).

It can also record at 1080p 30fps and 720p 60fps if you feel like downgrading the quality, but chances are you probably don’t need to do that.

This camera can record audio, which was ever so slightly less horrifying but even so, pretty much unusable. The motor noise is loud and high-pitched which probably won’t allow for any other sound to be picked up from the environment. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the case with all of these cameras and we yet have to see a split type camera with useful audio recording.

The output file format of the Caddx Baby Turtle V2 is MP4 and it supports class 10 SD cards with storage ranging from 8GB to 64GB. On average for a 6 minute flight the 1080p 60fps recording is about 1.36GB.

The canopy is a pretty nice, high-quality TPU print that lets you adjust the camera angle from about 28 degrees to about 45 degrees.

On the backside of the canopy, there are slots for the VTX’s dipole antenna, as well as for the receiver antennas. The VTX is power-switchable between 25/100/200mW.

A capacitor is soldered to and shrink-wrapped together with the xt30 connector. This is pretty much a standard nowadays, so nothing special about it.

A battery strap comes pre-installed under the quad, where we also have a rubber battery pad to provide additional grip and keep your battery in place when flying around or in crashes.

This is how the flight stack is set up on the inside.

At the bottom, we have a GEP-12A-F4 AIO board. As the name states, it should support continuous current up to 12A on a 2S to 4S battery. The firmware target for the flight controller is MATEKF411.

Above the flight controller board is the Caddx Baby Turtle V2 board (this is also where you would plug in your SD card). On top of that is the VTX and on top of the VTX is the receiver (in my case, the FrSky XM+).

And all of that comes currently at about ~ $170, which in my opinion is a pretty good deal for an HD toothpick drone.

⚙ Setup

To get up and running with the GEPRC Skip3 HD we wound need to bind the quad to a radio transmitter, take a look at the Betaflight config, install antenna tubes, consider battery mounting options, put on the props and get out flying.

🔗 Bind the receiver to a radio

To get the quad bound, you will have to set your radio in bind mode from the setup screen, then plug in a battery to the drone while keeping the FrSky XM+ receiver’s bind button pressed. If the binding is successful, one of the LED’s will be in solid green, while the other will be blinking in red. At this point power cycle the quad and you should be able to see only 1 solid green LED on.

If you have any issues, drop me a comment down below or on YouTube, and I’ll try to do my best to help you solve your issue.

🐝 Check the Betaflight configuration

TAKE OFF THE PROPS if you have them on for whatever reason. While working in Betaflight, we want props off at all times!

I always recommend you back up the existing Betaflight configuration before making any changes, just in case things get messy and you want to roll back. I’ll show you how to do just that, but in case you didn’t back up your config on time, here’s a copy of my GEPRC Skip3 HD stock configuration (mine came with Betaflight 3.5.7).

To produce your own backup, connect the quad to your computer via the micro USB port, start Betaflight, and go to the CLI tab. Type dump in the command box input and press enter. Then click the button to save the config dump to a file. This is a full configuration dump and could be useful to roll things back to the way they were, should you need to do so.

Next, let’s go through the way the quad is setup out of the box by the folks from GEPRC.

Ports tab

Nothing special here, but leaving this here in case you were wondering what the defaults are for this tab.

Configuration tab

On the configuration tab, we learn that the quad is set up in the more common Props in mode, which informs us how we would be putting on our propellers later. I like having MOTOR_STOP off, and I am happy to find that it’s off by default. Double-check that the receiver is set up correctly too - Serial based receiver and SBUS should be selected when dealing with the FrSky XM+ receiver. All good there.

A bit further down the page I like taking a look at the other features section to make sure AIRMODE is on. You want that on if you are planning to do any acro tricks. OSD is on too, and the Dshot Beacon Configuration is also on, which is great and allows us to use the motors to do some beeping (since this model does not have a dedicated buzzer).

PID tuning tab

These are the default PID values. I never make changes to the stock tune, because I think it’s very valuable to fly the quad on the stock config to evaluate how it performs as it comes setup straight out of the factory so to speak.

Receiver tab

The receiver tab is one of the most important ones to check. You don’t want to be attempting flying if the channel mapping between your radio transmitter and the drone are set up incorrectly.

That’s very easy to fix, but it is quite common that you would need to make some changes. I’ve noticed Emax tends to ship out their drones set up in the TAER1234 channel map, which for me is perfect and matches how my transmitter is set up. GEPRC, however, tends to send their products set up in AETR1234.

This bit is quite common to mess up with newer people to the hobby but easy to fix. Go to your radio’s setup page and take note of what the channel map setup is. Then change the value here accordingly. As mentioned, in my case, I will change this to TAER1234.

In case you are wondering, the letters T, A, E, R simply mean that Throttle is at Channel 1, Aileron at 2, Elevator at 3 and Rudder at 4.

Modes tab

The modes tab is normally fairly straight forward as well, however, this was the ** the first time I see a manufacturer opting-in to set up switch activation at the low point of the range**. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with that, but if you don’t expect it, it might throw you for a loop.

In my case I totally didn’t expect this and was wondering why even though my modes are setup correct, the quad wouldn’t arm and was buzzing immediately when plugged in.

So the only thing I changed here was to drag the range slider to the upper end for the ARM mode on AUX1 and the same for the Beeper on AUX3. That ensures that the off position for the switch is away from you and the on position is when the switch is flicked towards yourself.

OSD tab

On the OSD tab, after the first flight I changed from displaying the total battery voltage to displaying the Battery average cell voltage, which I find slightly more informative and clear for when to land and so on.

If you enable RSSI value (like I did) and don’t see it anywhere, it’s probably under one of the values at the top left or top right of the OSD, so you might have to move them around a bit.

I also added Power to see throttle stick values in real-time.

And we are done with Betaflight.

To install the antenna tubes just cut them to length and slot them in while guiding the antennas thru. Then put an antenna tube cap on top.

Because this is an HD capable quad, we need to also install an SD card, so definitely don’t forget to do that.

By default, the camera is set up such that it will record in 1080p 60fps and it will start recording as soon as you plug in the quad and it will stop the recording and save the footage when you unplug the battery. It works in a very convenient way.

If you need to adjust the recording settings, you can use the provided camera joystick to connect to the camera (there is a camera connector under the canopy).

Finally put on the props. Remember that they should be in props in mode and so the way you put on the props should match what you see in the image below.

With all of this done, we are finally ready to go fly!

🚁 Flying

Maiden flight on GNB 4S 520mAh battery (127.3g AUW) with DVR overlay and a 5 second sound sample

The maiden flight went well. I was blown away at the amount of performance this drone has. This was the first time I had to consciously put effort to keep my throttle so low. I think the majority of the flight while getting used to how the GEPRC Skip3 HD flies I had to do my best to keep the throttle at 30-35%. The reason for that is that if you go slightly above that value, the quad TAKES OFF.

This genuinely made me wonder about how it would fly on 3S or even a 2S battery. However, there is no doubt that if you need performance and fly on 4S, the Skip3 HD will deliver.

Granted I was not pushing too hard this flight but I still got over 6 minutes of flight time which is good and talks to me about efficiency. This could be extended further if you fly on an even bigger battery. I flew on a GNB 4S 520mAh battery but I can easily see how the quad can handle a 650mAh battery without sacrificing too much performance for the extra weight. Let me know if you tested that and it worked for you.

If you get the Skip3 HD, clearly you care about the HD footage. This may mean that sometime you may want to zip around racer style (which this quad can do perfectly), and maybe sometimes you wanna go smoother and slower around objects, cinewhoop style. The Skip3 HD can do both of those things nicely.

I’m not the biggest fan of bi-blade props, I think in general I prefer tri-blade props because of the easier handling and in many cases, the performance/efficiency lost when compared to bi-blade props is nearly negligible. But this is my personal preference and I know of many people who swear by and prefer bi-blade props. I don’t think there’s a right answer here, it’s more about preference and what flight scenario you are trying to accommodate.

A thing to note is that the manufacturer EXPLICITLY STATES YOU SHOULD NOT FLY TRI-BLADED PROPS, TO PREVENT YOUR MOTORS FROM BURNING. I also recommend you don’t do that, but I will be testing that for you, so you don’t have to because I’m curious if I can make it work on a 2S battery for example.

Flight test in a big open field on a windy day

One of the first things I did when testing this drone was to go to the field where I usually only fly my 5-inch drones. It’s a pretty big open field and that day was a bit windy too - with wind up to 7-8 m/s. I was curious to test this after seeing that the Skip3 HD was a performance monster and indeed it handled the wind with no issues and it flew around (dare I say it) almost like my 5-inch drones. Very interesting. Flight time was still around 5 minutes, even though I was pushing it more and it had to combat the wind actively.

Flight test on a heavier 4S battery - Turnigy 4S 500mAh (149.7g AUW)

This next test flight was on a Turnigy battery I have lying around. I’m not a fan of this battery and I do not recommend you get, because it’s 22g heavier and offers 20mAh less compared to the GNB battery. The reason why this test is interesting, however, is that even in these conditions the GEPRC Skip3 HD didn’t care for it, it carried the extra weight like a champ and delivered a flight time of over 4:30 minutes against the wind. I think that’s cool and I’m pretty sure you will get even better results on a good GNB battery.

For example, a 4S GNB 650mAh battery would be about 25g heavier than the 4S GNB 520mAh battery I was testing with but will provide 130mAh more capacity. I’m not planning on testing that scenario, however, because I’m happy with how it flies on the 520s I have.

Flight test on a 2S GNB 450mAh battery

Flying on a 2S 450mAh battery tanks the performance of the quad a bit and you might actually just like it. Immediately as soon as I took off I noticed the quad felt almost exactly as what flying my GEPRC Phantom feels like. It still performed somewhat decent, it was MUCH easier to handle and I had to maintain throttle closer to 50-60 % for a smooth flight (so higher than on 4S and much closer to what I’m used to).

I don’t recommend getting 2S batteries if you are buying now, but if you have some lying around it’s good to know that you can use them and get a decent flight experience from them.

Flight test on a 3S 300mAh battery?

I like how much raw power the quad has on 4S and I like how docile it is on 2S. Naturally, it makes me think flying it on a 3S battery might be some nice middle ground. However, I only have this 3S 300mAh battery which is of a way too small capacity for us to judge its effectiveness.

I will nevertheless fly it and take down some notes for the sake of getting a rough idea of how it performs.

And when I finally got around to testing it, there were no surprises - it flies just as fine on 3S and is somewhat easier to handle. However, I DO NOT recommend you fly as I did on just a 300mAh battery - this is way too small capacity (I only did it cause, that was the only 3S battery with an xt30 connector I had lying around). If you go 3S, make sure you get at least 500mAh capacity battery or why not even a 650mAh. The quad can carry that weight easily. Mentioning this, so you don’t get startled at the 2 min flight time on the video below, which is absolutely not representative of what this drone can do on a good battery for its capabilities.

On the other hand I caught a very sunny day on that flight and you can get a sense of how the camera performs in such conditions as well.

💀 Flight test on 2S battery with tri-blade Avan Rush 2.5” prop

I DO NOT RECOMMEND YOU DO THIS NEXT BIT! The GEPRC Skip3 HD product page explicitly states you should not try to run it on tri-blade props because this could lead to burning your motors.

However, I was curious and I did it for you, so you don’t have to wonder. Even though my first couple of test flights went well and I burned no motors (Yay 🎉!) I’d like to stress that I do NOT recommend you do this and if you do, do so at your own risk.

I decided to fly my favorite Avan Rush 2.5” tri-blade props. To begin with, I started with a 2S flight and was just cruising around at first, looking at the amps drawn. On average we were going around 4-6 amps, which is pretty decent.

💀 Flight test on 4S battery with tri-blade Avan Rush 2.5” prop

The next flight was on 4S and I have to admit I was a bit worried about how it would go. Luckily it was fine. I peaked up to 9 amps drawn on some tight corner turns and the motors were indeed just a bit warm after the flight.

We need to take into account that it was not a very warm day (maybe around 7-8 degrees celsius / 44f - 46f) and there was some cool wind. I mention this just in case it was what made the difference between cooled and burned motors.

I think going forward I’ll be flying mostly on 4S and with the tri-blade props and see how far we can get. I might add a slight throttle limit mostly to bring the normal cruising throttle values to slightly below mid stick position (35-40%), which is how I’m used to flying.

I don’t recommend you do this, but I am a big fan of the Avan Rush tri-blade props - they perform very nice, handle superbly, and are VERY quiet too. My theory is that GEPRC says you shouldn’t use 3” tri-blade props (the same size as the stock bi-blade props the drone comes with). I expect everything to be just fine and not to have any excessive amps drawn, due to the fact I’m going down to 2.5” props with the Avan Rush tri-blades. Only time will tell.

Here’s another test idea for you: fly it on 2.5” (65mm) bi-blade props and see how it does. It would make the Skip3 HD EVEN more efficient and you might end up with 7-8 minute flight times when cruising. That’s just my untested working theory. If you do test it, please let me know how it goes by dropping a comment at FPVtips on YouTube.

📑 Conclusion

I’m happy! I think I’ve finally found it - the HD toothpick I’ve been searching for.

Simply put, the GEPRC Skip3 HD marries the HD capabilities of a drone like the Mobula7 HD with the flight performance of a toothpick like the GEPRC Phantom or the Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle. But this is not just a simple combination of features and an incremental upgrade. The performance alone is a huge upgrade with support for up to 4S batteries and is probably more than what most people would ever need.

At the same time, you get nice long flight times of more than 6 minutes cruising and over 4-minute full-send zipping around.

If on top of all of this you prefer bi-blade props and the way they fly then you will love this drone. If like me you prefer tri-blade props, you could risk it, downsize to 2.5” and try the Avan Rush tri-blades. I don’t recommend you do this, because it could lead to burned motors, according to the manufacturer, but I’ll take my chances and let you know what happens in a few months. I just gotta have me some tri-blade props.

I did notice some very slight hints of jello in the HD recording when going strong against the wind, so I will be monitoring how that plays out, but in general, I’m satisfied with the quality of the HD recording.

I did have something bizarre happen twice. When I plugged in the quad but did not immediately take off for about a minute or so, after taking off I had a lot of latency in the FPV feed which I had never experienced before. Luckily after quickly landing and power cycling the quad the problem goes away. I have no idea what this is about and if you do know please drop a comment. I’m thinking it could be the VTX starting to overheat after a bit if not cooled down by the air brushing past it when the drone flies, but this is just a theory. It’s also not a consistent thing and only happened a couple of times out of about 10 or so flights.

I’m looking forward to flying this quad a ton more this spring and summer and I feel pretty happy about it because I seem to have finally found the toothpick that can record HD and also flies like a rocket.

Happy flying!

🕔 Post Evaluation

After having flown this quad for a few months I’m still pretty happy with it overall. I have no upgrade ideas, but I did want to come back and share with you about the Gemfan 3016 tri-blade props. They were recommened to me by a viewer on my YouTube channel and I have to admit they deliver.

Bare in mind, running tri-blade props would increase the risk of burning a motor, so if you decide to go for it, do it at your own risk. I want to make that clear and I do not want to endorse doing this if you’re not up for the damage you could cause to your quad.

With that out of the way, I’d say for now, I’m really, really happy how the drone flies with those props. Just going from 2.5 to 3 inch makes a big difference in terms of raw performance, but at the same time the Gemfan 3016 props handle just as easy as the Avon Rush. Big fan.

Mobula6 EmuFlight and Project Mockingbird setup guide

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

In 2020 most of our quads fly on Betaflight. That’s a fact. However, there are some other options out there (EmuFlight, Cleanflight, Butterflight to name a few).

But if you have already made up your mind, in this short guide, I want to show you how to flash EmuFlight on your Mobula6 (but you could do that to many other quads too), and how to set up the Project Mockingbird config.

In this example, I’m gonna be using my Mobula6 (Bonus points if you already followed the JESC firmware guide in my original review post).

❔ What is EmuFlight?
❔ What is Project Mockingbird?
🔽 Download EmuFlight
💽 Backup
💾 Flash the flight controller firmware
📋 Load the Project Mockingbird config
✅ Validate the configuration
🔗 Binding
🚁 Flying
📝 Conclusion

❔ What is EmuFlight?

EmuFlight is a Betaflight fork, that implements some more opinionated features and some people claim that it improves how their quads fly out of the box on stock config. I hear that even more regarding small micro drones.

I’m not gonna try to convince you to move your entire fleet to EmuFlight (and I’m definitely not going to do that myself) but I figured it might be interesting to try out and experiment with, and the Mobula6 is in many ways the perfect candidate to do that.

If you want to learn more about EmuFlight I recommend watching Joshua Bardwell’s interview with Kevin Plaizier.

❔ What is Project Mockingbird?

As far as Project Mockingbird goes, it claims to deliver the best angle mode config for your brushed whoops. Project Mockingbird can be set up with Betaflight as well (EmuFlight is not a requirement), it’s basically a bunch of configuration to make your whoops fly even more awesome.

Project Mockingbird is strictly a whoop / micro drone project. You can join the community in their Facebook group.

🔽 Download EmuFlight and config files

You can download the EmuFlight Configurator from their GitHub releases page. At the time of writing this, I used the configurator version 0.2.12-RC2.

You will also need this EmuFlight_0.2.0_CRAZYBEEF4FR.hex file and if you want the Project Mockingbird settings, this file as well EMUF_215_PMB-FF-BASE-DIFF-ALL-PUBLIC-01-09-20.

After downloading the EmuFlight Configurator for your operating system you have to install it.

💽 Back up

Before we begin, it’s always a good idea to have a back up of your working config. That way if you want to go back for whatever reason, you can do so easily.

To restore your config and firmware you need to take note of 2 pieces of information:

The firmware target
The complete config dump

I’d do that in the Betaflight Configurator (as the Mobula6 originally has the Betaflight firmware), but chances are you can probably do the backup from the EmuFlight configurator as well.

Type version in the CLI tab in Betaflight. Make a note of what the flight controller target is, so you can flash it back.

Then type dump and save the full config result to a file. Note, that when you ran the dump command if you scroll back to the top the first line informs on the firmware target as well. You now have a way of restoring your config.

💾 Flash the EmuFlight flight controller firmware

Run the configurator and plug in your flight controller via the micro USB port to your PC.

Click the Update Firmware button at the top right.

Select the correct target CRAZYBEEF4FR (that’s the flight controller of my Mobula6 - it’s a Crazybee F4 lite, the FR bit stands for the FrSky receiver version, yours could be different if you are not on the FrSky version, so make sure to double-check).

This might change in the future, but as of right now (April 2020), the version we need is 0.2.0 and it is not yet in the list, so we will have to load it manually. Hence, why we downloaded it a couple of minutes ago (if you didn’t yet, grab it here).

Next, click the Load Firmware [Local] button and select the hex file with the flight controller firmware we downloaded (EmuFlight_0.2.0_CRAZYBEEF4FR.hex).

I usually select Full chip erase when flashing fresh firmware. Click Flash Firmware.

One of two things will happen now. If you’re lucky, flashing will start immediately and you can monitor the progress in the progress bar at the bottom of the screen.

If it seems like nothing happened, take a look at the upper right corner and you should be able to observe this message:

Failed to open serial port

If that’s the case, you need to do an additional step - download and run the ImpulseRC driver fixer

This is going to take less than a minute and is going to set up the DFU drivers for you.

Attempt to start the flashing process again and it should now run smoothly. If you have any other issues, feel free to drop me an email or leave a comment below.

📋 Paste or load the Project Mockingbird diff

If you don’t care for the Project Mockingbird settings, you can skip this step.

In EmuFlight, go to the CLI tab and click the Load from file button. Select the file you downloaded earlier with the Project Mockingbird settings.

That’s mostly all there is to it.

✅ Validate and adjust the configuration

It’s is highly recommended we double check and validate the configuration before we go out flying.

These are arguably the most important things you want to double-check before flying:

Props in vs Props out

I had to toggle Motor direction is reversed because my Mobula6 is setup in props out mode. If you are following along on a Mobula6 and your setup was similar, make sure to get this one or your quad will flip out when you try to arm.

SPI Bus Receiver Provider

Scroll down and check the SPI RX settings. In my case, I had to set it to FRSKY_D since I’m running my Mobula6 on D8 on my Taranis X-Lite.

Channel map on the Receiver tab

Another adjustment required here, I’m flying most of my quads in TAER1234, so I had to change the value here to match my transmitter’s setup.

Modes tab

Check and setup some modes. The default config was acceptable in my case - ARM on AUX 1 (Channel 5), then on Channel 6 (AUX 2) it starts in acro by default, goes through horizon for the middle of the 3 position switch and angle mode at the end of the range. I was curious to go fly it so I didn’t bother doing any changes here.

Those are the main most essential things you MUST go through. Other than that, feel free to tinker and play with the settings as much as you like.

🔗 Binding

If we assume you had previously flown this quad already on the stock config, chances are you don’t have to add any switches in the MIXER screen of the radio. But if you don’t have any assigned, make sure to assign a 2 position switch to Channel 5 for arming and a 3 position switch to Channel 6 for changing flight modes.

Finally, the last thing - you most probably will have to bind the drone again to the radio (I had to at least in my case). Follow the standard procedure. For me it went like this:

Put the radio in bind mode, plug in a battery in the Mobula6, press the bind button (tiny, next to back left motor, if you look at it from the top down with the camera pointing forward away from you), LED blinks, exit transmitter binding mode, unplug drone battery, plug drone battery back in, notice solid green LED on the receiver.

🚁 Flying

Initial immediate impression: Yaw axis is super sensitive and responsive, at the same time, the pitch axis seems too slow. This seems to be on purpose, will have to see if I get used to it, but I’m not sure I want to. I like my rolls :) Need to get in more flights. There’s something nice about the tune. The flight time does not seem to suffer, need more tests.

Here’s some footage of my first few packs after I flashed the firmware (this is probably battery 2 or 3).

Indoor flights (angle mode)

After a bunch of packs: I’m not sure how this is going to come out, but I love and hate the tune at the same time. On one hand I really dislike that the yaw axis controls 90% of my turns. I’m more used to that being a combination of yaw and roll. On the other hand it kind of … works well indoor.

I’ll definitely fly a bunch more packs, but I’m kind of torn for now. Not the biggest fan of it, but I don’t completely hate it either.

I might try flashing Betaflight 4.1 to see how this compares to 3.5.7 and to EmuFlight 0.2.0.

Outdoor flights

As far as outdoor flight go, I caught a windy day with strong winds but luckily coming in gusts, so there were quiet moments in between.

The quad behaves, I flew both acro and angle mode, cause I was curious to see how it handles, but noticed nothing out of the ordinary. It still flew nicely, in acro, almost the same as before flashing EmuFlight. When you fly in acro mode the yaw axis is not as strong and it goes back to the more familiar flying experience.

No perceivable changes to flight times either.

📝 Conclusion

Take it for what it is and have fun with it. This might not be for everyone and I’m not sure it’s a matter of if this is really the one true set up. I’ve been hearing many people reporting very decent results with Betaflight 4.1 which allows filtering. At the same time, I really can’t complain about how the quad flew on 3.5.7 either. I was pretty happy with it. I mostly did this upgrade out of curiosity, to learn something new, to share it with you folks and to see if it was as good as some people claimed it to be.

If you feel like trying it out, go for it, if not, enjoy your Mobula as it is. On the other hand, you can always flash back to Betaflight and paste in the stock config. Let me know how it works out for you, come drop a comment on the FPVtips YouTube channel.

Whatever you choose, have fun and happy flying!

Holybro Kopis2 HDV with DJI digital FPV system

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve finally decided to take the plunge into digital FPV drones with the DJI Digital FPV system. I’ve been very interested for a while now and lucky to finally be able to get into it. For my first digital FPV experience, I’ve chosen to go with an already assembled quad, instead of building my own from scratch.

The main reason for that is because I’d like to focus on the experience itself and evaluate that for what it is, rather than evaluate a new custom build.

When doing so, going with a drone as tried and tested as the Holybro Kopis 2 HDV that excels in performance is a very safe bet.

I don’t want to discourage you from building one from scratch, however, in fact, I always encourage you to try and build your own, but especially if it’s your first one, I highly recommend grabbing a prebuilt drone that you can learn to fly on and enjoy, as well as learn to repair when you crash it.

If you decide to follow along and grab the same quad as I did, do note that the Holybro Kopis 2 HDV can be purchased with and without the DJI air unit. Because I grabbed a DJI bundle with the goggles, controller, and air unit already, I opted in to grab the Holybro Kopis without the air unit.

If you are in the same boat as me, I’ll include instructions on how to completely set up your quad if you need to add the DJI air unit on your own.

📦 Unboxing
📝 Specifications
🐝 Betaflight setup
🥽 DJI digital FPV system setup
🚁 Flying
🔝 Upgrades
📑 Conclusion

If you prefer watching, check out the full video playlist on the FPVtips YouTube channel:

📦 Unboxing

Coming in at about $250 without the air unit, the Holybro Kopis 2 HDV is not one of the cheapest quads out there but it does offer an unboxing experience to match the price.

Once you get past the Holybro box, you discover what looks and feels like a very high-quality carry case.

Inside the case, the Kopis 2 is sitting nice and snug, in the middle of the case, strapped in securely with a velcro strap.

The upper part of the carry case has a zippable container that hosts the following items:

2 sets of different props, a small bag with prop nuts, a few spare screws, zip ties, double-sided sticky tape, a parts list sheet, and a DJI air unit connection cable for the flight controller.

At a glance, it might look like you were given 2 sets of the same prop, but those are 2 different sets with a different pitch.

The less aggressive pitch and thinner T5143S (on the left) and the higher pitch T5147 on the right.

The carry case strap is a nice inclusion, and if you were wondering the same, the quad does fit inside the case with the props on, so this is not useless at all.

The quad looks legit like a piece of art and feels very high quality, so let’s take a closer look at the components it comes with.

📝 Specifications

So we’re still missing a camera, VTX, and a receiver (in this case the DJI digital FPV air unit), and I will update this post when the rest of the components of the build arrive, so stay tuned. But in the meantime let’s take a look at what we do have.

The frame is a stretched X from what I think is very high-quality carbon fiber with 4 separate arms, which makes replacing a broken arm easy.

The top plate of the frame has “grill” openings which I can only assume will help better cool the DJI air unit.

The quad is intended to have the battery mounted under it, as it is indicated by the thick rubber battery pad underneath the quad that would help with gripping and holding in place the battery, as well as cushion it away from the screws on the bottom plate to prevent piercing it in a crash. There’s also a nice Holybro battery velcro strap, which looks a bit short to me, but I’d be surprised if it’s not long enough to hold a 6S battery.

The motor wires are neatly and snuggly wrapped with a tape that feels like a cloth-like material, should hold up much better than some plastic tape. The motors themselves are the T-Motor F60 Pro III, in my case the KV1750 as I’m going for a 6S setup. I haven’t yet tried these motors personally but I know they are a trustworthy brand and high-quality motors. I expect them to perform accordingly.

In the back, we have an XT60 connector, as usual, the battery leads length is fine, not too short to not be able to reach top or bottom and not too long to sacrifice that extra bit of performance. There’s also a capacitor attached to the power terminals to smooth out some potential plugging in battery voltage spikes. There is also a barely visible buzzer attached to the back right arm, close to the body of the frame. Those have certainly become somewhat rarer, but are still nice to see a dedicated one on a 5-inch drone, as they are usually much louder than the sound of the motors beeping.

The soldering job on the motor wires coming to the Tekko32 40A rated 4 in 1 ESC is pristine. The Tekko32 is a tried and trusted high-quality ESC board, so no surprises there.

The ESC is connected to the flight controller via a plug on the front side of the board. The flight controller itself is the Kakute F7 HDV version. It has an SD card slot for collecting Black Box data, a barometer, a 32-bit processor, and a GH port, where you can plug in the DJI air unit for both video signal transmission, as well as radio controller transmission link.

Which also makes this build a completely solderless assembly, if this is important to you.

The flight controller can be configured in Betaflight via a micro USB port on the side. It would have been nice if the port was USB type C to conform with the DJI air unit so that you wouldn’t need 2 different cables, but that’s a minor thing and I’m sure it is going to be improved in the future.

Finally, a TPU mount for the DJI air unit antennas is added to the sides of the frame. There is a camera TPU mount in the front, and a TPU holder for the DJI air unit itself on the back standoffs, as well as 2 small strips of double-sided sticky tape under the top frame plate.

I can’t wait to get the DJI digital FPV system and continue this build. If you land here in the meantime, stay tuned or better yet, subscribe to FPVtips on YouTube for updates.

🐝 Betaflight setup

While waiting for the DJI Digital FPV system, I decided to take a look at the Betaflight configuration.

The Holybro Kopis 2 HDV comes with Betaflight version 4.1.2 which is quite up to date (at the time of this writing the latest release is version 4.1.5).

Ports tab

ESC telemetry is setup on UART7 and serial RX on UART6.

Configuration tab

The motor direction is Props in, which is the more common configuration and what I personally prefer. Good to know when putting on the props. I also like seeing MOTOR_STOP off. Accelerometer is enabled which could be handy for angle (stability) mode if that’s important to you.

In this next bit, we don’t care much how the receiver is set up as we’ll be using the air unit for that, but I do like making sure that Airmode is on. Because we have an on-board dedicated buzzer, I also like that RX_LOST and RX_SET are off since we won’t be using the motors for those sounds.

Receiver tab

I would normally change the Channel Map here from AETR1234 to TAER1234 as that’s what my Taranis X-Lite is configured to, but in this case, we don’t care and we’ll leave it to the default for now.

Modes tab

Not a lot to see on the modes tab either, it seems there is only an arming switch on Channel 5 (AUX1) and horizon mode on Channel 6 (AUX2). By default, we will be in Acro mode, so that’s all good.

I might come back here and add Turtle mode and the Buzzer on some channel.

OSD tab

Not much to say about the OSD tab for now either. I know the DJI goggles support some amount of Betaflight OSD, but we will need to come back to this later and see what we can add.

I like seeing my signal link strength and battery stats.

If you made it this far, thanks for going through this with me. Do note, this is a living document and I will be updating this article as soon as possible. I’m still hoping to get the goggles during April and worst-case scenario in May. Shipping times can be a bit flaky at the moment.

Stay safe out there and happy flying for now.

UPDATE (May 9, 2020): 🎉 It is finally here! It surely took a while, at this point almost 2 months since I ordered the DJI Digital FPV system, but it is what it is and at least I’m happy now that it is here. I will be updating this article in the coming days, so keep checking back! Thanks for your patience, I know I’m really looking forward to setting up the system and flying HD!

🎦 Setting up the DJI digital FPV system with the Holybro Kopis2 HDV

If you go for this exact drone + DJI digital FPV set up you actually have very little to do. It may seem like a lot of steps, but all of them are very easy and a matter of minutes to accomplish.

The only thing that takes time in this whole setup process is charging your DJI radio controller. I suggest you do this first, as it will take a few hours.

You can also check out the more thorough review and setup guide with a deep dive into the DJI digital FPV system. Here I’ll keep it straight to the point and as short as possible in the context of the Holybro Kopis2 HDV quad.

To proceed you should have the following gear available:

DJI digital FPV controller

DJI air unit

DJI digital FPV goggles

DJI digital FPV goggle accessories

You will also need to have a couple of batteries to provide power to the goggles and to the air unit.

4S LiPo batteries

The DJI digital FPV goggles accept voltage from 7.4-17.6 V, so a 2S to 4S battery will do. Don’t go above that though!

You are provided an XT60 to DC barrel jack cable to allow you to use one of your drone 4S battery packs. Alternatively, you could grab a Fatshark battery case for a couple of 18650 batteries. I’m going, for now, the way of the drone battery, which allows me to keep it in my pocket and reduces the overall weight when you have the goggles on.

Let’s get started!

Charge the DJI controller and batteries for the DJI goggles and air unit

This is important because we’re going to be upgrading the firmware and you don’t wanna be doing that on anything but a fully charged battery ideally. To charge the DJI radio, just plug it in via the provided USB type C cable and wait a few hours. It will take some time, so be patient.

Charge a 4S LiPo for the goggles and another 4S or a 6S battery for the drone, depending on which version of the quad you bought.

Install goggle antennas, head strap, air unit antennas

Installing the head strap is not a requirement for the setup, but you might as well do it now since you will need it anyway eventually.

However, installing the antennas is very important. Never deal with video transmitters without having installed their antennas, as this is an easy way of frying them in some cases. Quite possibly the goggles may be totally fine even without antennas, since they just receive the transmitted video signal, but why take chances. To install the antennas simply screw them in in all 4 slots.

For the air unit antennas it’s absolutely mandatory that you install them as the chance of frying the unit if powered on without antennas is much higher!

I also plugged in the air unit cable that should connect to your flight controller. You should have one cable that came with your air unit (on the left in the picture below) and a similar cable that came with your Holybro Kopis2 HDV (on the right).

I used the Holybro provided cable as this setup is solderless since the cable is designed and intended to fit and connect perfectly the DJI air unit to the flight controller on the Holybro Kopis2. There is a port for that in the back of the flight controller.

I do recommend you power on the quad with a LiPo (NO PROPS) before you connect the air unit. That was you can test it for any potential issues and in the case that something smokes, you at least won’t smoke your DJI air unit along with it.

Download and install the DJI software

There’s no flying before we activate the DJI products. Go to DJI’s site and download the DJI Assistant 2 software for your operating system.

Activate products and update firmware

You will need to activate and update the firmware on all 3 products separately. However, this is much more straightforward than it may sound.

By now your DJI remote controller should have charged, so you can connect it to your computer and power it on by short pressing and then press and hold the power button. Startup the DJI Assistant app, create an account, or login and you should see the DJI FPV Remote Controller in Connected Devices.

Click the device to start the activation process.

Click through a few end-user agreements and your device should get successfully activated.

Next, you will probably get the firmware update prompt. Confirm you want to install the latest version to start off the update. This is highly recommended as DJI has released a few quite important improvements that you definitely want to have.

The firmware update is going to go through 3 steps. Downloading…

… transmitting …

… and updating.

In my case the entire process took about 5:30 minutes.

Unplug the radio from the computer and power it off by double press and hold the power button.

The next step is to do the same thing for the goggles. Plugin the DJI FPV goggles to the computer. Then power them on via a 2S-4S battery and the provided XT60 to DC barrel jack cable.

Once you do that, you should see them in the list of connected devices in the DJI Assistant 2 app.

The activation and the update process are exactly the same as what we did with the remote controller. Activate the goggles and complete the firmware update. Then unplug from the computer and power them off.

After the update has completed successfully, unplug from the computer, unplug the LiPo battery and let the air unit cool off a bit.

As far as I know the air unit shouldn’t fry too easily if kept longer, but again, why risk it. This is also not to say that you should stress to be super quick about it, go at a normal pace, but don’t, I don’t know, leave it plugged in and go grab a coffee or something. Get the job done and turn it off.

Believe it or not, we are almost done!

Bind DJI goggles to air unit and bind DJI remote controller to air unit

The order here is important if you are going to use both the DJI goggles and the DJI radio with the air unit. Always bind the DJI goggles first.

Optional side tip: If this is your first time with HD FPV, and you want to save your WOW moment for when you get to the field, then keep the camera protector plastic cap on. That way the video is still going to look somewhat bad-ish through the goggles while you’re setting things up. I’m happy to have done this by chance and in my opinion, it was worth it 😅

Then press the bind button on the goggles (it’s right next to the power jack). You should hear a few tones and the air unit’s LED will go green to indicate a successful link.

You can also change the switches and configure flight modes, but for now I won’t bother with that as I would like to evaluate the stock configuration. By default you can change flight modes with the SD switch. If left untouched it leaves the quad in the default acro mode, which is ideal.

Flight preparation

Put in SD cards in the DJI digital FPV goggles and in the air unit. It needs to be a recent card of decent quality, so some older cards may not work. Mine are some 32GB “high speed” cheepos but haven’t betrayed me so far in a couple of years. You can and you should format the cards from within the goggle’s interface to avoid any disappointment with missing footage.

Besides formatting both SD cards, I recommend you do 3 changes that I didn’t do before my maiden flight.

Settings -> Camera and set the aspect ratio to 16:9. By default it’s set to 4:3. I find 16:9 more immersive in terms of flight experience and the end footage is ready to be used without any post-processing. At 4:3 the screen feels a bit far away in the goggles and gives me a “cinema” experience. Don’t hate it, but don’t love it. Then you would need to post-produce the footage, but while in 4:3 you will get the full height of the camera sensor, you will lose resolution when you adjust the footage to 16:9 before uploading to YouTube.

Settings -> Preferences and set to high quality (instead of low latency). The latency difference is negligible between the 2 modes, and the quality improvement could be slightly more useful.

Settings -> Device -> Max Power and set to a higher value. I’m in the EU and by default the DJI goggles come configured to 25mW and locked into that value, but there are ways to fix this. The higher the power output, the better picture, and the further away you can fly. If you are legally allowed to do so you can allow higher output power by doing the following. Create a file called naco.txt on the air unit’s SD card, open it with Notepad, and write the number 1 in it as its only content. Add the SD card to the air unit. Once powered on and the file read, the air unit and goggles will change their settings and you will have access to more channels and more power output options. Once changed, it’s ok to get rid of the naco.txt file, it’s not required to keep it on the SD card at all times.

The last thing to do before we actually go out flying is to put on the props. To do that correctly you need to know what’s the direction of your motors. You can arm the quad without props and touch lightly the motor on the sides with a finger or with a piece of paper to identify the rotation direction.

You want them to rotate in the direction that is shown in Betaflight on the Configuration tab. In this case it’s the so-called “Props In” mode, because the props should move in towards the quad.

So if you put the quad in front of you facing up and away, as in the diagram, your front left motor is motor 4, front right is motor 2, back right is motor 1 and back left is motor 3.

It may sound like a lot and a bit convoluted, but I promise you once you’ve done it a few times it will make sense and you will probably never put props on in the wrong direction ever again.

Also take note that you only need to know how to put on 1 prop with the correct pitch direction. If you put on prop 2 correctly, then prop 3 should be the exact same type and direction and props 1 and 4 should be the same to each other, but different to 2 and 3.

With those rules in mind, you can put on props all day!

Here is how my setup ended up looking. Make sure you tighten the prop nuts all the way down nice and snug.

That’s really all of it! Let’s go for a flight!

🚁 Flying

Anytime flying a new quad I highly recommend starting with a line of sight test hover before you get into full-on FPV mode.

Moral of the story is: don’t skip the line of sight test hover, no matter how advanced of a user you think you are.

This time the hover test worked fine and it was finally time for the first HD FPV experience.

Maiden flight: CNHL 4S 1300mAh battery, 25mW air unit power output, T-5143S prop (lower pitch), 4:3 aspect ratio

With that out of the way, the quad still flew superbly. As expected from this type of a motor and battery combo, the quad was very timid and super easy to handle, but of course naturally it lacked some performance which was due to the 4S batteries used.

Flight #2: CNHL MiniStar 6S 1000mAh battery, 25mW air unit power output, T-5143S prop (lower pitch), 16:9 aspect ratio

In the second set of flights I flew the Holybro Kopis2 on 6S batteries and you can tell the quad performed better, as expected. I was punching the throttle more frequently but still mostly cruising around, enjoying the experience of the DJI digital FPV system, discovering things, and getting used to the new controller. The other thing I changed at this point was the camera aspect ratio, so now I fly in 16:9 which I’m much more used to and comfortable with.

Flight #3: CNHL MiniStar 6S 1000mAh battery, 700mW air unit power output, T-5147 prop (higher pitch), 16:9 aspect ratio

In the third set of flight tests I changed the power output of the DJI ait unit to 700mW. Immediately all artifacts and pixelization we had while flying on 25mW were now gone. With that drastic improvement in quality the flight experience was even more enjoyable and in the next couple of videos I dared going farther away than I have ever been before, when flying my huge open field tests.

I ended up mostly cruising and taking in the view during the first of the flights and got a flight time of about 6 minutes again.

I also lowered the camera angle to about 35 or so degrees. I should report that I’ve been getting cut off footage on the air unit. The recording on the goggles is always there and in full. It could be an SD card issue (I have now tested with 2 different SD cards, but will also test with a high-quality brand new one). It could also be that I’m unplugging the quad too soon and I lose a few seconds of footage. However in some of the flights the footage is gone after about a minute of flying.

🔝 Upgrades

Improve the DJI air unit antenna positioning. Many people have claimed and shared that the antenna positioning on the Holybro Kopis2 HDV is suboptimal. It’s not the end of the world, but arguably you could get better performance if you find a way to bring the antennas up and away from the carbon frame. This may be extra significant to do if you are locked in to only flying on 25mW power output. I will update this info when I have a more concrete solution to this. Update: I’ve decided I won’t be moving the antennas around at this point. At 700mW the connection is superb and unless I really have issues in the future, I’ll leave the antennas as they are.

Consider increasing the camera tilt. I bumped my way up high (almost 45 deg, might reduce that slightly), gets rid of a lot of the “props in view” issue and a bit nicer to fly. Update: I like the higher tilt angle, but I did reduce it slightly to 35-40 degrees.

More upgrade ideas coming later on, after I have flown the quad and the system more…

📑 Conclusion

It’s a bit early for me to deliver the final conclusion, as I like testing products extensively and over time. I will make sure to come back here and update.

In the meantime, here are a few words on my initial thoughts. Holybro Kopis2 HDV - love it! Very locked in tune, goes where you tell it, easy to handle, has plenty of speed and performance, is somewhat lightweight if you don’t carry an extra camera like a GoPro if the DJI air unit’s footage is enough for you (for me it is).

Setting it up has been super easy! No soldering required, so that will tick a box off for a lot of people. It’s a very high-quality product that is not cheap (coming in at around $250 without the air unit), but I dare say not way too expensive either, given the top of the line components. Only time will tell how it will hold up, but it seems like a very enjoyable drone to fly so far. I’m hoping to be ripping it around all summer and beyond into next year!

As far as the DJI digital FPV system goes, I am impressed. I was mindblown, although perhaps admittedly much less so than many other YouTubers’ first time trying the DJI system. At this point, even only by watching other people, I had too many expectations to get completely surprised, and still, the moment when I flew around scraggle and small trees so much closer than ever before is something that changes things.

You can just make out so much more detail in all cases. Is the DJI digital FPV system the answer to everything? No. Not yet. I love flying my micros and not planning on stopping any time soon. Analog still covers a lot of different flight scenarios just fine and I see no reason or have no desire to drop analog FPV at this point. Time will tell how this situation will evolve.

I hope this guide helped you get set up and enter the world of digital FPV. Happy flying!

SkyRC Q200 - One of the best drone lipo battery chargers

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t always want to start an article with such a strong statement as “one of the best…” but at the same time, I also try to review and feature the products I found out to be useful, high quality and good value.

And today we’re going to have a look at the SkyRC Q200 Quattro balance charger as one such product.

There are other products out there, that are certainly cheaper, especially if you have your own power supply or if you charge with a parallel charging board. That’s a fact that needs to be acknowledged and I’m not saying the SkyRC Q200 is the right charger for everyone. But for me it is. For 2 main reasons:

I don’t have a separate power supply and much more would prefer a plug and play unit that I can just start using.
I don’t do parallel charging with external boards. I know if you are careful and know what you’re doing it is a safe method of charging many batteries at once. I do not want to do it and do not need to do it. I fly different quads with different battery sizes and have been doing somewhat fine with just a couple of very small chargers for about 3 years now.

The SkyRC Q200 has 4 completely separate from one another charging slots and I love this. I can charge 4 different batteries at the same time. This, plus still using my 2 old chargers is a combination I don’t think I’ll be outgrowing any time soon.

If you like parallel charging and know what you’re doing - enjoy. I’m not trying to convince anyone against it. It’s not wildly dangerous, I’m not trying to portrait it like it is. But I know of many people who don’t want to do it (including myself) and this is why I’m making this review and sharing my experience and my charging setup.

📦 Unboxing
📝 Specifications
⚙ Setup
⚡ Charging
🔝 Upgrades
📑 Conclusion

If you prefer watching, check out the full video review on my YouTube channel:

📦 Unboxing

For something that costs around $170, the unboxing experience is pretty good.

The box comes padded with this thick foam to protect the unit from all sides.

Removing the top plate reveals two compartments: one for the charger and one for its accessories. The charger came wrapped in a plastic protective film too, which I have already removed on the picture below.

So, here is the SkyRC Q200 in all it’s glory. It looks and feels like a high-quality product. Not too big, around 19x 17cm.

Here is everything you get inside the box: the charger itself, a nice thick and detailed manual, an outlet plug (in my case EU style), 2 custom banana plug to wire cables for soldering to your own connector type, 4 banana plug to XT60 connectors, 4 balance wires and adaptors supporting 2S to 6S batteries (perfect for our drone lipos).

If anything, I’m surprised how minimalistic the package contents are. Definitely a good thing and you get only what you really need. Here’s a closer look at the wires we’ll use to charge our lipo batteries.

📝 Specs and Features

In terms of specs and features, the two arguably most important things about this charger are the fact that it can charge up to 4 batteries at the same time (with different amounts of cells or different chemistry) and completely independently. And it can do so with its own internal power supply - no extra power supply needed.

It has a nice color screen with a fairly intuitive UI and you can operate the unit with the 5 labeled buttons right under the screen.

The A, B, C, D labels point to where the 4 charging slots are located. At 19cm x 17cm (~ 7.5” x 6.5”) it’s not the most compact charger. It’s also not the bulkiest given it contains the power supply as well as a couple of cooling fans on the sides of the unit.

It can charge a variety of different battery chemistries (LiPo, LiHV, LiFe, LiIon, NiMH, NiCd, PB), including our drone favorite LiPo. And it can do that at up to 200W total power fed via an AC input.

For OTG (On The Go) applications, the unit can also accept power via an XT60 DC port on the back (11-18V). There’s also a power on/off switch on the back panel above the AC plug slot.

In the middle of the front panel, there is a 5V USB charging port and a PC link micro USB port for connecting to a computer.

Each of the 4 charging slots (channels) has 4 ports. The banana plug positive (red) and negative (black) lead ports, the balance lead port (white) and a temperature sensor port.

The firmware is upgradeable, there is PC control software, as well as a smartphone app that allows you to connect to the charger via Bluetooth to control it and monitor its state.

Additionally, you can scan QR codes via the app to quickly read and apply charging profiles. So in a way, it’s very easy to quickly get started and get your packs charged so you can go fly. At the same time, the charger supports some more advanced use cases and scenarios, should you ever need them. Cool stuff.

⚙ Setup

There’s not much to the setup of the SkyRC Q200 charger. You only need to plug it into the wall and turn it on via the switch on the back.

You don’t need the smartphone app or the PC app to operate the charger. But they are there should you need them, and there I say the UI on both is pretty nice, useful and organized. Very good job, SkyRC!

🈸 Get the SkyCharger smartphone app (optional)

The quickest way to get the mobile app is to scan the QR code from the manual. Or visit the SkyRC smartphone app download page and then go to the app store of your choice. I’m using a Google Pixel 3, so I visited the Google Play store.

Install the app, select the Bluetooth device (charger must be on for this to work) and set an access password when prompted.

Now you can use the app to control or set up the charging process, as well as to monitor the state of the batteries and the charger.

💻 Connect to a computer via the Charger Master app (optional)

Download and install the SkyRC Charger Master app. Connect the charger to the PC via a micro USB cable. Run the app and the charger will get recognized.

You can then use the app to set the different channels, change settings and monitor the overall progress.

Let me know if you are interested to learn more about the SkyCharger or Charger Master apps and I can make a dedicated post where we can go into more details on how to use them. The apps have a pretty good interface and provide similar functionality.

In the meantime, let’s take a look at charging batteries using the SkyRC Q200’s user interface, which is more than enough for most use cases and faster to get started with.

⚡ Charging

If I take 2 things seriously about FPV drones, that’s 5-inch props and lipo batteries. I suggest you do too if you want to stay safe.

Dealing with lipo batteries can be dangerous, so always pay attention, be careful, don’t do dumb stuff and never leave your batteries charging unattended.

Additionally, the author is in no way responsible for any damage you may cause.

The charger comes with a pretty detailed manual, you should refer to it before doing anything with the charger.

With all of those disclaimers out of the way, I’d like to mention a few words about operating the charger. I was very pleasantly surprised with the whole user experience, to be honest.

One of the challenges with such a product where you have so many different options and configuration settings is how to communicate those effectively to the user without making them go through thousands of screens and steps just to get started.

SkyRC has absolutely nailed it!

I was expecting some sort of a navigation hell and a hard to remember steps, instead, I got a product that’s very easy to use and gets you up and charging with a few button presses. As a frontend software engineer, I appreciate this!

When you first boot up the SkyRC Q200 you are presented this “main menu” screen which shows at a glance the state of all 4 charging channels.

Pressing the left-most button cycles through the channels and the currently selected one is highlighted with a black background.

Pressing the ➕ and ➖ buttons cycles through the battery chemistry options at first. Then pressing the ▶ (enter) button takes you to the operation mode.

You can select from Balance charging, Charging, Storage charging, and more. 99% of the times you would probably need to either Balance charge your batteries, or to put them in Storage charge.

Putting your batteries in storage charge (3.8v - 3.9v) is very recommended when storing them over extended periods, ranging from just a few days to over the winter season. Doing that will preserve their longevity and characteristics.

Once you have selected the operating mode, pressing Enter allows you to go into the cell count number (2S - 6S). Always make sure to get this right depending on what battery you are charging.

Finally, you can also set the charge current. Be careful when setting too high current. I mostly charge at 1A and rarely at up to 2A. I never go past that; I’d rather wait a bit longer and stay as safe as possible.

Be careful and follow the instructions in the manual when doing the battery connections. But in a nutshell, the battery’s balance lead goes to the balance board adaptor, depending on its sell count. The XT60/XT30 battery connector goes to the XT60/XT30 lead on the charger.

When ready with all settings press and hold the Enter button for 3s to start charging. It’s going to verify the In this example I’m storage charging a small 2S 350mAh whoop battery. But the process is identical for any battery.

That’s all there is to it! Remember, always keep an eye on your batteries while charging. You can also monitor the progress via Bluetooth with the smartphone app but this should not be a substitute for actual in-person supervision.

You can also save particular settings as profiles to QR codes. What that allows you to do is to then print those QR codes, cut them out and attach one to each battery with its charging settings. That way come charging time you can just scan the code and go. I haven’t yet looked into that myself, as I don’t find it that hard to just punch in my charge settings anyway.

There are many more advanced things you can do with the charger, such as voltage calibration and on the go charging.

🔝 Upgrades

If you are charging any 2S - 6S battery with an XT60 connector (most 5-inch drone batteries) you are set - the provided cables are enough to charge up to 4 of those batteries at the same time.

However, if you also need to charge 2S, 3S or 4S batteries with an XT30 connector, I recommend you grab some of these banana plug to XT30 connector cables or make your own if you have the necessary connectors, wire and feel like soldering.

I also very recently learned about a XT30 to PH2.0 cable that could help you storage charge your 1S PH2.0 whoop batteries. I found out about this thanks to a video by AndyRC which I recommend you see.

I also recommend you subscribe to his channel if you haven’t already, and while you’re there, subscribe to my YouTube channel too - FPVtips.

📑 Conclusion

So the final verdict. I fell in love more with that product than I initially thought I would. Let’s be honest here, chargers, most times I wouldn’t say are particularly exciting. But here’s the thing - a good charger can save your house from burning down, can take good care of your batteries, save you time and make the overall charging process pain free. So while chargers usually lurk in the background, they do a lot of the work involved so we can fly our drones.

The main thing for me with the SkyRC Q200 was the ease of use and the nice UI. It’s not often that you see not 1 but 3 nice user interfaces: on the charger’s screen, on the smartphone app and even the desktop software. I was genuinely very surprised.

Overall I would say the charger feels like a high-quality product, delivers a great experience and comes in at “only” $170. I’m not rich, but here’s why I say “only”. A fairly decent ISDT charger will set you back around $60-$80. Then you have to add a decent power supply to that, so say at least another $30 - $50 more. And that’s to charge 1 battery at a time. Add another $20 - $30 to that for a parallel charging board. We’re looking at $110 - $160 already.

If that’s your setup and you’re happy with it, great! Nothing wrong with that. But if you don’t want to deal with parallel charging, the SkyRC Q200 is one way how.

Happy flying!

P.S.: I’ve linked below the charger, some recommended batteries, and the XT30 cables.

How I got into FPV drones and how you could too

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

FPV stands for First Person View and in the context of FPV drones usually refers to flying a drone for freestyle or racing while viewing the feed from a camera mounted on drone as if you were the pilot. This is what it looks like:

📖 How I got into FPV

My professional background is in software engineering. That’s my day job, but in 2016 I got interested in smart home devices and smart home automation possibilities in particular. I wanted to go past the simple “use an app on your phone to turn on your Philips Hue lights” which was kind of the highlight of that time period.

I quickly discovered an open-source project called Home Assistant, that I really liked and contributed to a little bit. In a nutshell that is a Python project that allows you to run a piece of software called Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. This software then allowed you to connect together many different otherwise unrelated smart systems or sensors. Ranging from fetching data from 3rd party APIs like weather information, to controlling your lights, blinds and many more. Most implementations were frictionless and very powerful.

Some of the things I had set up were, for example, a morning coffee automation that started brewing my coffee every day at 6:55, or automation where the lights would turn on every day 30 minutes before sunset. Cool stuff.

I was also using Google Home for voice commands, Amazon’s Alexa for a while, but I always preferred Google Assistant. Sky’s really the limit when it comes down to those systems, there’s so much you could do with Bluetooth, presence sensors such as motion detectors, smart outlets, soil moisture and nutrition sensors and so on.

Now I’m not going to get into much more detail about Home Assistant, as I want to get to the point and tell you how that brought me to FPV racing drones. If you are curious to learn more, however, I do encourage you to look into Home Assistant or to read my “Living with smart home automation for a year” article on the blog.

So what has that got to do with FPV racing drones? Well, roughly around July 2017 as I was looking into how to waterproof some electronics for outdoor projects, I stumbled upon a video by Samm Sheperd (I was saddened to have found out that he had since passed away. Rest in peace Samm). That video was about conformal coating the electronics on his FPV drone. He then flew around his house like crazy in the middle of winter, snow and all. I still remember what I thought to myself: “I gotta have this in my life”. No joke, I was legit so hook, it didn’t make sense. I just knew I had to be doing that. It was mesmerizing.

This lead to a bit more research on the subject and discovering UAVfutures, Joshua Bardwell and Mr. Steele, who (along with Samm) are the people I credit with my getting into FPV. One of the first UAVfutures videos I watched was his 99$ drone build guide, Joshua’s series on actually learning to fly in FPV Freerider, and Mr. Steele’s alien videos convincing me he’s an FPV god from another world and inspiring me to try to achieve 5% of his skill set in my lifetime of flying drones.

SO, I ended up ordering an Eachine Wizard x220 in August 2017 and I started my FPV adventure. I also started writing about my experience on my blog. (and mostly really fixing the issues I had and learning along the way).

I quickly learned how crappy the stock props of the Wizard were, when they shredded on full throttle and my quad fell out of the sky, I got better antennas, modded my box goggles to record DVR and got better at flying and started crashing much less over time. I was also lucky to have a buddy of mine join me in the FPV adventures.

I’ve loved the experience and all the learnings so far, but I’m sure our hobby can still be pretty intimidating to many beginners, so here’s my message: “You don’t have to know it all beforehand. It’s ok to learn at your own pace as you go.”

Also, worth noting is that many things are so much less intimidating and so much easier nowadays than when I started and that’s a great thing! You can start off with a pre-built model and do modifications and adjustments to it as you go and as you learn. In my case, my Wizard x220 has only kept its original frame, PDB and Flight Controller. Since then, PDBs are now gone, and I have swapped out everything else - receiver, vtx, camera, motors, ESCs have all been changed.

But yea getting into FPV is just not as smooth as butter just yet. You will need to most of all have that “willing to learn mentality”. That’s what it’s all about. You don’t have to know much to start, you can learn as you go, but you have to be willing to learn. The amount of how much you need to learn as you go, however, I think has gone down over the past few years and is on a downwards trend and will only keep declining as parts and quads keep getting better.

That being said and while I’m all for lowering the barrier of entry so that more and more people can join the hobby and feel less intimidated at first, I think learning and tinkering with components are a fundamental part of it and are not going anywhere.

I’m trying to do my part in helping more people take flight and enjoy FPV, mostly because I think it’s an awesome hobby and so much fun. If you’d like to help me and support me and others in doing so, come visit the FPVtips YouTube channel and tag along for the ride! We surely appreciate your help!

👩‍🎓 How you could get into FPV

So how could you get into FPV? Everyone learns in a different way, but keep in mind time in a simulator is really time well spent. It will save you months of frustration, repairs, money and forever lost quads. On the other hand, if you would like to learn with the real deal, so long as you know what to be careful about, I think that could work out too.

I did just a little bit of time in a simulator and was itching to try the real thing. I paid attention to how to set up my failsafe, so my quad wouldn’t fly away on me, and I was always careful and very respectful of 5-inch quads and the damage they could do with their props. That’s no joke! Those things’ props can do some real damage, so always stay away. In addition, being thoughtful and careful with your lipo batteries is a must too. Once you know and are aware of those main dangers which are VERY SERIOUS topics, you can have fun for the most part.

Go to a huge open preferably grassy field and fly. Why grass? Well, I went flying over concrete and gravel on my first flight, crashed a few times, lost a bunch of screws and caused some minor damage to my frame. Then I went flying over grass for a softer impact while I kept learning how not to crash.

Try and fly low, not too close to yourself and just give it a shot. You will be crashing, try to have those crashes as controlled as possible, try to learn the basics, get familiar with throttle control and then pitch, roll, and yaw. Learn how to be quick on the disarm switch to prevent further ESC or motor damage. Practice some line of sight flights, do some FPV. (I never really got very good at Line of sight as I tend to lose orientation fairly quickly). Don’t get discouraged, it turns out, I’m just better at FPV than at line of sight.

You do you. I’m not advocating jumping in and flying like crazy without any simulator preparation, but I do understand you’re anxious to try the real thing and don’t want to become a master of the simulator first. Again I advise for caution and taking this seriously, flying far away from people and buildings at first, until you get decent at flying.

You are also lucky because nowadays there’s a great way to get into FPV without much of the stress that comes with flying a 5-inch drone. That’s micro-drones and toothpicks. Those little quads in many cases fly almost as good as a bigger drone and will deliver an experience that actually translates well to the experience you would get when flying a bigger drone. That’s cool cause your practice on a smaller drone will not be in vain and the muscle memory and the flight control learnings will translate nicely to when you start flying a bigger drone.

And while I am a fan of flying the real thing, I have to say there are plenty of really cool simulators out there nowadays. My favorite is Liftoff, I have that on Steam, and you could also look into Drone Racing League or the new Drone Champions League as well as Velocidrone and a few others. There are no drone repairs involved or the walk of shame to go get your drone after you crash in the sims. Particularly useful when trying to learn and master new tricks. So I definitely encourage you to try to spend some time in a simulator. Of course, you want to do that with your radio plugged into your computer, instead of some other gamepad or joystick. Again, it’s all about muscle memory.

But in general, it is a great time to join the hobby of FPV racing and freestyle drones. You can grab a very decent and relatively safe drone for about less than a hundred dollars. A radio for about a 100 or so, some box goggles to get you started, or if you are 60% sure you would commit to the hobby, go for a 250$ pair of goggles that will be good for at least a few years if not longer. Good simulator software, with free trials or free levels, that will be enough to get you started. There’s also plenty of information on specific topics and a handful of YouTube channels highly recommended to follow, in order to stay up to date with what’s going on in the hobby. From then on, it’s all about ripping packs, alone or with some friends, flying different spots and just having fun.

Here are some action points on how you may take this further:

In no particular order, as mentioned above this is your journey and how you go about it is your own choice depending on what works for you. This is just to provide some concrete next steps if you are interested.

Watch YouTube videos on building and flying FPV drones
Find a local club and watch in person as others fly (and maybe try yourself)
Buy a radio transmitter and practice in a simulator (Liftoff, Velocidrone)
Buy a micro drone / toothpick class drone (there are some great suggestions below)
Buy a 5-inch mini drone

Enjoy your journey in FPV and happy flying!

If you’re curious to learn more, have a look at what’s in my FPV backpack and what’s the gear I use and the drones I fly.

Mobula6: Complete setup and flashing 48kHz JESC firmware

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

It’s truly a great time for our FPV racing and freestyle hobby. For one, we get to enjoy a pretty rapid rate of tech improvement. Even though I’ve been into FPV drones for about a little under 3 years, it never ceases to amaze me just how much things have changed.

The Mobula 6 micro drone is a living embodiment of these rapid changes. It’s a very well-executed product, and at only 20g it’s easily one of the smallest and lightest micro drones out there, that still zips around plenty fast on brushless motors and handles superbly.

I’ve been buying and trying Happymodel’s products since the Snapper7 a few years back, and have never been disappointed with any of them. The Mobula7 HD was a particular favorite of mine from 2019, and I’m still planning to try out the Larva X HD a bit later this year too.

That’s all just to say that while I do like Happymodel, I will be, as always, telling things as they are and not be fanboying around. This is not a paid advertisement, just my experience with the Mobula6. And it blew my mind a little bit 😅. Let’s take a look at what all the fuss is about.

📦 Unboxing
📝 Specifications
⚙ Setup
🚁 Flying
🔝 Upgrades
💾 Flash 48 kHz ESC firmware
📑 Conclusion

If you prefer watching, check out the full video review on my YouTube channel:

📦 Unboxing

The unboxing experience is fine and pretty minimalistic, I think in a good way. The Mobula6 arrives in a small cardboard box.

And here is everything you get inside. Besides a print copy of the user manual,

you get a tiny Philips head screwdriver, prop remover tool, USB battery charger,

4 spare Gemfan 1219 props,

4 Happymodel branded 1S 300mah batteries (pretty sweet),

and the Mobula6 itself.

📝 Specifications

In terms of specs, the biggest deal here is the weight of the drone.

The Mobula6 comes in at barely just 20g dry weight with props. Or 19g without props, as 4 props add up to a gram.

The all-up-weight (AUW) with the provided stock battery is just 27.7g.

With a GNB 1S 450mah battery, the AUW is 33.3g

Speaking of batteries, the Mobula6’s battery connector is the common and popular among tiny whoops PH2.0. Great for battery re-usability if you have plenty of those lying around already.

The canopy is plastic and allows for adjusting the camera angle via screws (I haven’t had to do that though). It’s somewhat sturdy, but I think it has a couple of weaker points towards the lower back. We’ll have to see how it holds up.

The same goes for the frame. I don’t expect miracles from it, but it’s held up fine for now and I’ve smacked my Mobula6 around quite a bunch indoors and outdoors over the past couple of weeks. The only thing so far is the plastic getting a bit whiter on one spot after a harder impact, but didn’t crack and remained still solid and in one piece. If needed replacement frames are easy to obtain for about $4.

I would imagine you could probably even print a micro-frame yourself? Let me know in the comments if anyone of you has ever had some luck with 3D printed frames for micro drones in particular.

The battery bay houses the provided 300mah batteries perfectly as you would imagine. For bigger batteries, you can remove the battery bay completely, or use a rubber band for a somewhat decent fit, while not damaging the capability to fit perfectly the stock batteries. I’ll show you how I attached my 450mah batteries a bit later in the article.

The Mobula6 comes with an option of 19000KV or 25000KV motors. Not super much difference, but I opted in for the 19000KV version. The motors are Happymodel branded SE0802 with 1mm shaft diameter. They spin up Gemfan 1219 tri-blade props which provide excellent handling in turns and offer more performance than quad-blade props.

Everything else on this quad except the camera is on the same PCB. As always there will be people that like this and those that don’t. I’m in the fan camp. The big drawback here is that burning out 1 ESC, messing up your VTX or receiver, or say breaking the micro USB port, and you gotta replace the whole board.

On the other hand, you get all the weight and space savings and in a way simplicity of just having to order one thing.

The built-in vtx and receiver antennas are guided out the sides of the canopy - there are plenty of holes and options on how to get that done.

The camera is RunCam Nano 3. It’s a really good CMOS camera for its size and comes in at only 1.2g. You can adjust the camera angle via 2 screws on the sides of the canopy. And possibly adjusting the foam padding placed under the camera to combat jello which it does, but not 100% successfully (as you can see in some of my outdoor sample footage).

The flight controller board is the Crazybee F4FR Lite in my case, where the FR part stands to tell it’s the FrSky version with built-in SPI based FrSky receiver. It can only handle 1S batteries so don’t even think about 2S (although the motors wouldn’t handle that either).

The receiver is gonna get you about up to a couple of hundred meters max (100m = 109 yards). The ESCs are rated for 5A continuous current. The on-board VTX transmits a signal at 25mW power and can be controlled via Smart audio (through the OSD).

The micro USB port is easily accessible and the whole board is mounted to the frame with rubber grommets to dampen vibrations.

Overall, especially for being a fairly cheap product, the components are of good quality and the execution and build and very well done. Bonus points for twisting around and sticking between the frame the power leads, instead of just leading them out straight from the battery pads. This helps reduce tugging tension on them, which is unlikely but might occur if your battery flies out of the mounting bay mid-flight.

⚙ Setup

As with most other quads, to get started we need to bind a radio controller to the drone’s receiver and take a look at the Betaflight configuration.

🔗 Bind the receiver to a radio

The Mobula6 comes with a printed manual, but you can also get it online in pdf form. It is a simple, to-the-point-one-pager, useful to quickly answer some of your immediate questions, such as, where is the bind button 😅? Spoiler alert: it’s right next to the motor plug for the back left motor and is tiny.

I’m using the FrSky Taranis X-Lite radio, but this setup is very similar to most FrSky radios running OpenTx. Create a new model, go to the Setup screen, scroll down, set the Mode to D8 and press the [BND] function. The radio will start chirping looking for a receiver.

Then plug in the drone’s battery and press the Bind button. The receiver will bind to the radio. Stop the radio Bind function by exiting out of it. Unplug the drone. Plug it back in. At this point, you should see a solid green light to verify that there is an active link with the radio.

We’re almost done, one last thing to do is to go to the Mixer screen in the radio and add switches to channels 5, 6 and 7. Those channels will correspond to aux 1, 2 and 3 in Betaflight and we will need them to arm and activate various flight modes.

If you need more help here is a more detailed explanation on how to add the switches and how to fine-tune the channel outputs.

👀 Check the Betaflight configuration

Before we even start going through and potentially changing the Betaflight configuration, it’s a good rule of thumb to export a copy of the current configuration as a backup, in case we need to restore it later.

You can do this by going to the CLI tab and running the dump command. Then save that information to a file. Now you have a backup. If you ever goof up, you can load the configuration back from that file or by pasting its contents straight into the CLI here.

If you didn’t do that, I’ve done that for you - here is the stock Mobula6 Betaflight configuration dump for v3.5.7.

Configuring the Mobula6 was the first time I didn’t touch a single option in Betaflight. Why I’m sharing this is because I’ve been noticing a trend of having to do less and less before I get up in the air flying when setting up a new quad. I think that’s great and I wanted to take a moment to appreciate it. Tinkering with your quad to your heart’s content is not going anywhere, but it’s nice to see the barrier of entry getting ever so slightly lowered, this is great if we want to welcome more and new people to the hobby.

This is the shortest possible checklist of what I go through quickly when checking a quad’s configuration:

Configuration tab

Props in or Props out mode - important to know how to put on your props. MOTOR_STOP off. Accelerometer on for angle (stability) mode. SPI RX support and FRSKY_D for D8 mode.

Airmode is on. RX_LOST and RX_SET are on in case you want to use the motors to beep for a lost model alarm since we don’t have an onboard buzzer.

✅ All good here, the defaults match what I expected so no changes needed.
Receiver tab

Here I’m making sure the Channel Map is TAER1234. That’s what my radio is set to and a match here makes sure the quad won’t flip out when I start flying. ✅ All good.
Modes tab

Arming is set to AUX1 which is whichever switch you set to Channel5 earlier in the Mixer screen on your radio. That’s fine. Then I notice AUX2 (Channel6 switch) is set by default to start-up in angle mode, and any other position will set the quad to acro. That’s fine too. And I have turtle mode (Flip over after crash) on the third switch. ✅ Perfect, no changes needed.
OSD tab

In the OSD tab I care to see if RSSI value is displayed, I also like to see current draw, throttle value and flight time elapsed. ✅ All good, no changes needed.

Let’s go fly!

🚁 Flying

I was very excited and curious to fly the Mobula6 for the first time. My first immediate impression was how easy it was to handle without sacrificing any performance. It only took me a couple of packs to get very comfortable with the drone. I started by flying it on the stock configuration.

🏡 Maiden indoor flight, stock 300mah battery 🔋

I always enjoy trying out different battery and prop combinations in my reviews and this time I had a lot of tests to carry out.

Besides flying on the stock Happymodel 300mah battery, I wanted to see if there was any difference with a similar Eachine branded 300mah battery.

The short of it is that there was no noticeable big difference, despite the fact the Eachine battery is engaging in some “slight” false advertising, stating its C rating is higher than it actually is (40C on the outer label, 30C on the battery enclosure). This makes it essentially identical to the stock Happymodel battery and since it did perform very similarly in my initial tests, the tests for the Eachine battery ended here.

The third battery I wanted to try out was this GNB 450mah as I have plenty of those lying around.

And since we’re doing this for science, I wanted to try out each battery type indoor and outdoor. Then, I wanted to do it all again after I did the 48kHz esc flashing mod.

Before I show you the flight footage, here is the comparison and my findings of flying different battery sizes, indoor, outdoor and before and after flashing the ESCs. All batteries were high voltage (HV) batteries and were charged to 4.35v.

	🏡 Indoor 300mah battery 🔋
Stock ESC	Average ~ `4:17m`
48 kHz ESC	Average ~ `5:05m`

	🏡 Indoor 450mah battery 🔋
Stock ESC	Average ~ `5:16m`
48 kHz ESC	Average ~ `4:24m`

	🌄 Outdoor 300mah 🔋
Stock ESC	Average ~ `4:00m`
48 kHz ESC	Average ~ `4:15m`

	🌄 Outdoor 450mah 🔋
Stock ESC	Average ~ `2:45m`
48 kHz ESC	Average ~ `3:45m`

Perhaps an interesting observation is that while I could fly fairly decently indoors on a 450mah battery and with increased flight time, the story was quite the opposite outdoors. I got consistently much shorter flight times, had to be almost at all times at more than 60% throttle and I could feel the weight of the battery significantly impacting the flight performance.

I’m fairly convinced a 350mah battery (didn’t see any 400mah available) might be the best option on the flight time vs performance trade off. I’ll be doing that test as soon as I can, but do bear in mind, for now, that’s just my hypothesis and if you’re unsure, but want to grab extra batteries right now, the 300mah URUAVs or GNBs are a safe bet.

🏡 Indoor flight, 450mah battery 🔋

Since the battery didn’t fit into the battery bay I used a rubber band to mount it.

I could feel the extra weight a bit but it wasn’t too bad. I assume mainly because my place is a bit small and I don’t reach particularly much higher than cruising speeds.

🌄 Maiden outdoor flight, stock 300mah battery 🔋

I was very impressed how this little guy held up outdoors and did not expect it to be that good. My house is a bit too small to be able to fly indoors in acro mode, but that was not the case outside. I really loved flying it in acro mode! Locked in tune and easy to handle! If you watch one video only, watch the one below.

🌄 Outdoor flight, 450mah GNB battery 🔋

This flight was a bit of a letdown. Unlike the indoor 450mah battery flight, here I got a pretty short flight time of around 2:30m. It was a pretty calm day with a bit of slight breeze every once in a while. The bigger battery’s extra weight seemed to take its toll and was noticeable even when cruising as I had the throttle higher on average.

So how did things change after I flashed the JESC 48 kHz firmware? Let’s compare.

🏡 Indoor flight, JESC 48 kHz, 300mah stock battery 🔋

On average we gained a flight time increase of + 48 seconds. Not bad at all! Also chances are I’m flying even faster since I’ve gotten so much more used to the Mobula6 by now.

🏡 Indoor flight, JESC 48 kHz, 450mah GNB battery 🔋

It would appear that we have lost up to - 52 seconds of flight time. Given in the first attempts I was flying much less aggressive and had a few crashes I needed to recover from with turtle mode (which counted as flying time) this could explain the result. HOWEVER, I never claimed nor attempted for the highest accuracy scientifically correct experiment, but the point here for me still stands - at best, there is no improvement in flight time with the heavier battery.

🌄 Outdoor flight, JESC 48 kHz, 300mah stock battery 🔋

I’ve been having plenty of bad weather, but was finally able to try flying the Mobula6 outside after the upgrade. On average I didn’t notice a crazy big improvement, although there was an improvement in flight times of about 10 - 15s.

🌄 Outdoor flight, JESC 48 kHz, 450mah GNB battery 🔋

I’ve been having plenty of bad weather, but was finally able to try flying the Mobula6 outside after the upgrade. I’ve been getting between 3:30 and 4:00 flight times, so there has definitely been an improvement since the ESC firmware upgrade. Bare in mind I conducted those tests at about 0 - 2 degrees Celsius (32 F), so in slightly warmer weather you might get even better results. All in all I’m happy with the results.

🔝 Upgrades

We already get pretty decent flight times of about 4:00 - 4:30 minutes. What if we could push this further?

Flash 48 kHz ESC firmware

This has been an amazing discovery/knowledge shared around our FPV community. I first found out about it in Joshua Bardwell’s Mobula6 video’s comments section, posted by a user called Dan Miller. Thanks for sharing that with us Dan! I’ll go through the exact procedure how to set it up a bit further in the article.
Replace the PH2.0 connector with the new BT2.0 connector by Betafpv

Claimed to deliver up to 10% battery overall performance boost
Remove motor plugs and direct solder motors to the board

Unless I get very bored, I won’t be bothering with this, but some people believe this does improve performance a bit. I’m not saying it won’t, but I’m not convinced it’s worth it. Nevertheless, it’s here on the list if you feel like truly maximizing your Mobula6’s performance.
Use Betaflight 4.1 and RPM filters?

My Mobula6 came with Betaflight v3.5.7 on it. If you wanna do RPM filters, you need to use version 4.1. Filters are known to improve flight characteristics, but I’m not sure if they will help with battery life. Chances are they might. Do some more research first, though, and let me know too.
Is a battery size of 350mah the best option on the weight vs performance trade-off?

I’m curious to learn more about this one. I’m quite convinced that a 350mah sized battery would be the best fit, but I have yet to test this.
Discover better props?

This seems a bit like a long shot, as the Gemfan props already perform stellarly. You never know though! Let me know if you discover better props.

I’m just wondering if we can get up to 7 or why not even 8 minutes of flight time on the Mobula6 😬. Let me know if you carry out all of these upgrades and manage to reach some sick flight times, I’d be very happy to hear about it!

Why all the min-maxing though? Well for one, this quad is doing so many things so well and is so light that small changes to weight can have significant impact. Also, it’s fun 😅

💾 How to flash Mobula6 ESC for 48kHz

This is the one upgrade that’s gonna take you 1 minute to do and will increase your flight times by at least 30 seconds. It’s that simple.

Just a word on BLHeli Configurator vs JESC Configurator. I normally use the BLHeli Configurator to do my ESC flashing, and you can use it to do the 48kHz firmware upgrade. However, that requires manual download of firmware files and is a bit more error-prone, while using the JESC Configurator, in this case, is super straight forward, so we’re going to use the latter.

First, google for jesc-configurator and open the Releases and Install instructions links, in my case the first and third results in the list.

The Releases link is going to take you to the corresponding page on the jesc-configurator on GitHub where you could download the software for your operating system. Download and extract the package and then start up the software.

The other link we opened contains the installation instructions, and the only thing to pay attention to, as highlighted in the screenshot below, we need to check if H is the middle letter in the ESC code, once read into the JESC software.

As a rule of thumb always take off the props when dealing with drone ESC or flight controller configuration. Next, plugin the Mobula6 via a micro USB cable to the computer and also plug in a battery since we need power to the ESCs to read the setup.

Let’s look at the configurator. It’s very similar to the BLHeli Configurator, in case you are familiar with that one. Select the correct COM port from the dropdown at the top right-hand side. It should normally be preselected correctly. Click the blue Connect button.

You are presented this screen. Click the Read Setup button on the bottom right-hand side.

If all goes well you should now see all 4 ESCs listed in the right half of JESC Configurator. Take a look at the ESC code and make sure the middle letter is H as mentioned as a requirement in JESC’s installation instructions. In the screenshot example below I have already flashed the JESC firmware successfully.

Click the Flash All button at the bottom.

In this last step, select the JESC 2.3 - 48khz option from the Version list and click Flash.

Wait until all 4 ESCs are flashed successfully. When done click the Disconnect button at the top right, unplug your quad from the micro USB cable and the battery.

Congrats 🎉! You should now have on average 30 seconds longer flight times for free. How cool is that?

📑 Conclusion

Happymodel has once again delivered a fun experience. I’m trying hard not to overhype or call the Mobula6 a technological achievement but in my opinion, it kind of is. It comes at a very affordable price for what it offers, you get 4 batteries to rip around which for many beginners could just as well be enough.

With flight times of 4:30 - 5:30 minutes, chances are by the time you’ve flown your other 3 batteries, the first will have charged-up if you plugged it in immediately after you flew it. So you could go for some pretty long flight sessions.

If this is your first quad getting into the hobby, I’m very comfortable recommending it, as you will get an outstanding indoor experience and you would be able to rip some packs practicing acro mode outside as well.

I love how light it is, and even though it already flies really well on Betaflight v3.5.7, upgrading to 4.1, flashing the ESCs for 48khz PWM and the other potential upgrades I’ve highlighted above could deliver some outstanding flight times.

That’s cool because if this is your entry into the hobby, you can learn so much by tinkering with these things and trying out different setups. At the same time even if you just want to grab it and fly, you can do that in seconds. As I mentioned earlier I had to do nothing in Betaflight! This too is amazing because it lowers the barrier of entry to our hobby and really if you have a pair of goggles and a radio, you can just bind to this guy in a few seconds and start flying!

I’m looking forward to ripping more and more packs on the Mobula6 throughout the remainder of the winter and I’ll surely take it out with me when I start going to parks in the spring.

Happy flying!

Eachine E016F: Hovercraft and drone

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I love FPV! And so far I’ve only really done drone FPV. I am looking forward to trying out a few other ways of exploring the world with FPV wings, hovercraft, and even a submarine.

Some of those you could just pick up online for a few bucks, some are not at all available and will need to be full-blown projects, if at all possible.

Today we’re going to check a toy grade item, namely the Eachine E016F Hovercraft and Drone.

As I mentioned I mainly focus on hobby-grade FPV drones and don’t normally deal with toys, but I did purchase this hovercraft and was pleasantly surprised and I think it’s worth sharing my experience for several reasons.

First and foremost - winters in Finland are long and brutal and there is little chance for flying, but there’s plenty of chance for building projects. One project on my list was to try to make an FPV RC Snow glider / Hovercraft. I already have my hands on this GEPRC hovercraft foam frame, and this project is coming very soon to the blog and the YouTube channel, so stay tuned (and subscribe 📺).

But while figuring out how to put together my own craft, and while waiting for the snow to come (it’s been record high temperatures in Finland and we still don’t have any snow?!), I bought one of these ready to zip around, cheap hovercraft to see what they are all about.

📦 Unboxing
⚙ Setup
🚁 Zipping around
🔝 FPV upgrade
📑 Conclusion

If you prefer watching, check out the full video review on my YouTube channel:

📦 Unboxing

Let’s have a look at what you get in the box.

Eachine E016F unboxed.

You get a couple of those 1S 350mah Eachine batteries (the other one comes mounted on the drone already).

You also get some tools and spare parts. A screw, 4 spare props, prop remover tool, mini screwdriver, USB battery charger, a manual, radio controller and the craft itself.

A nice and very helpful touch is that the transmitter comes with this cardboard overlay with all the button functions, which makes it very easy to get started but also to have a quick reference whenever you forget which button did what.

The transmitter takes 2 AA batteries on the back.

And finally here is the Eachine E016F itself. It has 4 lego studs on top, in case you wanted to mount a lego figure.

The back motors are up-right at a 90-degree angle to the front motors.

This is how the craft looks from underneath. The small hole in the middle is where you can find the screw that holds the drone-mounted to the frame.

And here is a top-down shot.

⚙ Setup

To get started place 2 AA batteries in the transmitter. You will have to undo the screw on the battery bay.

Next, undo the screw on the bottom of the hovercraft frame to release the drone and access the battery.

Charge the battery via a USB port and the provided charger. When the LED goes off, your battery is full. Install in on the drone and the drone to the hovercraft frame.

🚁 Zipping around

How to arm the quad?

Turn on the transmitter. Plugin the drone battery.

Move the left (throttle) stick all the way up. Then move it all the way down. The drone will arm. From this point on if you start moving the throttle stick up your drone will fly.

Let’s talk modes. So this craft has 3 modes for moving around. Ground, water and air. You can tell which mode you’re in by the color of the LED on the front of the quad.

Red - drone flight mode

Green - ground hovercraft mode

Blue - water hovercraft mode

How to change modes?

To go between the different modes, press the left trim button under the throttle (left) stick. This will go between the different modes as denoted by the change in color of the front LED.

If you’re gonna fly in drone mode, make sure you have removed the hovercraft frame, snap back the motors, such that all motors lie on the same plane, make sure the front LED is red and you’re good to go.

For the other two modes, make sure you have mounted the drone in the hovercraft frame and secured it down with the screw. Then make sure you are in green mode for ground hovercraft or blue for water hovercraft.

Flying experience

So how did the Eachine E016F fly? Not bad for a toy. Am I impressed? Not really. Is it better than flying FPV drones? Not really. Can you mod it for FPV? Possibly. But the extra weight is only going to make the flight characteristics even worse.

But here’s what’s good about it. It’s a good craft for bringing people into the hobby and making them familiar with drones. It’s also much less intimidating in terms of both setup and controlling around.

I had a ton of fun flying this with my son. He’s too young to fly anything else, but this, with my supervision (and my hands at the controls at the same time), was something we could do together, have fun and stay safe. And even though this is a cheap toy that flies suboptimal, it was awesome to see it pique his interest.

Hovercraft experience

I really do enjoy the hovercraft experience. It’s also a fun thing to do together with my son, and I can absolutely let him control the craft on his own in this mode. He’s having a ton of fun driving it around. The craft is surprisingly controllable, and I can’t wait to take it outside in the snow once the snow finally arrives.

Update:

🔝 FPV upgrade

So, how to add FPV to the Eachine E016F? One of the easiest ways to do that is to add a camera + vtx all-in-one unit. You could grab one from an old tiny whoop you have lying around, or grab this Eachine TX02. It’s lightweight, will do what you need it to do and pretty cheap too.

The only thing you should make sure, whatever camera and vtx all in one unit you choose, is that it works with input power between: 3.3-5V. That’s important because I didn’t manage to find a 5V step up on the hovercraft’s board, which means we will be operating off of a lower battery voltage. So a camera that needs 5V or higher input is out of the question, or you would need to do some additional setup, which is beyond the point of this easy mod.

For my mod, I’ll be using this very old all-in-one camera and vtx from an Eachine E010S I bought a couple of years ago.

The unit only requires power to run, so we just need to solder it’s ground (black) wire to ground on the hovercraft board and the red wire to 3.3V on the hovercraft.

Initially I tried the pads right behind the front led, but that did not work (R C D - +).

Then I decided I’ll just add the wires to the battery terminal pads. The battery connector is under the board, but its connector is soldered with a through hole pins and those come up on top of the board (right hand side of the board, next to a motor connector).

After checking with a multimeter, I found out which side was ground and then soldered ground to ground and voltage to voltage. If you look at the picture below, the upper pin is ground, the lower is voltage.

I had to cut out a hole in the top cover in order for the camera wires to come through.

This probably compromises some of the craft’s water resistance (which I have no clue how good is anyway). But if you want to go back at least as close as possible to its previous state use a bit of hot glue to seal the hole, after you setup the camera in place.

To attach the camera, I just used 3m double sided sticky tape.

That’s all there is to it. Here’s some sample footage, it was actually surprisingly even more fun to glide this around, than I anticipated.

📑 Conclusion

I think the Eachine E016F is a pretty nice little toy to bring in people around you into the hobby. It’s great for little and big kids, it’s really cheap, and it performs fine. It’s not one of those toys you will try out and toss in the garbage cause they don’t move around at all or are too hard to control.

Controlling it in hovercraft mode, especially on a hardwood floor is pretty good. It even goes on some carpets, which is appreciated. But at the same time, this is still just a toy and so long as you don’t expect miracles out of it, you’ll have a good time.

How to replace a motor on the GEPRC Phantom

Sun, 05 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Replacing a motor on your quad is for the most part fairly straight forward. But in this guide, I’d like to also go over debugging a motor and ESC and figuring out the faulty component, as well as verification and configuration after the replacement.

If you prefer watching, check out the video version of this post on the FPVtips YouTube channel.

Let’s get to it!

🧪 Debugging a drone motor

We need to figure out the issue and the faulty component. Most times when we end up here we would have a motor that wouldn’t spin at all or would twitch but not spin up properly as the other motors.

In today’s example, we’re going to be investigating this issue I had with the GEPRC Phantom.

I had a strong reason to believe that I burned the motor, after my battery fell off during a 4S battery test.

The first question you should always ask yourself, if unsure, is:

Is it an issue with the ESC (electronic speed controller) or with the motor?

ESC issues are not much harder to be figured out or fixed, but with the growth in popularity of 4 in 1 ESC boards, it has become more cumbersome and slightly pricier as if even 1 ESC dies you still have to change the whole board. In the case of these micro drones, you have to toss the entire working flight controller board and resolder everything on a new board. Pity, but that’s how it is and that’s the price we pay to reduce weight and for the comfort of having a single board to deal with instead of 4 separate ESC boards.

So it would be so much more favorable to be dealing with just a bad / broken motor. How do we validate that? You can inspect the motor for signs of damage. Brown parts, missing or loose magnets, or if the motor wires are still properly connected to it (I had an issue with a snapped wire on my Mobula7 HD).

In this case, I could observe no obvious damage to the motor. The next best and easiest thing to validate you have motor issues is to try and swap out the motor with another one. If you haven’t yet, make sure you take the props off!

So let’s swap the faulty motor with another one that we know works. If the faulty motor does spin up on another slot, that’s not very good, as it could indicate issues with the ESC. If, however, the motor still doesn’t spin up properly, we are in luck, and this could be further indicated by a successfully spinning motor on the slot where our faulty motor used to be.

This is great and is a very simple and easy way to isolate the issue down to the motor. At this point, we can be 99% certain there’s some issue with our motor.

🔄 Replacing a motor

In some cases, if you have the skills, time and desire you can just proceed and repair your motor. In other cases, it might make more sense to just order a new one and replace the faulty one. I opted in for the latter and when I finally got my motor I was able to proceed with the replacement.

When ordering a motor, pay attention to the KV value, stator size and also the motor shaft size. Alternatively, you could also swap all 4 motors, as this would be a good time to do so if say you were planning a motor upgrade. Just make sure that whatever you pick makes sense with the quad’s ESC, AUW (all-up-weight) and your prop choice. You don’t want to get 4 new motors just to burn the ESCs and have to then replace those as well, do you?

When working with micros, in some cases the motors will come with a plug and if your flight controller / esc board has the same plug, you just plug those in and that’s all. In other cases, you might have to do some light soldering.

In my case, the spare motor did come with a plug, but as the motors are directly soldered to the board on the GEPRC Phantom, I had to remove the connector from the motor and prep the wires for soldering by stripping the silicone insulation a bit and pre tinning them with a bit of solder.

Let’s take off the bad motor. Unscrew the mounting motor screws.

And then desolder the old motor wires from the ESC.

To finally remove the offending motor.

It should be a quick job as the wires and pads are very small and they don’t require a ton of heat. Go quickly in and out with the soldering iron, without spending too much time on the board.

Finally solder up the new motor wires in place, carefully observing not to bridge any of the pads. Then screw the motor onto the arm so we can proceed to test it.

✅ Testing and configuring the new motor

Before we go out flying, here are a few things to consider:

1. Does the new motor actually work?

Dead on arrival motors are not unheard of and although a rare occurrence, can happen!

2. Is the motor direction correct?

It’s always good to double-check this. If the direction is not correct, you can change it by desoldering 2 of the motor wires and swapping the pads where you solder them back. Or, even better, change the direction in software with BLHeli Configurator.

3. Do we need to calibrate the ESCs?

Probably not. If you are running DSHOT the answer is definitely not. No need for calibration. But if you believe that a little calibration never killed nobody, you can use the Motors tab in Betaflight to do that. Follow the step outlined in this article about changing ESCs and motors.

Generally speaking, that’s really all there is to it. The process is overall straight forward with only a couple of gotchas here and there. Make sure to put on your props correctly and go rip some packs outside!

I hope it works out well for you and happy flying!

How to build a Ryzen 3rd gen computer

Thu, 26 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Every 4-5 years I build a new computer. It started 20 years ago (in 1999) when my dad and I ordered our custom-built configuration from a computer parts shop in Bulgaria.

Then, in 2006 I specced and ordered a newer PC, 4 years later in 2010 I got another machine - again specced by me, but built by the company I ordered it from.

Finally, in 2014, I ordered the parts only and built my computer, which I’m typing this post on. It’s a good machine and it certainly has a few more years in front of it, but for several reasons, it’s time to build a new computer.

And while my 2014 PC was an Intel-based system with an AMD graphics card, now we’re switching things around and are going to be building an AMD system, Ryzen 3rd gen based, with a GeForce RTX GPU.

I sourced all the parts from a local, Finnish shop in Helsinki. Black Friday deals helped get a discounted price on some items, but not all.

Because I got a new monitor in the summer - a 1440p, 144 Hz one, I didn’t need to spend money on that. I also have a mechanical keyboard, decent Logitech mouse and a Corsair headset that I’ll be carrying over to the new PC. So let’s have a look at what we got in terms of components.

🔩 Components

CPU

As most of the component decisions depend on what CPU you go with, let’s start with that. I’ve been very happy with the Intel i5 I’ve been running for the past 6 years. It’s been performing well for most of the work and gaming I’ve been doing with it. I’m also fortunate to say that while money was not a big limiting factor when pulling off this build, I did try to stay cost-efficient and had a rough budget of 1700 euros for the PC itself.

Last summer I started a YouTube channel and video editing and rendering have joined gaming and software development as tasks I’d like the computer to be excelling at.

Coupling that with a nice Black Friday deal on the Ryzen 7 3800x 8 Core Processor and the choice was made.

This determined the motherboard, as we need to have an AM4 socket for our Ryzen processor. Here the choice was between a B450 board or a 5 series. If an older B450, you might have to update the BIOS to support a 3rd gen Ryzen processor. I decided to go the slightly pricier and easier route of grabbing an x570 motherboard - MPG X570 Gaming Plus Motherboard.

The other big wins here are the PCIe Gen 4.0 compatibility and the TWO M.2 SSD slots, which I will need based on my storage design.

For a GPU I decided to go for the GeForce RTX 2060 Super. It’s a good value for money in terms of performance while still not breaking the bank. Ray tracing and 8GB of RAM on it, what’s not to like.

To power a GPU and a CPU like those I went with a CX750M Corsair power supply. This is a solid overkill, but I’ve had a similar PSU on my previous system and no issues, so might as well.

And as you might have figured out already, based on my motherboard and power supply choices, I’m going for a “regular” ATX case - Fractal Design Define C. The nice parts here are the cable management section on the backside of the case, the tempered glass side panel (as I’m planning to have some nice RGB fans), dust filters and is highly configurable.

For memory, I grabbed 2 x 16GB Kingston Hyper X Fury DDR4. For storage I got 2 M.2 SSDs(a 250GB Kingston and a 500 GB Samsung) and one 3.5 inch Western Digital hard drive.

So, let’s build a computer.

🔩 The Build

We’ll start with unpacking the motherboard and placing it on its box. If you have an ESD bracelet (antistatic wrist strap or else) consider wearing it for the duration of the build. Otherwise, you could try grounding yourself by touching some metal like a heat pipe or a radiator for a second. Ideally, you’d like to minimize the risk of shocking any of your new components with static electricity.

The first thing to install is the CPU. Lift the CPU socket retention arm. Then, carefully take the CPU out of the box and while holding it by its sides, place it carefully into the AM4 socket on the motherboard, such that the small triangle notch on the CPU matches the same on the motherboard. It is crucial to get this right and there is ONLY ONE correct orientation.

The CPU should fit nice and snug and if you’re sure you’ve done it right, proceed by pulling the retention arm back to lock it in place. Good job, you just installed your CPU!

Next, let’s add the CPU cooler on top. In my case, mine came with a pre-applied thermal paste that looked good. In your case, you might have to apply the thermal compound yourself straight on top of the CPU. Do not do both though! If the cooler already has thermal paste, just use that. Notice the two metal brackets on the sides - we are going to use those to hold the fan and lock it in place nice and sturdy. For additional instructions, consult your CPU’s or motherboard’s manual.

We now have the CPU and the cooler installed. Way to go! The fan cable gets plugged into a slot on the motherboard usually labeled CPU fan, close to the CPU socket. In my case, it was just above it.

Next, let’s add our RAM sticks…

… and M.2 SSDs. A 250GB one for Windows and applications.

And another 500GB M.2 SSD for games and video editing projects.

Here’s how I’ve set up the RAM sticks and SSDs. Consult your motherboard manual which channels are optimal when inserting the sticks. For me, the best set up is as it’s shown in the picture below. Installing the M.2 SSDs is as simple as slotting them in and securing them down with a screw on the left side.

So far, so good. Now, let’s move this party inside the case.

Open the case and prep it by laying it on its side. I decided to quickly plug in the power supply unit, as it’s separate from the motherboard, but going to be required in the initial testing.

Secure the power supply unit with the provided screws and make sure to provide the required cables for the motherboard, CPU, and GPU for initial testing.

Now lay the case down flat and install the motherboard I/O shield. Add the 9 standoffs on top of which we’re gonna place the motherboard.

By holding the CPU cooler slowly and carefully place the motherboard in place over the 9 standoffs and matching the I/O ports into the I/O shield we attached to the case.

Secure the motherboard to the standoffs with the provided screws.

Plugin the 24-pin motherboard connector from the power supply, as well as the 8-pin CPU connector. You can also install the graphics card in a PCIe slot and plug in another 8-pin into it.

The fan cables go to headers labeled fan or system fan. The case’s USB 3.0 header goes to its slot (consult your motherboard manual), the power button, hard drive activity, and LEDs go in a very specific way to the headers at the bottom right of the motherboard. Look it up in the manual, it’s not very tricky but good to get right!

We are ready for the first test! Don’t close the side panels or assemble the system more than you need, in case something is wrong and we have to open it up again. Oh, it seems the stock CPU cooler has an RGB fan, neat!

If all works out and the system posts successfully, you can close up all the panels. Install your operating system of choice via a USB drive and enjoy! Do remember to turn on the XMP profile in the bios to enable faster memory speeds.

My build continued a bit further a week later when my Corsair LL120 RGB fans arrived.

The set includes quite a few cables, controllers and if you are new to this (like I was) can easily throw you for a loop. Luckily there are many YouTube videos you can lookup on how exactly to connect the fans and their RGB controllers.

For this setup, we first took off the stock fans that come with the case.

In a nutshell, fan power goes to the fan headers on the motherboard, much like any other fan. The RGB headers connect into a controller which you can mount to the inner wall on the back of the case using the provided double-sided sticky tape. This works very well and keeps the mess out of sight.

You can power the led and fan controllers with a SATA power connector so make sure you have at least one of those coming out of your PSU. In my case, I piggybacked off of the only SATA power cable I had for the hard drive.

I decided on 2 fans front and 1 back for a positive pressure airflow, where there should be slightly less dust hold up in the case, but the trade-off is the slightly slower exhaust of hot air. I can always change things around if needs be.

And that was the first PC build we did together with Anton! Yay! 🎉

End of a decade /2010-2020/

Thu, 26 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

You only get to do those “end of a decade” recaps only so often, so here goes. This post takes a look at the past decade, from the beginning of 2010 to the end of 2019.

However, to understand why the first thing I did in 2010 (quitting my job) was important, you do need a bit more context and so let’s start with that.

[1985 - 2010]

I’m someone who was born in 1985 in (still at the time) communist Bulgaria, graduated high school in 2004 and started university immediately after, just to drop off after 2 years in favor of a job. You can read more about my early job opportunities, adventures and fails here and here.

To keep things short I’m not going to focus much on the previous decade. I’m only going to mention that the university exchange program to the USA I participated in 2005 and 2006 was easily one of the most influential things in my life that set a course I’ve been on to this day in one way or another.

On the other hand, I wasn’t ‘feeling’ the degree in economics I was doing, or maybe just Bulgarian universities don’t ‘click’ with me, so I finally dropped out after 2 years in. At the time I got my first permanent, full-time job and focused on that. I started as a waiter in a 4-star hotel in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, called Sankt Peterburg. I had fun, met people, made friends, worked hard, got promoted to shift manager 6 months in and stayed at the job for about 3.5 years. I also picked up World of Warcraft and that was fun for a while. But at the beginning of 2010, I was a manager of a small restaurant (still under the same company), I worked a 9 to 5 and started to feel as if I don’t do something, that’s how my life would just keep going…

[2010 - 2020]

So I made a change - I quit! It was very hard and I felt so guilty handing in my notice, I felt as if I was betraying so many people. While my dad was the main driving force for my trips to the USA earlier, this time my mom was the driving force that sent me to Cyprus.

When I got there I lived on the other side of the island, she was in Paphos and I was in Ayia Napa, but the inspiration for this plunge came from her. On one hand, I was pretty scared - not in the literal sense, but like in general - shaken, from quitting doing what I was used to do for 3.5 years, just to go elsewhere to look for a job as a waiter and start from the beginning again? Did it make any sense? But either way, we did it - a friend and I. Our humble beginning in Cyprus did not come without challenges. We did not take a whole lot of money with us. Why? No idea. Luckily he had some friends and friends of friends, I had my mom on the other side of the island and worse comes to worst we would just go there?

After a few hectic first days, getting ripped off by paying sick amounts for rent for 1 week, he finally found a job and so did I. That allowed us to stabilize and after a while, things fell into place. Ayia Napa was an interesting place. That first year my job there is a small hotel as a waiter did not come without challenges, mainly because I had an abusive piece of a shit manager. I stuck it out till he was out of my face when I was able to start working on the pool bar and be away from him.

Slightly later that summer, I met my wife and the mother of my son. I just didn’t know she would be those things just yet. She was Finnish and as such went back to Finland when her vacation was finished. I was figuring things out and had no idea what I would do next.

I ended up going back to Bulgaria when the season in Cyprus was over, and given there was no going back to the hotel I worked in Plovdiv, I did another first - went to work at the Bulgarian ski resort of Banko for the winter. I met a lot of people I consider friends, many nice people and did my best at the job.

Sofi (my wife) came down to Bulgaria to meet me in early 2011. Months later I ended up going to Cyprus again for the summer season at the same job. Had more responsibilities, wrote the pool bar menu and had fun. Sofi came down there in June for a week, and then finally in August 2011, she moved to Cyprus. For a month we lived in different apartments until our friends suggested that my roommate would move in with another friend and Sofi and I could live together. And we did. Ever since.

The end of 2011 was a bit confusing as towards the end of the season in Cyprus, I was wondering what’s next and had ideas about going to the UK or else. In the end, we ended up going to Bulgaria for a while, live in Plovdiv, then went to Bansko together and worked for about 2 months at Kempinski, but after leaving most of our money for electricity bills and rent, figured we might as well not do anything and not have money, rather than work and not have money. So we went back to Plovdiv for the end of the winter in February 2012.

In March 2012 we went to Finland together for the first time on a week-long vacation that was a lot of fun. Then in April back to Cyprus for what would end up being the last season. I was in the same hotel there and Sofi got a decent job too. It was fun but now I was hitting another thing - this season life was starting to get too much - too much back and forth. We went through so many plans and options but ended up going back to Bulgaria for a few months after the end of the season in Cyprus. Finally, in December 2012 we moved to Finland.

This was another bigger and interesting chapter. It also did not come without challenges. I decided to apply for a university and go back to computers and software engineering, which I had done some way back in high school. In January 2013 I applied, in April I did my entrance examinations, in May I found out I was accepted and in August I started studying at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. That was a big win for me for which I’m happy and grateful! What wasn’t a big win but was a very needed necessity was to work for some money in the meantime. I was lucky to be offered a job by Sofi’s friend Maya in their previous bar workplace. I appreciated this as we needed the money and of course, I did what I had to do, but I despised this place and every second spent on it.

2013 was the first year ever I never went back to Bulgaria. We were establishing and building a life for ourselves in Finland for now. There were interesting things to explore about Finnish culture and nature. I met new friends in school, was excited to start studying again, this time something I cared about. I worked the bar job on weekends and was so happy when every weekend was over and I would go back to school on Monday. I did a crap ton of extra studying on the side and building projects.

2014 came around, the first year of school was over, things were settling in and in August we went to Bulgaria for a 3 week vacation. It was fun, but it was also funny that in some way I was also looking forward to going back and starting the next school year.

When 2015 came, it came with a bang. I was progressing nicely in school, projected to graduate ahead of schedule. I was due to do a work placement in the Autumn semester of 2015, so I needed to get some sort of a job and so we started looking already in February. In April we both quit the bar job we had been doing for a while now (it felt amazing to leave this place!). In May I had an interview and was offered a job that I started on June 8th, 2015 at F-Secure as a trainee for the summer for 3 months. On June 16th, 2015 Sofi told me she was pregnant.

The rest of the year was mainly focusing on pregnancy and doing what we had to do. Did some preparation for the baby - furniture etc. The work was going fine, I was happy, learning and was able to secure contract extensions.

In 2016 I was supposed to be back to school so I had to go to some classes while working a full-time job. Then in February 2016, our third member of the family came. Becoming a parent and having a child had been easily the biggest highlight of the decade. It’s unbelievably hard to put in words what a life changer it is, and how much it’s worth it every step of the way.

2016 was also the year when I managed to write my bachelor’s thesis and finally graduate in September 2016. The rest of it was rather calm - work was going well and a lot of focus was going into our son.

In 2017 it was a lot more of the same. Learning and teaching at work, spending time with family and son, picking up some interesting hobbies with smart home automation, writing my blog and towards the end of the year - started to fly FPV racing drones which also changed my life in a few ways.

2018 contained an interesting work project, a trip to see my family in Cyprus in September.

It’s not like things have slowed down since plenty is happening but there are so many moments and memories that are priceless and hard to describe or I simply don’t want to disclose. The idea is that when you have a kid and spend time with them you’ll know what I mean.

2019 has been an amazing year once again, I’m very happy about - from spending family time, to going on the trip to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, to writing more on the blog and starting a YouTube channel. And to changing jobs. After more than 4 years at F-Secure, it was time to move on and to do other things and learn other things. I met a lot of nice people at F-Secure, many of whom I consider friends. Good times.

If you want to read more about the past 2-3 years, I do write these year-in-review posts in excruciating detail, so go read there more if you must.

It’s been 10 years. This was the decade when I partied like crazy, the decade when I met my wife, when I went back to school, became a parent, became an engineer, started working as a software developer, flew and reviewed FPV racing drones. A decade. I’m not very happy with James Cameron for not releasing at least one of the upcoming Avatar movies, but I’m looking forward to them finally coming out next year.

In all seriousness though, it has been an adventure. We, humans, tend to (for the better part) remember the good things and filter out the bad stuff with time. That’s normal. That’s also not to say that those past 10 years came without challenges; in fact, there were plenty. Luckily most of the challenges are somewhat easy to deal with, some are much harder. You just gotta push through and believe. Don’t stop.

So what’s next? What’s in store for the next decade? Hopefully, we are alive and healthy to see. I’m looking forward to so much more technological and space progress. We need to work hard and bring awareness to real issues with climate change, renewable energy, social media psychological impact on a personal and societal level. As a tech enthusiast, I’m excited, but it’s also clear there are issues we need to solve that humanity had never had before. That’s ok, we can do it. I’m super excited to spend time with my son and do a ton of things. I’m excited about the projects I work on. I’m somewhat itching for adventure so hopefully, we can have some of that too.

What are you excited about for the next decade?

My 2019 year-in-review

Sun, 08 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I really love these yearly reflection posts and I am really looking forward to writing them every year. Not because I want to pat myself on the back or brag over stuff, but really because they show me in a very clear way what had happened and what had changed in the semi-long run. These posts uncover a lot of small details invisible to the naked eye on a daily basis, and it is very important to acknowledge what had gone well and what progress you have made in a specific area. This leads to reduced stress and anxiety levels, less feeling of failure and allows you to take a deep breath and chart out the roadmap for the next year.

I encourage you to try this out for yourself and see if it helps you realize how much you have achieved and what to focus on next. This post is structured such that topics are grouped, while still maintaining a roughly chronological order of how events transpired throughout the year.

Let’s do this!

I feel very fortunate and grateful to have a good job I love, interesting hobbies and side business that seems to be doing well. But the single most important thing is my family - my wife and son. They mean everything to me and are the sole inspiration for everything I do. This blog post is dedicated to you - Sofi and Anton.

🔭 Quick overview

When I think of 2019, these immediately come to mind as the main topics:

🛫 The trip to my hometown - Plovdiv, Bulgaria - for the first time in 5 years and for the first time with my son 💙
📈 Growth of the blog, collaboration opportunities - it has been amazing to have had the chance to produce so much high-quality content and to help people out with their FPV racing and freestyle drone questions.
📝 Writing a book - wrote 13 chapters, 14 000 words, kept refining the story, killed ideas, brought in new ideas, but ultimately stuck to the main setting and plot.
🎥 Starting 2 YouTube channels - over 334 raw flight test videos of test flights of different drones and equipment on my footage dump channel and 80 subscribers and 20 high-quality videos on my main FPVTIPS channel
💻 Career growth - I gave two talks at tech meetups, delivered a bunch of workshops at my now previous job, and oh yeah, changed jobs. I also created 2 open source libraries, a lot of closed source stuff, shipped a bunch of projects and learned many new things.

I also read more books this year, learned a lot about video editing and production, audio quality, had an amazing summer family vacation in Finland and grabbed an opportunity when one presented itself.

But how does that overview hold up against the goals I set for myself last year?

🚢 Shipping products, teaching and moving on

So at the beginning of the year, because winter in Finland is long and brutal, it’s a great opportunity to do indoors stuff and focus on one’s coding career 😉. I was streaming live coding on Twitch while working on some personal hobby projects and decided I’d give my first talk at a local JavaScript meet up. I ended up giving two talks. Worked hard on my slides for nearly 2 months (in my free time) and thanks to the topics being closely related to the work we were doing, got a lot of support and great feedback from my manager at the time - Marine, and she really helped me to nail this! Thanks, Marine, I really appreciated the help!

My single advice to everyone this year is on pro-activity. You have the power to shape your career in many different ways. It might take some time, but with consistency and effort, you can do it. In my case, I’m talking about my career as a software engineer and in particular the example of my work at F-Secure as a web developer.

I started at the company as a summer trainee and went through a few steps and contract extensions to end up spending a total time of 4 years and 3 months of my life there. I loved it, learned a lot and thaught a lot! This year, on September 13th, was my last at F-Secure.

I could easily (and probably will) write an entirely separate blog post on lessons learned from my job at F-Secure, so instead, I’ll focus here mostly on the straight to the point conclusions. During my time at F-Secure, I was fortunate enough to have had the support of my direct managers (some more so than others), which helped me to drive initiatives close to my heart that were business impacting. I’ve been involved in several projects I’m very happy to have been a part of, which allowed me to learn more, improve my skills and ship products.

My last “Hail Mary” at the job was the migration of our campaign web pages to a modern Gatsby + Netlify stack, the development of 2 React open-source libraries of shared componets and icons, and shipping a few Progressive Web App (PWA) projects. All within less than half a year.

👩‍🎓 Never stop learning and the next chapter

I have been approached by many recruiters over the past few years. Some I had decent conversations with, some not so much. Some that knew what they were talking about and some that didn’t. Mostly and mainly I’ve been discarding offers and actively saying I wasn’t looking for a new job at the time.

But eventually, a time comes to move on to new challenges, learning something new and experiencing something different. And one decent recruiter who I’ve been talking to for a while about different companies eventually called me and told me of this one particular drone company called Sharper Shape. Even at a glance, there seemed to be a lot of intersecting interests and areas between them and me, and where I wanted to go in the future, so after a few interview rounds it happened - I finally decided I’d move on, and they ended up hiring me.

And as a software engineering professional with a drone-related hobby, I feel very fortunate to work with and learn much more about data, AI, drones, images, metadata, processing, development, maps, sensors, lidar, trajectories, design and architecture of services, apps and utilities.

And while my specialty is in front end development (for now), I have to admit I enjoy doing some back end development and even working with a well-designed dev-ops setup. I’m dedicated, giving it my all and trying to utilize all learning opportunities while developing something useful and meaningful. Very excited about the times ahead!

And no, it’s not always easy and I have no intention of painting a fake picture - changing jobs can and will be hard, you will be staring at new code bases for hours, slowly trying to make sense of things, you could even go through many crappy interviews with different companies, but in the end, it’s always worth it and if you are stuck in a rut, I advise you to take the plunge and move on, it will be hard but once you get past it, you will thank yourself.

Finally, I’m happy to share I ticked off my goal of going to at least 5 tech meetups this year, and not only did I do, but I also spoke at 2 of those. Those are always fun, insightful and inspirational.

🛌 Downtime and focus shift is important too

Whether we’re talking about getting good amounts of high-quality sleep or spending time away from work, both are equally important for you to succeed in your professional life. I can not say I’m doing very good on the sleeping front - I average 6.5 to 7 hours a night, and probably could do a bit better. I have also noticed that I function best at 7 - 7.5 hours of sleep per night and I don’t need or want to do more than that.

But one thing I’m very happy about is that we had pretty high-quality vacations. Both the trip to Plovdiv, Bulgaria in May and the Finnish summer vacation in July. We visited a lot of places, had a ton of fun and enjoyed the time off as best as we could. It was also nice to have some good food, meet friends and relax.

Lastly but for sure not least, I did manage to keep my promise of flying much more this year than in 2018. I did uphold that and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I went many times flying on my own, as well as with my buddy, testing different quads and gear, just ripping packs! There’s nothing quite like FPV 🚁 💙!

A thing I had no idea would be happening but somehow did and was quite fun and amazing, that started from Anton watching a YouTube video with a Mickey Mouse game we ended up buying and playing ourselves. This lead to us getting a few more platformers, such as Crash Bandicoot remastered on Steam and a few others. We also played The Curse of Monkey Island and World of Warcraft Classic together (or rather explored) and hanging out together playing some games had been of such great help during my first month at the new job when it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with new information, technology, and codebases.

And before you start coming at me with the pitchforks, no we don’t only play games all the time, we also build a lot of Legos and work on other projects too :)

📖 My book writing adventure

So I’ve been preparing for my book writing adventure during this year’s NaNoWriMo and I … failed? Or did I? Let me elaborate. The goal of the event is simple - write 50 000 words during November. And I failed because I didn’t write 50 000 words. I wrote 4 000 and stopped. Now I can go on to explain that I got sick, on top of doing extra hours at a new job (which is a cognitive demand on another level in and of itself), but the fact is that had I wanted to, I could have pushed through and done it.

I made a conscious decision to stop. Not because I was lazy, not because I couldn’t have done it, but because I believe that it’s ok to drop things when you decide it’s good for you in the long term, and to prioritize other things.

You can’t plan everything in life and this year for me was a perfect example why. And that’s ok. That makes things a bit more fun too. I love planning and having a rough idea of where I wanna go, but how I get there and what I go through, I want that to be partially a surprise, an adventure.

Stay mentally sane and don’t push yourselves over the limit. It’s ok to drop things and re-prioritize as you go along.

If you’re wondering what’s next for my book writing project, I’m happy to say I haven’t dropped it at all. I will continue working on it, write weekly and go at a slower pace but consistently. I love how the stories and characters are taking shape in my head now that I’ve kept thinking about the main plot, setting, and characters for roughly a year.

The whole project so far has been a big learning opportunity on its own. Learning how to be ok to remove characters, plot ideas that would not make sense in the big picture, no matter how cool on their own. Learning from Brandon Sanderson’s writing class, the amazing Writing Excuses podcast! I also read more books this year as a function of wanting to write one. In particular, I enjoyed Logic’s Supermarket because he’s a hip hop artist and this was his first book. It was so interesting to analyze and see how he had tackled different parts of the story. Enjoyable as a read and enjoyable to learn from.

I think I was aware I would not become a writer in a year, not even in two years, but I have started the journey and I’m enjoying myself and looking forward to writing more.

🚁 FPVTIPS. Growth, drones, blog, YouTube

This has been one of the things that had made me the happiest this year! It’s something I’m very passionate about that had been growing both organically and supported by me in many ways. I also think I took the right decisions when they came up.

So, looking at last year’s list, it seems I wanted to go participate in a drone race (I actually had the chance but was not able to this summer), fly more FPV drones (definitely did that!) and grow fpvtips.com (I did that too in a different, better and unexpected way).

I started this blog in August 2017 and published my first FPV drones related article shortly after on September 18th, 2017. Please don’t judge it too much, as I have learned a lot about producing content since and have improved the quality and quantity of my posts by a mile. I’ve gone from casually sharing a thought or two, to writing posts with a reading time of 18-24 minutes, in-depth guides and tips with a lot of (and better) pictures, YouTube videos and more.

I’ve loved and enjoyed putting together all of these posts and sharing what I know with the community. And this brings us to one of the most impactful things that happened to the blog - in January this year I got an email from Banggood about a potential collaboration.

Banggood is a huge Chinese online shop that also has fairly popular drones and FPV gear line up. I would assume the 2 biggest reasons for many people to purchase from there are: low prices and free shipping. Especially when you are building a drone from scratch and when learning, it’s a very good option, as your initial investment will be quite low. The downsides are that shipping could take anywhere from 2-3 weeks to over a month in some cases (although they are mitigating this by opening warehouses in the US and Europe) and that depending on your experience customer service satisfaction can vary. I have never had any issues with customer service, or with getting refunds for poor quality items, but I have heard of people who have had a bad experience and in the spirit of full disclosure, as always, I call things for what they are. But indeed, I have not had any issues.

And so it began - in February they sent me the first review model and in March I published my first review of the Eachine Trashcan micro drone as a fruit of that collaboration. These types of collaborations are a win, win, win situation for the business, the blog and the readers. The business gets customers they otherwise wouldn’t, the blog gets to produce helpful content, the users get to learn more about the products before buying. This additional commitment also makes it harder for me to procrastinate and not publish content, which is a well-received extra motivator.

And that particular article had done very well; in fact, it easily is one of the biggest reasons for the blog’s growth this year with over 5.7k page views for the past 9 months, and a whopping 2k more than the next most popular article. I call those unicorns 🦄.

And here is the monthly / weekly / daily active users report since the start of the blog, a little over two years ago. You can easily see how releasing more content has impacted the blog.

To illustrate better the kind of content explosion I’m talking about, let’s briefly compare the content stats for 2018 vs 2019.

If we compare the stats for 2018 vs 2019, we have 10 vs 17 posts and 5500 words vs 32404 words. The word count increase alone is 589 %.

Here’s a breakdown by the word count of all FPV drone-related content released in 2018 on this blog:

And here is the content release in 2019:

In general, I’ve been writing much lengthier and in-depth posts with time to read in minutes anywhere from 1 to 21 minutes.

And getting items to review has directly fueled this and helped me to produce more and higher quality content, but really the biggest validator has been the people reading that content!

I really appreciate it and thank you for taking the time to read my reviews and guides, and I hope they are useful to you and you find what you came for. I would also like to thank SO MUCH all of my early supporters (and there has been a lot of you, which makes me feel honored). All the people who subscribed to the newsletter or the YouTube channel, or follow on social media; all the people who bothered to leave comments, suggestions, and constructive feedback! That feedback has been implemented into the way I make the videos and as such, you have direct input and influence on how and where the YouTube channel goes!

I’m trying to and hoping to provide as much value as possible while keeping things interesting and informative. I haven’t mentioned this so far, but putting together those blog posts with a reading time of ~ 15-20 minutes, takes a LOT of work. On average about 6 - 10 hours per post, depending on the amount of research and verification required. The actual drone and gear testing and evaluation takes much, much longer.

Initially I had no aspirations to do YouTube. I created the Georgi FPV YouTube channel mostly as a way for me to back up and put out there tons of raw flight footage.

But, as I’ve released a total of over 321 videos since I started this adventure in roughly early March, I got a lot of practice, I refined my uploading, tagging, content management skills and dipped my toes into the YouTube platform - an experience I would end up appreciating and needing soon enough.

And so finally, this led to the announcement of the FPVTIPS YouTube channel:

I’ve had a lot of fun producing content for the channel. Video editing and production are hard, especially at first. This may have been one of my biggest learnings this year - video editing, production, sound, transitions, rendering, storage, voice-overs, writing scripts and so much more. It has been fun, it has been challenging. I wish I were able to produce at least 1 video per week, but that hadn’t been possible so far. So I try to focus on quality and learning instead of quantity for now.

It has been so cool to see so many people subscribe over the past few months! Words can’t describe how much I thank you and I appreciate that! This is so much more important than you may realize because this and your comments act as a validator, that there is an audience for the content I produce, which in turn keeps me going! Thank you :)

I have such a long list of ideas and projects in the backlog for the channel, but only so much time. I do believe there will be a lot of interesting topics, however, and if you made it this far, I guess I can tease a few of the things that may be coming to the channel soon: snow gliding RC hovercraft, FPV racing cars, in-depth guide on battery charging and storage, and maybe even RC boats and submarines in the summer of 2020. 📺 Go subscribe and stick around to get notified when those videos come out.

Alternatively you can follow FPVTIPS on social media: Twitter, Instagram or Facebook

I’m looking forward to putting a lot more effort into the FPVTIPS YouTube channel in 2020. Hopefully working on creative ideas, improving the video and audio quality and do some giveaways.

✅ Goals for 2020

So 2020 is just around the corner - a new year, a new decade. What would be my goals in 2020? I think the most important things going forward would remain largely the same - family, software engineering career, FPV drones - flying, testing, releasing content for the blog and YouTube.

I like having quantifiable goals whenever possible because it’s a bit easier to validate whether those were completed or not.

⬜ Major goals:

🎈 Have a fun time with the family. Quality vacations whether in Finland or away.
💻 Build and work on cool projects. Learn new and get better at current software development skills.
👨‍🎓 Learn, teach and play around with new things with Anton (Legos, robots, game dev with Unity, RC boats, ??)
🎥 Release 3 videos per month for FPVTIPS on YouTube
📝 Produce at least as much content for the blog in 2020 as in 2019 (~ 33k words, ~ 17 posts ballpark)
📚 Diversify blog content further - articles on CrossFire radios and transmitters, long-range drone setups, Jumper radio, DJI digital FPV system
🌿 Health. Work out, eating better. More focus on this, please!
🚁 Fly FPV drones as much as possible 💙
🏡 Buy a house

◻️ Minor goals:

🚤 Do at least 2 fun projects - RC snow glider / RC boat / RC FPV car
🍿 Watch Avatar 2
📈 Reach 500 subscribers on the FPVTIPS YouTube channel
🤞 Watch Space X crewed launches
📼 Get better and more efficient at video production
🎤 Improve audio and video capture quality
🎮 Play some nice new games if any come out
🧪 Finish testingjavascript.com course
👨‍🏫 Finish at least 5 courses from leveluptuts.com
💻 Build our first computer with Anton

It’s a wrap!

I prefer leaving those posts on a high note, but I’d also like to take a moment to mention those no longer around us. You are always with us and in our hearts and we miss you! It’s good to remember every once in a while.

It’s also good to take a moment and appreciate those around us for what and who they are because they shape and define who and what we become.

I’m looking forward to so many things in 2020 and I hope you too. Cheers, and enjoy! See you back here in one year.

Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle review and setup

Sun, 17 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Microdrones are quickly becoming my favorite class of drones in 2019 and the Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle is one of the reasons why. Flying this thing makes me wonder how is it possible something that small to fly that much like a 5” quad and to be so fast and enjoyable.

I was fortunate enough to be able to compare the Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle to the GEPRC Phantom, which is also one of the best toothpick class drones that came out in the middle of 2019. And it’s funny that although both of those quadcopters are amazing they are also quite different in terms of what they offer.

So stay tuned if you are in the market for one of those. Let’s take a deeper look and compare them. I think this is going to be the right article for you.

📦 Unboxing
📝 Specifications
⚙ Setup
🚁 Flying
🔝 Upgrades
📑 Conclusion

If you prefer watching, check out the full video review on my YouTube channel:

📦 Unboxing

Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle comes in a nice hardshell case, great for packing in the quad and carrying it around.

This is everything you get inside the case.

You get 2 450mah 1S batteries with a PH2.0 connector, a USB charger board for up to 6 such batteries, some spare screws and standoffs, a manual and of course stickers.

Among the spare parts, we find an XT30 connector, in case you want to change the PH2.0 connector the quad comes with. We also have this PH2.0 “jumper” that is used to terminate one of the battery connectors so you could fly the quad on 1S.

You get 2 full sets (8 props) of the Avan Rush 2.5” props.

And of course the quad itself.

📝 Specifications

The all in one board and the camera used in the Tinyhawk Freestyle are the tried and tested ones from the Emax Tinyhawk S (F4 (MATEKF411RX Firmware), with a 5A, rated 4 in 1 ESC). The frame is a carbon fiber unibody frame supporting a top-mounted battery. The micro USB port on the all in one board is conveniently exposed and easy to access for Betaflight configuration.

A capacitor is installed on the battery terminals on the board. The built-in SPI based receiver’s antenna is guided out the back and is not likely to get chopped off by the props.

Speaking of batteries, this drone allows for top mounting of the batteries. The battery connector is Emax’s interesting solution to allow plugging in 2 PH2.0 connectors (or just one if you use the jumper for the other slot).

The motors are the Emax branded TH1103 7000KV, spinning up Avan Rush 2.5” props.

CMOS camera, with no possibility to easily, adjust the angle (although I haven’t needed to do that in my tests). 25mW VTX and a VTX antenna coming up and away from the side, out of the props’ reach.

The quad comes in at 46.1 grams dry weight…

and with a couple of the 450mah batteries, you get in the package…

the all-up weight is 71.4 grams + another 4 x 1.3 = 5.2 grams for the props. Which brings us to a total of 76.6 grams.

Be careful with the provided charging board, not a biggie, but the battery slot plastic fell off when I disconnected a battery from it for the first time. You can just put it back in.

Or use one of these boards, which are a bit better (but not miles better really). And at least allow charging on the go via an XT60 source plug.

The overall build quality is pretty high with a lot of minor details handled very professionally and neatly. As always, reluctantly I’ve smacked it around quite a bit while flying over concrete, and there have been no issues with any component so far.

⚙ Setup

To get ready for flying, we need to:

🔗 Bind the receiver to a radio

You can access the bind button fairly easily underneath the quad and depress it with a hex head screwdriver for example. If you do use a screwdriver or anything else that conducts electricity, make sure you press the button only and you don’t touch other components to prevent shorting the board.

Binding is the process of uniquely associating a receiver to a transmitter module. A transmitter module can be bound to multiple receivers (not to be used simultaneously). A receiver can only be bound to one transmitter module.

Hold the bind button for 2 seconds while the flight controller is already on. When the Blue LED is on, it means the receiver is in BIND MODE
Turn on the transmitter, make sure it is set to D8 mode, and then set it into bind mode. When the BLUE LED on the flight controller starts flashing, it means bind successfully.

Power cycle the flight controller and take your radio out of bind mode.

That’s it, the receiver should now be bound.

While we are here, we can assign a few switches in the MIXER tab. We need those for the Betaflight configuration in a bit. I’ve assigned switches to CH5, CH6, CH7. At the very least you need 1 switch for arming, so if you don’t care for different flight modes, buzzer, turtle mode or anything else, it’s ok to have only 1 switch assigned.

If you’d like to (recommended but not required), you can fine-tune the stick endpoints via the OUTPUTS screen on your radio. I’ve written previously on how to do this step by step.

Next stop Betaflight.

👀 Check the Betaflight configuration

If you followed along, you should not have your props installed yet, but if you do, REMOVE THEM. It’s always a good idea to do that, as the quad might flip out and cut you up or break your things. Not worth it, just take them off 😀. You can access the micro USB port on the left-hand side of the flight controller board.

You can calibrate the accelerometer in the Setup tab if you have the Tinyhawk Freestyle on a leveled surface.

Not much to do on the ports tab, this is the default config.

In the Configuration tab, we see the Tinyhawk Freestyle comes in the default props in mode, so let’s keep that in mind when installing the props later. MOTOR_STOP is off, which is good.

Next, verify that the receiver mode is set to SPI RX support and then FRSKY_D if you have opted in for a FrSky based built-in SPI receiver like I did. Also, make sure AIRMODE is switched on, so that whenever you do flips or rolls and you cut the throttle to 0 during the maneuver, the quad won’t completely shut down the motors.

And here is the last page of the configuration tab default settings.

Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle Betaflight Power & Battery tab default settings.

Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle Betaflight PID Tuning tab default settings. I didn’t change any settings here, to test the configuration out of the box.

Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle Betaflight Receiver tab default settings. Pay attention to the CHANNEL MAP and make sure it matches the setup on your radio. The default TAER1234 matched perfectly the default config on my Taranis X-Lite, so I had to make no changes here.

Here you can test and make sure that the sticks on your radio correspond to the correct channel. If you plug in a battery while the props are off, you should get real-time feedback in the Betaflight interface, whenever you deflect a stick or flip a switch.

In the modes tab, we can assign and change the functionality of switches. Most importantly make sure you have an arm switch. This is usually set to AUX1, which maps to channel 5 on your radio. You can also assign flight modes, buzzer, turtle mode on another switch.

Default configuration:

Here you can also test your switches in real-time if you power on the quad (props off). A mode is activated when the yellow notch falls within the yellow range indicator for it.

I fly predominantly only in acro mode, and just a bit when testing and evaluating new quads in horizon mode.

My configuration:

In the OSD tab, you can adjust the position of elements to your liking.

It’s always a good idea to run the dump command in the Betaflight CLI tab, which allows you to save your starting config to a text file. Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle CLI dump

🌀Install the propellers

Now that we are done setting up the drone, we can install the props and head outside for a maiden flight. Because the Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle is set up in ‘props in’ mode, we want to put on the propellers like it’s shown in the picture below.

Push down the prop on the motor shaft firmly, but carefully as not to bend it. Secure each prop in place with 2 small screws and a hex-head screwdriver.

Looking good and ready to take to the skies!

A little tip when putting on the batteries is to have them on top of each other with the power lead of each battery on the opposite side. It’s not a biggie, but it does make it easier when plugging in the battery connector.

Make sure the leads are firm and stay in the center, away from the props. There should be no issues unless the batteries you use have very long leads. I haven’t had any issues with my GNBs.

Finally, another little tip is to remove the foam from the carry case and observe that the quad fits nicely in there with the props on. Phew 😅.

In case I missed something and you lost your paper manual, you can also refer to its online version.

🚁 Flying

The Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle flies spectacularly. It’s one of the quads that flies so well that I had absolutely no desire to do with it anything further in terms of tuning. I just want to fly it all the time. Here’s the TL;DR recap if you don’t feel like reading my detailed impressions of the quad.

What does it do well? Flight characteristics, handling, flight times, battery reusability, easy to set up and to fly.

What could be better? Range.

Maiden flight, stock 2 x 1S 450mah batteries.

Immediately during the maiden flight right after I took off I noticed how much power this thing has and how locked in the tune is. Great job by Emax there. A big part of how the Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle handles is thanks to the amazing Avan Rush 2.5 inch tri-blade props. Those give you really precise handling in turns. At the same time, they don’t seem to consume a ton of amps. The Tinyhawk Freestyle is so lightweight and zips around so fast that you really won’t be able to believe how fast it goes from the moment you take off as soon as you punch that throttle.

A thing to note is that the camera is a 4x3 camera and depending on what goggles you have if you’re using them in 16x9 mode, it might take a bit to adjust to the fisheye effect. The good news is that you do get used to it after a while.

The Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle flew so well on these 1s 450mah batteries that come with it that I legit had no desire to even test other batteries. It flew great, handled easily and the thrust to weight ratio on it was spot on, at least in my opinion.

You just completely lose yourself and enjoy flying around at what seems to you like really high speeds. You get flight times of 4-5 minutes easily even if you keep the throttle at more than 40% the whole flight. Crazy! I don’t think I’ve ever had a quad that efficient, while still feeling powerful and zippy. Interestingly, you get almost the same flight times whether you fly it 1S or 2S. And the performance is also hard to differentiate. It feels almost a bit weird but that’s how it is. I do fly it mostly on 2S though in any way.

Here is the flight footage of the Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle on 1S stock 450mah battery.

The battery choice is perhaps one of the biggest upsides of this drone set. Because Emax has opted in to use 2 PH2.0 connectors, it allows you to reuse your batteries, in case you have any of those lying around.

For a lot of people, including me, that’s gonna be a big deal! Those are always easy to charge, they have a great capacity to weight ratio for these little quads. And if you have none of those lying around, you could replace the PH2.0 connectors with the provided XT30 connector, in case you have more of this type of batteries.

For lolz and science I even flew it on these Eachine 300mah 1S lipos and it still flew over 4 minutes with little to no voltage sags.

Pretty decent! This is just to say that if you have some of those batteries lying around you can reuse them with the Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle. But if you are buying, I still recommend getting the GNB 450mah 1S batteries.

In terms of flight characteristics, I’m a bit curious to try out some bi-blade props on the Tinyhawk Freestyle, although I also got to admit that it is completely unnecessary, as the stock build, tune, and props already provide an amazing and very enjoyable flight experience.

And here I have to also mention how easy is to go out flying with this toothpick. Put a bunch of batteries to charge, leave the house in less than 30 minutes, fly anywhere as it’s easier to find a spot for such little drone, without bugging people. Very, very easy.

And this is how I enjoy flying this drone nowadays - just throttle up and never let go, pretending I’m a racer 😅. I honestly completely forget this is a micro drone when I’m flying it.

🔝 Upgrades

I don’t have a lot to mention in terms of potential upgrades. Most of my ideas are for testing different props. But honestly, it’s not necessary.

One thing I might consider doing and could suggest you do as well if it is easy to pull off (and I don’t think it would be very hard), is to add a full range receiver. It should hopefully not ruin the flight characteristics with a few added grams but will add a lot of enjoyment in terms of flexibility and how far you can fly. I have to admit I gotta be pretty mindful of this one flying around and not going too far away. Not a bit issues, but good to be aware of it.

I would not add an HD split-type camera to this one, as this will surely ruin the flight characteristics, as the Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle is indeed super lightweight and every little bit on top will be felt and will change things a lot.

You swap out the battery connector for an XT30 connector if you have more batteries with that connector. In my case, I’m thrilled the Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle allows me to reuse my 1S 450mah GNB batteries, which are pretty high quality and the quad flies superb on them, so I’ll be leaving the battery connector as is.

📑 Conclusion

2019 has been a great year for these micros. There are a lot of amazing and great value toothpick class drones out there. I feel like the best thing about them is that you can pick one that is directly tailored to your situation.

And if we compare the GEPRC Phantom with the Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle one of the things that immediately becomes obvious is that even though both of these quads fly awesome, they are also so different and would fit different scenarios, or different pilots.

From what you get in the box with the Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle it seems to be best suited to someone who has a lot of those 1S 450mah batteries with a PH2.0 connector. The quad flies amazing with those, you will get pretty long flight times of like four to five minutes. This is a big deal because it would allow you to reuse your existing batteries.

The flight experience is super enjoyable and because the quad is quite easy to handle I would say that it’s suitable for people newer to the hobby. Maybe like practiced beginners.

Some of the drawbacks worth mentioning here are the lack of a full range receiver. I think the board supports installing one, but don’t quote me on that and do some research first if this is important for you. I would also assume that the added weight should not be too much and would not ruin the awesome flight characteristics.

The camera is fairly decent and very-very lightweight, so I understand why they’ve picked it up. I’m skeptical to believe you could make this one work with a split-type camera, but I guess it’s probably not impossible. Maybe a RunCam Split 3 Nano could work? We’ll have to wait and see I might do that mod in the future.

But regardless if you’re just getting into the hobby or you have been flying drones for a while now, the Emax Tinyhawk is synonymous with the word fun. It’s got a locked-in tune and is pure pleasure to rip around anywhere. Like, really anywhere. It’s relatively quiet and is not gonna bother anyone if you decide to fly it in a park or a more populated area.

Either way, have fun and happy flying!

GEPRC Phantom - My favorite toothpick for 2019

Fri, 18 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I was super excited to try out a couple of ‘toothpick’ class drones. If already at this point you are like: ‘toothpick, what?!’, check out KebabFPV’s YouTube channel for more context. The TL;DR is small, lightweight, micro drones that zip around fast and sport bi-blade propellers (mostly).

The Geprc Phantom is one of the best toothpick class micro drones that came out this year and I feel very fortunate and happy to have decided to try out exactly this one.

Let’s see exactly why!

📦 Unboxing
📝 Specifications
⚙ Setup
🚁 Flying
🔝 Upgrades
📑 Conclusion

If you prefer watching, check out the full video review on my YouTube channel:

📦 Unboxing

The quad arrives in a little cardboard box like other GEPRC products. Not as fancy as a hardshell case, but it gets the job done just right.

Inside, everything included the drone is packaged or wrapped in plastic bags.

Here are all the box contents laid out on the desk. We get some stickers and the vtx channel table card, as well as the FrSky XM+ receiver instructions (in my case; you can order the quad with a variety of receivers).

We also get a couple of battery velcro straps, antenna tubes, and tips, a hex driver, rubber battery pad, soft foam arm landing legs.

And these stock props.

You get a total of 8 props (4 sets).

And finally here is the GEPRC Phantom unwrapped.

📝 Specifications

The motors are CR1103 8000KV motors, the quad is claimed to be rated for 2S - 3S or 2S - 4S (I saw both entries on the product page, but fear not, I tested it on 4S for you so you don’t have to, more on that later). An XT30 connector is used for power delivery.

The frame is stiff, unibody and resembles a stretched X frame.

GEPRC has installed a capacitor, which if not a nice touch, is starting to be a requirement with most micros nowadays. The frsky xm+ receiver antennas are routed out the back through a small 3d printed part, which works great. The vtx antenna in a similar fashion is routed through a hole in the top frame.

The FPV camera is Caddx EOS2 - very lightweight and does what it does pretty well. The VTX goes up to 200mW, the stack is a 16 x 16 with an F411 flight controller, and 12A rated ESCs.

Here is how the XM+ receiver was zip-tied to the available space in the back of the quad.

⚙ Setup

To get up and running, this is what we need to do:

🔗 Bind the receiver to the radio

Same procedure as always for any XM+ receiver: press and hold the bind button on the receiver while plugging in the battery. Set the radio in bind mode. End bind mode on the radio and power cycle the quad. At this point, the LED should be solid green and a stable link should be established.

📡 Configure RSSI, channel mapping and modes in Betaflight

First, add 2-3 switch inputs via the Mixer screen on your radio (I’m using a Taranis X-Lite, but this process is identical for most Taranis radios).

Next, whenever we are configuring a quad in Betaflight, remember to always take off the props. Even on those little drones. It’s a good habit to get into.

Here are the most important things to check in Betaflight when setting up a new quad.

In the configuration tab check if the quad is in ‘props in’ or ‘props out’ mode. It’s more common to be in ‘props in’. As you can see in the picture below, that’s how the GEPRC Phantom is setup out of the box.

You should be running DSHOT600 and make sure MOTOR_STOP is off.

Next, if you are using the FrSky XM+ receiver, make sure RSSI_ADC is off and the receiver is set to SBUS.

The rest of the configuration on this tab is not super critical, except for making sure AIRMODE is on so that your motors can keep spinning even when you pull the throttle all the way down in a flip, for example.

In the Receiver tab you wanna set the Channel Map to match your transmitter’s settings. In my case, I had to change the AETR1234 to TAER1234. That makes sure that your radio communicates to the quad on the right channels and it won’t flip out when you arm it.

Next, set RSSI Channel to AUX12 which will give us signal strength telemetry.

In the Modes tab, it is finally time to set up our quad for taking off by designating an arming switch. For example, if you have assigned in your radio’s mixer setting a switch to Channel5, that’s what AUX1 is here in the modes tab. If you also added a switch to Channel6, this is represented here by AUX2 in the dropdown.

You wanna watch the small yellow pin and make sure it is within a range you define with the sliders. If you plug in your quad (props off!) you can test how your switches work in real-time, as they will move the yellow pin when you activate a switch.

So make sure you have a working arming switch and you are good to go. You can also set up different modes, beeper, and turtle mode if you want to. I just fly acro so, I make sure that Angle or Horizon modes are not activated.

In the OSD tab I only had to turn on Rssi value to be displayed.

Finally, here’s the rest of the configuration and a link to a CLI dump of the GEPRC Phantom’s settings.

⛓ Install: antenna tubes, landing legs, battery rubber pad, velcro strap, and props

All those things are quite straight forward but should not be underestimated, as the last thing you want when flying your brand new quad is to chop off the receiver antennas. And speaking of chopping off, be careful when cutting the antenna tubes as you don’t want to clip the antenna itself too.

Then just put on the antenna tube tip. And do the same as the other receiver antenna.

Because we’re gonna be mounting the battery on top, we can install some landing legs, from soft sticky foam. Cut short pieces and stick them under all 4 arms.

Finally, install the rubber battery pad which helps a lot with grip and holding the battery in place. Also, run a velcro strap around the top plate of the frame.

All in all, this adds up to a total all-up weight of 63 grams without a battery (probably a couple of grams lighter with the bi-blade props).

And 83.9 grams with a Betafpv 2S 350mah battery.

Let’s go fly this quad around!

🚁 Flying

And fly it I did 😍! I like testing drones extensively and getting some proper stick time before I dive in to review them. And in this case, I’ve been able to fly this thing for about a month give or take.

When it comes to flying the GEPRC Phantom quickly became one of my favorite drones to fly.

And while I’m somewhat new to the whole toothpick class drone action, I have a fair bit of understanding about it and how it should work. , In general, you want your models to be very lightweight. I’m oversimplifying it, and there are a lot of factors and combos you could try, tweak and try different props, motors, AUW (all-up weight).

That’s why I wanted to and managed to carry out many tests flying with different batteries and props. And there’s, even more, to do in the future.

So I have flown it on a 3s 300 mah battery, 2s 350 mah battery and I even tried flying it on a 4S 520 mah battery, but that last one didn’t work out so well. I also tried 2 different times of props.

🔋🔋🔋 3S 3️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ mah

Here is the 3S 300 mah battery maiden flight.

Immediate impressions from the maiden:

So quiet! I could barely hear the props just 30 meters (32 yards) away!
Very efficient, draw little amps (~ 2-4)
Smooth flying and easy handling
The tune is locked in!
I could get into this!
Where is the barrier between this and a 5-inch quad?
Flight time’s a bit short on this battery we need to test other types

And I have so many thoughts I want to share with you, this little fella made me think and think hard.

It handles nice in corners, although me coming from tri-blade higher pitch props, I do expect a bit more grip in turns. I love the Avan flow 5 props on mini quads, but they also draw significantly more amps at the higher end of the throttle. This is easy to get used to in just a few minutes. Now, in terms of speed the GEPRC Phantom toothpick is plenty fast and legit flies like a 5 inch quad for the better part.

It is genuinely fun to fly!

And I’ve had it for a little over a month now and I’ve ripped a ton of batteries through it even though the weather was mostly bad and rainy and cold with little opportunities to fly. What I’ve also noticed was that I started going for dedicated runs with micro drones out.

I always used to go out flying with my 5-inch quads. But I found myself going with just the micros and still having a ton of fun. If anything it makes things even easier, because charging the batteries is much faster, discharging them after coming home if you have leftover unflown ones is also faster, finding a spot to fly (depending on where you live this may be a big one for you or not a concern at all). I have a few spots around here where I really wouldn’t fly a 5-inch quad but are perfect for a toothpick.

The only thing I would like to improve on this quad is the flight time! It’s not the lousiest (around a little under 3 minutes depending on how much you push it), but not the best on my 3S 300mah and 2S 350mah batteries. I love flying the GEPRC Phantom so much, that if I could only nail the flight time with some sort of props and battery combo that fits those motors, I would be very, very happy! And this is what lead me to want to do a lot of different tests. The target was to get a flight time of between 3:30 - 4:00 mins.

🔋🔋 2S 3️⃣5️⃣0️⃣ mah

Well, you could technically get a flight time of 4 minutes even on a Betafpv 2S 350mah battery with some preservation phases between pushing it and if you run the battery down waaaay low as I did 😬. It was fun though! I also found my favorite spot to fly the Phantom.

Flying the GEPRC Phantom on a 2S 350mah battery, stock bi blade props.

In between of battery testing I also did some prop testing and that was mainly for 2 reasons: improving handling in turns and oscillations from the stock props after the slightest impact.

🌀🌀 HQ 2.5 inch bi-blade props

The stock props fly well, but even the smallest bump causes them to oscillate on subsequent flights. Maybe the plastic is too flimsy, I don’t know. It’s also funny but it doesn’t seem to impact the flight characteristics, but the noise is annoying and especially so given how quiet this quad is otherwise. I was also told recently that the HQ 2.5 inch bi-blade prop (which looks very similar if not the same as the stock props) is stiffer and does not have the same issues. We will have to wait and see on that one. Those are in the mail and I will update as soon as possible.

Update: And here we go! The HQs fly really nice, no complaints, but I still prefer the (SPOILER ALERT) Avan Rush 2.5 inch tri-blade props 😅.

🌀🌀🌀🌀 Avan 2 inch quad-blade props

This one was for science and out of curiosity and the conclusion is: lol, don’t do this. It made no sense, made the quad fly like garbage, drew a lot more amps and didn’t feel nice at all. This type of prop is better left to cinewhoops.

🌀🌀🌀 Avan Rush 2.5 inch tri-blade props

This one, though, was a winner for me! The Avan Rush 2.5 inch tri-blade props improve the handling in turns and once again give me this “point and go” feeling when flying the GEPRC Phantom. At the same time, these props did not take away from the speed or ruin the flight characteristics in any way and even the amp draw (where I thought the biggest trade-off would be) was increased insignificantly. Jackpot!

🔋🔋🔋🔋 4S 5️⃣2️⃣0️⃣ mah

The 4S flight didn’t work out so well. Partially because of the battery velcro strap (used stock, although too short). I guess it in a turn the strap snapped off and the battery fell on one side and pulled the quad down as it’s quite heavy. Check it out towards the end of the video. This happened a few times, and I think I lost a motor due to it.

I’m still carrying out the investigation and will update here with more info as soon as I know more. On Banggood’s product page and GEPRC’s site, I saw somewhat contradicting information regarding how the quad is rated. I saw the information for both 2S-3S and 2S-4S. At this time, I don’t think I burned a motor due to flying on a 4S battery, rather when the battery fell to the side, maybe the quad went crazy trying to overcompensate with that particular motor? Is that a thing?

My fault, I don’t blame the parts and when testing all sorts of crazy things, failures are bound to happen, but in the end, I’m still happy to do and share that test with you so maybe many others can learn from it, without losing a motor 😅

My main motivation for the flight was to increase the flight time. Of course, going up in battery size adds weight and this is your toothpick’s nemesis.

Flight characteristics:

The quad was noticeably heavier (not in a good way either)
It wasn’t going any faster compared to flying on smaller 2S and 3S batteries
Flight time did not in fact increase

This battery was a stretch and I kind of knew that going in. Probably my next test will be on a 2S 450 or a 3S 400? That must be the perfect spot for the GEPRC Phantom.

🔝 Upgrades

In terms of upgrades, I would recommend changing the stock props to similar but stiffer like the HQ 2.5-inch bi-blade prop. Or alternatively, you could try to find something else that works well for you, as I mentioned I like the Avan Rush 2.5 inch tri-blade props because of the control authority.

The other thing I would consider upgrading (if it works out) is the camera. This is not because the FPV camera is bad, not at all, it works perfectly, but I am curious if I could get some HD footage from this quad if I upgrade to a RunCam Split 3 Nano camera.

A full range receiver (✅), a flight time of ~ 4 minutes on average, even better handling without sacrificing speed (✅) and HD video recordings while flying this quad would make me beyond happy. I don’t think I want anything else if I could get those and I will be working on getting there during the winter, so stay tuned.

📑 Conclusion

There are currently maybe about 4-5 awesome value for money toothpick class drones out there and the GEPRC Phantom is definitely among them. It’s a great value for what you get, and I hope I managed to convince you how much fun it is to fly! This is my most thorough and the longest flying section of a blog post I’ve ever written. I just flew it so much, very quickly and wanted to try out so many things.

The tune and the flight characteristics are great, having a full range receiver is a blast! I loved flying my Mobula7 HD for the better part of 2019, it’s come to show me how powerful micro drones have gotten. In my opinion, the Mobula7 HD flies awesome. The GEPRC Phantom flies even better! And so much faster. It just makes you wanna pretend to be a racer and zip around at top speeds around the park. The good news here is that it is very quiet and unless you are very reckless, you should do no one any harm or cause disturbance or annoyance.

Also if staying under the 250 grams limit is important to you, this is a great option to do so, and still fly almost as if you are flying a 5-inch quad. I should also mention that unwillingly but admittedly I gave the Phantom quite the test flying it over concrete all the time and smacking it into the ground a bunch of times, always at high speed. No issues whatsoever, no lost screws, no issues with the frame.

Having a full range receiver on it is a big difference if you compare to other micro drones with an SPI based built-in receiver. No more of that “have to stay within less than 100 meters from myself or I’m gonna get a failsafe”.

Flying a toothpick like the GEPRC Phantom has been somewhat of a mind shift too. I want to go explore more and new fpv spots. There is less hassle in getting ready for flying or coming back home from flying. My goal is not to bash on flying 5-inch quads, though. I still love flying those, but it has been very interesting to me that flying micros like that is doable with the same level of satisfaction. I went out on a dedicated micro drone flight session many times and it was a lot of fun! Just my 2 cents, your experience may vary depending on what you prefer.

I will be testing even further with that quad during the winter (or maybe even build my dream toothpick), but I think that if I add an HD camera to the GEPRC Phantom and use a slightly bigger battery that would be my dream quad. We’ll have to wait and see, so sign up for the newsletter or YouTube channel and stay tuned.

I will also have an upcoming review on the Emax Tinyhawk Freestyle very soon and we will see how those 2 compare to each other. There are some interesting trade-offs and depending on what you want either can easily be the better option for you.

But in the end I can easily recommend the GEPRC Phantom because I can easily say that if you buy this one, you’re gonna have a ton of fun and enjoy yourself.

Happy toothpick flying!

P.S.: Here’s the complete playlist of more than 28 (and counting) raw flight footage videos of the Phantom on my second channel:

How to dispose of a lipo battery

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT

If you are into FPV, chances are sooner or later you will have to dispose of some old, unsafe or just no longer working lipo battery. And that’s a dangerous task if not carried out correctly! So I’d like to start this post with a very important disclaimer:

If you don’t know what you’re doing or about to do, STOP! This is not a guide or a DIY tutorial! This post is about sharing my experience with you, with the hope of helping people not to burn down their houses. Lipos are serious business, they DO EXPLODE and they DO SET THINGS ON FIRE. Proceed at your own risk! I take no responsibility for anything that might happen to you if you decide to continue. Be smart and be careful.

So back to our story. Sooner or later you will get a dead cell in a pack or a cell with significant voltage difference than the rest of the cells at which point it could be a bit of a risk to try and charge the pack.

Again, I’m not gonna get into how to fix such issues. I have read about people even successfully reviving cells, bringing packs back up to voltage, but this is what I think:

If a pack starts to be faulty, deal with it. It’s not worth the risk of burning down your house or worse just to use a pack a couple more times.

There are a lot of weird and wildly unsafe ways of disposing of a lipo and I’m not even going to mention them here. You can find out about them easily with some google-fu.

One of the ways to dispose of a lipo that I consider safest is to deplete all their energy slowly to kill the cells. There are many ways to do so, but here’s what’s worked for me - using led lights of some sort. It takes a long time but it’s fairly safe based on my experience. That being said, I still only do it when I’m in the room keeping an eye on the battery; I wouldn’t leave it unattended and don’t recommend that.

If you have one of those 1S whoop battery charging board, you could plug in the lipo to kill in the XT60 port, and use the USB 5V output port to power anything running off of 5V. For instance, I have an LED strip in my room that I can power using this method and while this does take a while because the LED strip is so energy efficient, it works nevertheless.

You could also use a 12W or 21W bulb, for example like the one you might have on your smoke stopper. A nice little bonus in my smoke stopper is that even after the main bulb goes off I can see that there is still some energy in the battery because the switch LED stays powered on. This on its own takes ages to drain any remaining energy, but if you are at this point that nothing else powers on anymore, that’s probably good enough for the next step.

And while those methods have worked nicely for me, I decided to grab one of these URUAV lipo killers and do things in a similar and even easier manner.

I used it to finish off a couple of battery packs I needed to get rid of. This thing goes for about $6-$7 and is nicely build and easy to use. You can discharge your batteries via the XT60 on board or by plugging in your battery’s balance plug in the pins. Just make sure you plug incorrectly if you use the pins.

I’ve also noticed you can set the desired discharge to voltage, although I have yet to use that option, because I mainly use my charger to set my batteries to storage voltage, but if you have nothing else to help you discharge your batteries to storage voltage, I would assume this tiny board could help a bit, albeit probably very slow.

Here’s what you get when you order one of these lipo killer boards. An acrylic stand and standoffs as well as some nuts.

You put it together like this.

And there it is, voila! This is nice because it protects at least a bit from accidental shorts by touching together the XT60 terminals underneath the board.

Which brings us to the last step in the disposal process: shorting and recycling.

DO NOT PROCEED IF YOU ARE UNSURE WHETHER YOU HAVE COMPLETELY SPENT THE BATTERY’S ENERGY

Also highly advised if possible to do that outside. I do that in the field just in case. In my case, I had done a good job and saw no sparks when shorting the XT60 leads and a few small sparks when shorting the balance leads.

Cut the wires one at a time, as if you try just both ground and voltage at the same time in the same snip, you might short them already right then and there. Either way, touch the leads carefully to finally short and kill the battery completely.

You can then save the balance plug, XT60 plug, and all the leads in case you need them for something. Check your local hobby shop for recycling the lipos, or if there isn’t one, some electronics stores might accept you recycling your lipos there.

GEPRC CinePro 4K Cinewhoop: review, complete setup, flight footage

Sat, 07 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT

It seemed to me that on the cinewhoop front, there have been a lot of advancements lately, in particular, models such as the GEPRC CinePro that carry a Caddx Tarsier 4K camera with 2 separate sensors, definitely catch the eye and excite me. In this review and setup guide, we’re gonna have a look at the advanced version of this drone with the FrSky XM+ receiver (BNF).

One of the quads I’ve flown the most during 2019 is the Mobula7 HD (which I love flying! - just look at the number of videos in that playlist on my channel). And while in general I prefer and started with 5-inch drones, there’s something super cool about being able to whip this little quad out and just fly it in a park without disturbing other people. My only desire with the Mobula7 HD was to just have a full range receiver, as the built-in SPI based receiver only gets you about 100 meters or so. This was the other main reason why I was very curious to test the GEPRC CinePro as it comes with a full range receiver.

Whether you are a cinewhoop veteran, or just considering getting into cinewhooping, I think you will find this post useful. Let’s get to it!

📦 Unboxing
📝 Specifications
⚙ Setup
🚁 Flying
📑 Conclusion

If you prefer watching, check out the full video review on my YouTube channel:

📦 Unboxing

When I think of the GEPRC CinePro 4K cinewhoop unboxing experience, I think of two things: minimalistic and high-quality gear.

Once you open the box, you are immediately presented the quad, which looks like a piece of art, but more on that in a sec.

The quad is wrapped in this protective film.

You get a card with a VTX frequency table …

… some stickers, a couple of velcro straps, antenna tubes and an extra set of spare props. Those props are Dalprop Cyclone Q2035C, quad blade high-quality propellers. The props that the quad comes with already installed are also high quality - Emax Avan 2 inch. Both sets offer very different flight experiences, as we’ll see a bit later.

The components are very high quality, the quad is gorgeous and the assembly work - top notch. Shiny solder joints, well-placed antennas and shrink wrap, really superb build quality, which is great, given that the GEPRC CinePro 4K comes with a price tag of about $270.

📝 Specifications

Sturdy high-quality carbon fiber frame. Dead cat shape and 115mm motor to motor diagonal distance, versus 69mm between the front and the back motor. This makes sure you never get your props in the shot.

Thick plastic prop guards, not flimsy at all. The props are secured with 2 screws each. Also, note that this quad comes configured in props out mode, so pay attention to that if you are swapping props.

I fly almost all my quads in what I believe also to be more common props in setup.

Metal cage to protect the Caddx Tarsier 4K camera, which is easily the star of this whole show 💃.

As you can tell the camera tilt is not at all aggressive which is somewhat expected when we are talking about a cinewhoop, as the goal is probably not so much to rip packs like crazy, but rather capture slower, more cinematic footage.

Plenty of space on top for mounting a battery, as well as 2 slots for guiding the velcro straps through.

Receiver antennas mounted on the front arms, pointing backward, at a 90-degree angle to each other 💙.

Back VTX whip antenna away from the props and won’t get caught in them. The VTX supports up to 500 mW. XT30 plug for batteries.

The motors are the GEP-GR1105 5000KV and the recommended battery is a 4S lipo for those.

Two separate camera sensors, one for the FPV feed and one dedicated for 4K or HD video recording.

And here is the FrSky XM plus receiver, zip-tied under the camera boards.

⚙ Setup

In terms of setup, here’s what we need to do to get up and running: 🔗 Bind the receiver to the radio, 📇 Insert an SD card, ⛓ Install the velcro straps, 📡 Configure RSSI, channel mapping and modes in Betaflight and 🎥 Configure the Caddx Tarsier 4K camera via the app.

🔗 Bind the receiver to the radio

The process was the same as usual (I use FrSky XM+ on almost all of my models). Put your radio in bind mode, press and hold the bind button on the receiver, while plugging in a battery. An extra set of hands helps a great deal with this, but you can also do just fine on your own, although a bit tricky. The receiver will then bind. After that turn off the binding function on your radio, unplug the quad and finally power it on again.

If all went well, after the final power cycle, the XM+ will have its led in solid green to indicate that it’s now linked to your transmitter.

📇 Insert an SD card

Fairly straight forward - the only thing is, the ducts are a bit in the way, but luckily just pushing them down slightly allows for just enough space to insert the SD card in its slot.

⛓ Install the velcro straps

Installing the battery straps is also pretty straight forward. Depending on what batteries you’re using you might be able to get away with just one of them, but I had to use both. I set up mine by guiding them through the designated slots on the top frame.

📡 Configure RSSI, channel mapping and modes in Betaflight

First thing you’ll notice is that the micro USB port is somewhat tricky to access. I’m happy to report that it is still accessible with a smaller, slimmer cable. I had this cable laying around and was able to use it to configure the CinePro. Alternatively, you could use an L type right angle micro USB adapter. Worst case scenario you might have to unscrew the motor screws to take off the duct and plug in your USB cable.

RSSI

My GEPRC CinePro drone didn’t come with RSSI configured correctly for XM+ receivers, so definitely check yours and set it up accordingly. That’s a quick 3 step process:

On the Configuration tab locate RSSI_ADC and make sure it’s turned off.

On the Receiver tab set RSSI Channel to AUX12.

Finally, in the OSD tab enable RSSI value to allow displaying it in the OSD.

Channel mapping

My GEPRC CinePro came with its channel map configured to AETR and I’m always using TAER channel mapping so I had to change it. If you don’t want things going wrong or best case scenario driving out to the field just to find out you can’t arm your quad because of your channel mapping (or having to change it in your radio), make sure to configure this beforehand here.

In my case, after changing to TAER1234 all the channels were responding correctly.

Modes and switches

Finally, let’s set up an arm switch and some flight modes on a switch. Jump over to the Modes tab in Betaflight.

I have this convention where my arming switch is Channel 5 on AUX 1 and this is the right-hand side 2 position switch on my radio. Then my modes are on the 3 position switch next to it and those correspond to Channel 6 or AUX 2 in Betaflight.

For a Taranis radio you need to add your switch sources to Channel 5 and Channel 6 in the radio mixer screen, then assign AUX 1 to ARM and AUX 2 to some modes. I have Angle and Horizon mode on that switch, but by default in its starting position is in Acro as that’s what I use to fly.

That’s it in terms of setup. Here are all the other Betaflight settings, which are pretty much the defaults and left as is.

Complete Betaflight configuration

Setup:

Ports:

Configuration part 1:

Configuration part 2:

Configuration part 3:

Power and battery:

PID tuning

And here is the complete GEPRC CinePro Betaflight configuration CLI dump with the default configuration plus my updates to it.

🎥 Configure the Caddx Tarsier 4K camera via the app

The last thing we have to do before we can go out and fly is to set up the Caddx Tarsier camera. Unfortunately, even though this is an outstanding camera in terms of both FPV feed and recorded footage, the user experience of the setup via the app is suboptimal, to say the least.

First thing you want to do is to go download the CaddxFPV from Google Play (or the Apple AppStore).

Also, something to note is that if you are going to be providing power to the whole quad with a lipo, you probably wanna be quick as the VTX gets pretty toasty pretty quick (unlike while you’re flying when it can cool off).

The camera has 2 buttons on the side. One for powering it on and off and the other one for initiating the WiFi connection.

Long press the WiFi button for 8 seconds until you see blinking green light from the camera board.

Open the CaddxFPV app and tap Connect camera. That’s gonna take you to your wifi settings where you need to tap on the CADDX network.

The default password is 12345678 (you can change that in the camera settings later).

Going back to the app and tapping the Access camera button (or something similar) will finally present you the first screen of camera options.

If you are getting stuck and are unable to access the camera, try stopping your 4G / LTE temporarily (not sure how this is related exactly, but I couldn’t access the camera via the app, until I did this).

Below are 2 screenshots of the default settings of the Caddx Tarsier camera.

Some of the available resolution options are 4k 30fps, 2.7k 60fps and down to 1080p. I’ve only recorded at 4k 30fps and 2.7k 60fps. The audio can be enabled and disabled and it’s surprisingly usable, given how the props sound on such a tiny quad. You can change the video encoding between H.264 and H.265, adjust the white balance, exposure and ISO. I didn’t touch any of those as I wanted to review the stock experience first. I’ve also been told not to touch EIS (some sort of stabilization, which is buggy at the moment). Will update this article as soon as this is no longer the case.

If you tap Device Settings you get to the second screen of options.

Here you probably want to change the default Start Action from Loop Video to Normal Video, to allow for normal video recording with no shenanigans as soon as you plug in a battery. You can change the default WiFi password, the video standard, factory reset the camera or format the SD card. That last one you probably really want to do, because it solves an issue I ran into.

I was connected to the camera, could see the live video feed just fine and I decided to test the camera by recording a clip.

So I pressed the big red record button and saw this message No Sd Card.

But I know there is an SD card inserted. So I headed onto the formatting option via the app and did just that.

After that, I was able to record clips just fine. Or … sort of. So my advice to you is make sure you format your SD card via the Caddx app. It’s better to do it anyway and test to avoid disappointments with missing or corrupted footage.

Speaking of which, I had my fair share of the latter and the former. My biggest issue was with my last battery of the day always ending up to be a 1.4 MB file, corrupted and unplayable. I’ve recorded at 4k 30fps, at 2.7k 60fps and I know it’s not the quality or the speed of my card, as it records every other battery pack I fly just up to the last one just fine. I know I’m not running out of space either. I feel like for whatever reason the camera is not able to write that last file. It could be something I’m doing wrong, but never the less if it happens to me it could happen to other people too and it’s better if you are aware of this as well. One thing I’ll try next would be to unplug and then re-plug the battery after the last flight and “give it time to write the recording” to the SD card. That’s my tinfoil hat assumption of what might be going on. I will come back here and update the article as soon as I have more information.

For now, take it for what it is, but this definitely adds to the poor user experience even if “I’m doing something wrong”. I’m doing the same thing with my Caddx Turtle V2, RunCam Split Mini and RunCam Split 2 and all of the always record and save all the footage correctly to the SD card.

Now even if the user experience suffers, I have to point this out - the Caddx Tarsier 4K camera is outstanding and does remarkable things for our hobby. The FPV feed is one of the best I have seen to date, the recorded DVR is crisp. The 4K sensor is pretty unrivaled too. In September 2019 there’s still no other 4K FPV cameras on the market (or are just starting to come out) and the quality of the video recording is superb.

🚁 Flying

We are finally ready to go fly and here’s how the maiden flight turned out. This is the 4K 30fps flight footage. Unfortunately, that flight ended up with a failsafe about less than a hundred meters to my 8 o’clock. I’m not sure what was that about, but the GEPRC records black box data in built-in on-board flash memory and I will investigate this further.

I enjoyed flying the CinePro a lot. It was very different than most other quads I had flown to date. I love 5-inch drones and zippy micro quads with brushless motors. But the GEPRC CinePro is surely different and that’s ok because it has a completely different purpose.

I tried flying it “cinewhoop styled” as much as I could - small camera tilt, slow, smooth. My first observation was damn, this thing is so easy to operate in tight spaces. You could get it to move very slow and steady and stall so much almost as if standing still. This is particularly important if you are shooting in 4k 30fps and want steady and slow shots - I think the GEPRC CinePro would do remarkably well in such conditions.

That’s also not to say that the CinePro can’t pull its weight, it could zip around pretty nice too, even if not at top speeds. Check out the slightly faster paced 2.7k 60fps footage below. You can also get a sense for how the props sound through the camera’s microphone (albeit the volume was reduced, but still usable sound quality).

I mentioned the maiden resulted in a failsafe and although the quad dropped from pretty low, I still lost 1 motor screw and the Caddx Tarsier’s wifi antenna. The camera’s position also changed due to the impact.

My advice for you is to make sure you tighten all motor screws every few flights or so, to avoid this (or go for a Loctite solution to the problem), and maybe take the wifi antenna off and keep it off the craft while flying. If I’m honest I’m not sure what it accomplishes as you can still access the camera just fine, so maybe it’s just that the bandwidth would suffer if you copy over files via wifi. I don’t do that anyway, as I find it way easier to copy over files straight from the SD card on a computer.

As far as the changed camera position goes, make sure to tighten those screws nicely, but I’ll surely be paying attention if they keep on getting loose over time.

All of the above has been tested with the default Avan Flow 2 props that come preinstalled on the quad. And I’m in the process of waiting for some sunny weather to go fly the Dalpros and see how the flight characteristics compare. I’ll make sure to come back and add the relevant footage as soon as I do.

You could also subscribe to my Georgi FPV YouTube channel where I drop all single pack unedited footage and see the dalprop footage as soon as I upload it.

UPDATE: here is the video of the GEPRC CinePro with the Dalprop Cyclone q2035c props. The quad still flies smooth and nice, I do feel that the handling with the Avan Flow props is a bit easier, but they are also more amp hungry. Both prop options work really well with this quad.

🔋 Batteries

I used 4S batteries for my tests which to my understanding are recommended by GEPRC. You can also fly it on 3S if you have such batteries laying around.

I used a 500 mah Turnigy Graphene battery…

… as well as GNB 4S 520mah high voltage batteries (although I still only charged them up to 4.20 volts per cell).

I think the performance was slightly better with the GNB batteries in general, maybe slightly longer, but for the most part, it was rather similar. That’s understandable, given they offer you 20 mah more. They also fit better and are a bit less clunky. If you go the extra mile and charge them up to 4.35 volts as they are high voltage batteries, I’d say you can’t go wrong if you go with those batteries.

📑 Conclusion

What’s the verdict? Is the GEPRC CinePro 4k for you? The answer is that it depends!

Are you excited to do some cinewhooping? And you wanna make your entry into this subset of FPV with the best components, highest quality build, the best 4K split-type camera on the market? Then, by all means, go for it! The GEPRC CinePro 4k is well worth the money it asks from you and you will have an awesome time flying and shooting cinematic videos safely really anywhere. It’s a great offer, though to beat.

The quad flies superb, is decently tuned, flies smooth and is ridiculously easy to handle in VERY tight spots and I mean it!

If you want a quad that’s closer to a freestyle/racer type of a drone, I’d hold my horses on that one. That’s not to say that the CinePro is slow or anything, it’s plenty fast, but it should not be compared to freestyle or racing drones as it is designed for a fundamentally different thing and it does that exceptionally well. This is truly a cinewhoop in the best possible meaning of the word and a top of the line cinewhoop too.

I’d wrap it up saying that the GEPRC CinePro 4k is one of the easiest ways to get into high-quality 4K cinewhooping. Happy flying!

Skyzone SKY02X: The best FPV goggles for 2019!

Sun, 18 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I’m very excited to review the Skyzone SKY02X fpv goggles because it’s always easy to write about a well-rounded, high-quality product that works well!

That being said, goggle reviews are VERY subjective by definition. There are many person-specific elements, ranging from how the goggles fit on your face, to what you use them for and what and where you fly.

I’ll try to cover almost all cases and be as objective as possible, while also mentioning what’s my personal opinion on some topics. Let’s get to it!

📦 Unboxing
📝 Specifications
⚙ Setup
🚁 Flying
📑 Conclusion

If you prefer watching, check out the full video review on my YouTube channel:

📦 Unboxing

The good impression of the Skyzone 02X starts with the unboxing experience.

The goggles come in high quality, sturdy box.

Inside you find the manual…

… and the rest of the gear packaged neatly in smaller boxes.

There are two boxes inside, a smaller and a bigger one.

Accessories for the Skyzone 02X. In terms of accessories, you get a JR data cable, DC barrel jack to an XT60 power cable, an AV cable, Futaba data cable, and two 5.8GHz antennas.

When you open the other box, you find inside the goggle case.

The case is pretty solid, high quality.

Will do well for daily transportation of the goggles, and even has a hook you can use to attach it to the outside of your backpack (why would you do that though).

Inside the case, we find the Skyzone 02X FPV goggles as expected.

You also get 2 different face foams - one softer and thicker, like on the Aomway commanders and one leathery and thinner similar to the one on the Fatshark goggles.

Here’s where you need to apply the face foam.

The strap for the goggle is only around the head. There is no over the head strap.

The fan is on top, as well as 6 buttons, which we’ll go over in the next section. Because this is the 02X version, it comes with a small camera in the front of the goggles, that you can toggle on and off and see things in real life, even as you are wearing the goggles.

📝 Specifications

The Skyzone 02X fpv goggles have a 30-degree field of view (FOV) and a resolution of 854 x 480 (WVGA). The interpupillary distance is adjustable via the slider on the bottom and can be adjusted between 59-69mm.

This is important and something to consider, and of course depends mostly on your face’s shape whether these goggles would be a good fit for you. For me, this was just fine.

The screens are high quality and very bright.

The goggles have diversity receivers, as it’s pretty much a standard in 2019, with 2 SMA antenna connectors.

The fan on the top can be toggled on and off via the power button on the side and is used to defog the goggles, as well as reduce the internal temperature of the unit.

And yes, the Skyzone 02X have a POWER BUTTON! Yay!. A long press turns the goggles on and off, which allows you to keep your power lead in at all times. Very neat and comfy!

Speaking of power, the Skyzone 02X goggles take in anywhere from 7 to 26V in (so pretty much 2S ~ 6S battery).

The front camera has a FOV of 60 degrees and a resolution of 640 x 480.

The goggles claim to support SD cards up to 32 GB (it works just fine for me with a 64 GB card though) for recording DVR and record at 30fps into AVI files. The goggles are pretty light coming in at about 210g.

The Skyzone 02X has a lot of different ports to support plenty of different use cases and needs. There is a mini HDMI port, micro USB, AV IN, and AV OUT, 3.5 mm headphone jack and you will also find the SD card slot in this area.

And here are the full specifications:

⚙ Setup

To get up and running with the Skyzone 02X fpv goggles, the bare minimum of what you have to do is this: 🥽 Install the face foam, 📡 Install antennas and 🔋 Plug in a battery.

🥽 Install the face foam

This is much easier than it may look like. First, you want to detach the faceplate from the goggles carefully.

This would give you access to remove the lens protector pieces.

Slide those out towards the center to remove them.

Now pick your foam of choice and apply it to the faceplate. In my case, I thought about using the leathery foam padding, but it wasn’t thick enough and I would have too much light leakage. I guess I have a somewhat more narrow face. The other foam type, however, worked just fine, so I applied that and it fit like a glove. Definitely experiment and test, before you apply the foam completely.

When you are ready, attach the faceplate back to the goggles.

📡 Install antennas

If you have been in FPV for a while, you probably know that you should toss those antennas you got in the box immediately. Unless you have no other choice, there’s no good reason to use them and hopefully, if you do have to use them, it’s temporary.

There are many good options for antennas but your choice will depend on how and where you fly. The choice pretty much boils down between 2 omnidirectional antennas vs 1 omnidirectional and a patch antenna.

If you never fly more than a couple of hundred meters away from yourself, you fly a lot all around yourself within that range, you could easily go for a setup with 2 omnidirectional antennas.

If you do fly further away from yourself in a particular direction you know beforehand, so you can position yourself accordingly, grab a patch antenna and an omni antenna.

Whatever you choose, here are some antennas worth having:

Do pay attention that you need to get an SMA Male antenna because the goggles antenna connector is SMA Female.

In addition, I recommend one of those 90-degree angle connector, so you don’t have to bend your antenna to keep it up.

After that, if you have 2 omnis, position them at 90 degrees to each other, if you have an omni and a patch antenna, keep the omni up and the patch in the direction of where you’re flying.

In my case I’m using an omni and a patch antenna, although in all fairness I fly open areas, no concrete buildings, and I don’t go further than 200 - 300 meters, so I could easily do what I do with 2 omnis as well and might switch to using a couple of stubby omnis just because of the smaller form factor.

🔋 Plug in a battery

I mentioned the Skyzone 02X fpv goggles take a pretty wide range of voltage, which is convenient. I use an old 3S lipo battery to power mine.

If you have a small battery you could suspend it on the side of the goggle strap. In that case, you do add more weight to them as well though.

The provided DC to XT60 cable is pretty long, and I’m using that to keep the battery in my pocket while flying. This makes the goggles truly feel ultra light.

🚁 Flying

⚡ Quick start

You probably noticed that the Skyzones have a lot of buttons, which is handy as it makes using them very easy. You should not feel overwhelmed, however, as you don’t need to know too much about all the functions to just fly daily.

The quickest way to get started is to plug in a battery and hold the power button to boot up the goggles. Then, press and hold the SEARCH button until the channel OSD panel comes up, then just press SEARCH and wait for it to complete. Once on the correct channel, press and hold SEARCH again to close the OSD panel.

🎥 Recording DVR

Don’t forget to insert and SD card, and then the recording is as simple as pressing the REC button. The OSD will indicate with a red dot when the recording has been started successfully.

Here is some example DVR overlayed in the corner of an HD video.

And here is a FULL DVR only video:

🔝 Other functions

You can also adjust the image settings, toggle the front camera on and off, playback previously recorded DVR and more. Just explore all the different menu options.

I have to admit that I thought I might use the front camera a lot more than what I ended up using it, which is pretty much not at all.

As far as playback of recorded DVR goes, I had a situation last year when that feature on the Aomway commanders saved me a lot of time when I crashed a quad in a huge open field without too many orienteering indicators. I just replayed the recorded DVR and found my quad in less than 5 minutes.

With the HDMI in you can set up things like a simulator straight to your goggles, as I’ve explained here.

To fine-tune channels and band, use the buttons on the right-hand side of the goggles.

For more details on all button functions, refer to the manual.

But the best part about any FPV goggles is in my opinion, the goggles getting out of your way, letting you forget you are wearing them and just letting you enjoy flying. Which brings me to the conclusion for the Skyzone SKY02X FPV goggles.

📑 Conclusion

Are the Skyzone SKY02X the goggles for you? In many ways and for most people I believe that the answer is just ABSOLUTELY YES! Quite simply the Skyzones are possibly the best fpv goggles for 2019.

And while as I mentioned earlier goggle reviews are by definitions pretty subjective, I’ll try to make this as objective as possible. Here’s what I think.

I’m someone who started with a cheap set of box goggles before I knew I was gonna get seriously into FPV. Then I switched to the Aomway Commander goggles and loved flying those for over a year. I’m well aware of the top of the line setups such as Fatshark HDOs with a RapidFire module (or similar). That might be great and for some people, but in many cases, unless you are performing like a top of the line pilot and fly at very difficult locations, you really may not need all of that, which adds up to well over double the price of the Skyzone 02X. And that’s not to say that the Skyzones won’t perform well for top of the line pilots, on the contrary, not only do they perform rather excellent, but they are also a CRAZY good value for money.

But this is not just a money argument, it is a value and ease of use argument as well. You are probably getting about 85% of the performance (if not more) of a top of the line setup, right here in the Skyzones and that’s at about 40% of the price.

Heck, if you grab the Skyzone SKY02C version, those go as low at $265 at the moment. That’s cheap for a high-quality goggle with awesome bright screens, great resolution, perfect diversity reception, all sorts of functionality and overall feel.

Light weight and comfortable on the head, no module hassle, no nothing, just put on a couple of decent antennas and you are quite literally off to the races!

All my thumbs up for the Skyzones, which I think I will also probably call best FPV product of 2019. Happy flying!

Fix Mobula 7 HD yellow screen

Sun, 04 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT

If you like me recently saw the infamous yellow screen of death on your Caddx Turtle V2 camera on your Mobula7 HD (or another drone), here’s one way to solve it.

To the best of my knowledge the yellow screen indicates camera issues - it is not VTX related, as all camera feed and recording should not be working. You can verify that by plugging in an SD card and checking to see if your Caddx Turtle V2 records any footage. In my case, the camera was not recording anything.

Upon closer inspection, looking at the camera’s ribbon cable, it became obvious that my issue was with a broken cable. 😅 Phew, at least the fix for that is easy, but I hope you have another drone to fly while waiting for the spare cable to arrive.

If you unscrew the front screw and the two side screws that hold the canopy in place, you get access to the camera fairly easily.

The proper way to remove the ribbon (coaxial cable) is by lifting up and away from the camera the two black side notches. You can do one at a time, just go easy on them.

I had three of those small cablets completely torn. Funny thing is, I remember still flying and recording some footage even with one of them torn, but I guess it couldn’t handle more than two or three broken. Tinfoil hat off.

To reach the other end of the cable, we do need to unmount the camera PCB from the stack.

That’s held in place by 4 screws, one in each corner of the board.

The back one was a bit tricky to get, so I had to guide my screwdriver through the canopy in order to reach it.

You should now have access to the other end of the coaxial cable and be able to remove it from the camera board. Please excuse my Mobula7 HD, call sign Grasscutter 😅.

I wonder if this cable is repairable and can be soldered together? For a moment I considered doing it for science, but I deemed it’s not worth it. Let me know in the section below if you managed to salvage yours.

I had ordered a replacement cable a while back and was now ready to replace the broken one.

Next, install the cable to the camera board and the camera. After that, you have 2 options. You can mount the camera upside down, so that the coaxial cable is at the top, forever out of the reach of the props, or you can just mount it as it was and try better cable management.

I went for option number two. It was easiest, and there was enough space to safely tug the cable away. If you do decide to mount the camera upside down, don’t forget to flip the image in the camera settings. Congrats! I hope your Mobula7 HD works like new once again!

Here’s my first flight after I changed the coaxial cable…

… and here is the full Mobula7 HD review on my FPVtips channel on YouTube:

Happy Flying!

RunCam 5: The Complete Guide

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

It’s finally here! RunCam’s latest GoPro competitor camera - the RunCam 5. In the meantime, GoPro has discontinued the Session 5 - many FPV pilots’ favorite camera, leaving people with the option to grab a refurbished one from eBay, buy used from elsewhere or move on to use a Hero 6 with a slightly different form factor. This is where RunCam’s new offering comes in.

I’m very interested in the RunCam 5 camera. My excitement stems mainly from the fact that RunCam specializes in making FPV cameras and does that exceptionally well. Furthermore I have been using RunCam’s Split cameras for over a year now and I am very pleased with the fpv feed when flying, as well as the 1080p HD video recording.

Is the RunCam 5 a worthy competitor and costing only a $100 (a fraction of the price of a GoPro camera) is it an option to consider switching to?

Let’s find out!

📦 Unboxing
📝 Specs
⚙ Setup
🎥 Video samples
🎦 Post-processing
🆚 RunCam Split 2 comparison
📑 Conclusion

If you prefer watching, check out the full video review on my YouTube channel:

📦 Unboxing

RunCam’s products almost always offer a premium unboxing experience with almost Apple-like quality. This one comes in a solid hard cardboard box with a slide-on top.

Underneath the box, you can find a field to scratch off and expose a code for verifying your product.

Inside we find the camera sitting in the middle of a bed of sponge-like soft material, wrapped from all sides.

The lens has a protective plastic layer that needs to be peeled off before usage. We also notice a single button on top and an LED.

On the left-hand side, there is a micro USB port for charging or connecting to a computer for accessing the SD card contents without taking out the SD card.

On the right-hand side, there is a sliding panel, that when slid open exposes the SD card slot where you can put your memory card. Slide it shut and your SD card is decently protected from getting lost while you’re flying. Above the SD card slot there is a reset button, should you ever need to use it.

And here’s a shot from the back of the camera.

In addition, you get a manual and a small box with a few accessories.

Inside that box, we find a USB to micro USB cable for charging and video downloads and two high-quality rubberized velcro straps.

The straps are indeed of decent quality and the rubberized coating definitely helps a ton with gripping tightly around the camera.

📝 Specifications

One of the most outstanding features of the RunCam 5 is its weight! It’s by far one of the (if not THE) lightest cameras in its class! It comes in at just 56 grams. That’s very, very light. In comparison, the Hero 5 Session weighs 74 grams. Here are the rest of the technical specifications:

In terms of dimensions, they are quite similar to the GoPro Hero Session 5 and that means that the RunCam 5 would fit in all existing TPU mounts. I use this mount and had no issues, the fit is nice and snug and you can also use one of the provided rubberized velcro straps to hold the camera in place extra tight.

As far as battery capacity goes, RunCam claims the built-in 960 mAh battery should get you more than 90 minutes of 1080p 60fps recording time, or about 60 minutes of 4k 30fps recording time. And yes, the battery is irreplaceable, built-in battery. Which might be one of the necessary shortcuts RunCam had to take in order to drive the price of the camera that low. I personally don’t mind at all that the battery is built-in.

To charge, use the micro USB port and DC current in the range of 5V - 15V.

Onto the video specs:

The RunCam 5 has a 12MP Sony sensor with a field of view of 145 degrees. The video output is in MP4 format, it supports resolutions from 1080p to 4K which we will dive in deeper in a minute.

Depending on what resolution and framerate video you shoot you will need a U1 or U3 SD card. The supported capacity is up to 128 GB.

The RunCam 5 does not support WiFi connections, so let’s look into what does that mean for setting the camera up.

⚙ Setup

For the complete setup instructions, you can always refer to the RunCam 5 user manual. Here’s a quick breakdown of the camera button’s functions:

Long press - will turn the camera on (if off) and will turn it off (if on). This is indicated by a green LED or lack thereof.
Short press - when the camera is on will start recording (indicated by blinking greed LED). A subsequent short press will stop recording, making the LED solid green.
Double press - when the camera is on will change it to setting mode, ready for reading a QR code (the LED will indicate that by changing to blue).

There are a few things to do to get up and running: ⚡ Charge the camera up, 📇 Insert a formatted SD card, 📱 Choose your video settings and 🏇 Mount it on a drone.

⚡ Charge it up

You can charge the RunCam 5 via its micro USB port. Plug it into a computer or something and let it be until the LED goes off. That indicates that the battery is full.

📇 Insert an SD card

Insert a high-quality, formatted SD card with decent capacity. We will be writing a lot of data and you need a fast card to do so. Don’t underestimate the formatting step, as it can save you from headaches and lost footage issues. If you are unable to format your SD card via a computer, you can do that through the RunCam itself. Get a decent capacity card, I recommend at least 32 GB, but you know yourself better, take what makes sense. Just note that 4-5 battery packs yield about 6-7 GB of footage easily.

📱 Configure the settings

I mentioned the camera does not have WiFi connection capability and it does not have Bluetooth either. So how do we change the settings on it? You see, the RunCam 5’s config lives in a file on the SD card, called CameraConfig.ini. There are at least two ways to change the configuration. By changing the values in a config file or by using a QR code to apply the new config.

by updating the config file

I don’t recommend this approach, although there’s certainly nothing wrong with it, it’s just that I found using the app easier. Either way, I’ll guide you through this way of changing the settings as well.

First, connect the camera to a computer via micro USB. The LED will go red to indicate the camera is charging. Press and hold the button for a couple of settings. This will power on the camera and will mount its SD card into your filesystem so you can access it. The LED will go green to indicate the camera is on (your LED might look even a bit orange if it is still charging).

Access the CameraConfig.ini file on the mounted SD card. Ideally, use an editor like Notepad++ or VS Code to edit the file to avoid issues.

Here’s a short example of how a part of my camera config file looks like:

And here is the complete configuration I’m currently using when shooting with the RunCam 5.

It might look like a lot at first but in reality, it’s quite simple. The lines that start with ; are comment lines - they are helpful messages for you to understand the functionality and have no programmatic meaning. RunCam has listed nicely in those comments all the possible options for a particular setting, as well as its default value.

For example if I wanted to change my VideoQuality setting to Low (why would I though), I would just change its value from 1 to 3. That’s all there is to it.

As I mentioned I don’t use this approach to change the settings, but one nice thing about this is that it allows you to easily create “profiles” by creating separate complete configuration files and keeping them somewhere in your computer. Then swap them in as necessary.

by using the RunCam app

The other way to change the settings is by using the RunCam App which you can get on the Google Play store or iOS App Store.

On the first screen select your product (RunCam 5) and tap the QR Code Configuration button.

The Video Settings are broken down onto two screens. The first you are presented immediately and is called Video as seen in the bottom navigation buttons. The other screen of options is called General and you can access it by tapping the corresponding button in the bottom navigation.

I’m not gonna go in great detail over every single option, in fact, I think most of them are very self-explanatory. Video quality you probably wanna keep at High and have very little reason to use anything else. Loop recording would split your video recordings in 3 minute or so chunks of footage. I don’t do that. I like starting and stopping my recordings. Auto record is something I don’t use either. I’ll get into much more detail about the available resolutions in the next section when we talk about video samples, comparisons, and post-processing. And Volume you probably want to keep at Low as well as that’s already pretty loud.

Below is the general screen of video settings. Here you can turn off things like the RunCam logo and Date stamp, you can flip the screen if you have mounted the RunCam 5 upside down. You can adjust a number of sensor settings here such as saturation, exposure compensation, contrast, sharpness, white balance. Do change the Power supply frequency from 50Hz to 60Hz if you live in the USA.

For now, I have left everything to their default values for the sake of testing the camera with it’s out of the box settings. I will make sure to come back and add an update to this article if I find particular settings that improve the image quality by a lot (subscribe to the blog using the form at the end to keep up with updates).

Update: August 2019

I have now played a bunch with the different settings on the RunCam. Here’s what I find to work:

Contrast=1 (Down from the default 2) Sharpness=1 (Down from the default 2) White balance - set to the current conditions instead of auto.

Here’s a comparison video I put together that compares the default settings versus the ones I mentioned above.

Clicking the three dots at the top right brings up a menu that allows you to restore the default settings or to format the SD card.

And finally, clicking the Apply button brings up a generated QR code that would apply the settings to your camera, when read by it. To do that, power on your camera with a long press of the button. When the camera is on and the LED is solid green double press the button (that’s two presses in quick succession). You will know you have done it right if the LED changes to blue, indicating that the camera is in Setting mode and will try to read a QR code if you show it one.

Next show the QR code to the camera by keeping it directly in front of it. If you hear a beep you will know the camera has accepted the new settings and it will then transition back to greed mode indicated by its LED.

This may sound somewhat finicky at first, but it’s actually very easy and straightforward and dare I say fast to do.

I did my tests on a Pixel 3 phone and had no issues with the camera reading the code. The app will automatically increase the brightess of your phone’s screen while displaying the QR code. If brightness is an issue for you, you can also print out the QR code on a piece of paper and use that instead.

🏇 Mount the RunCam 5 on a quad

Finally, let’s mount the camera onto a quad. There are probably many ways to do so, plenty of projects on https://thingiverse.com that you could print, or just purchase a mount like this one from an online store.

This mount worked pretty well. Attached it with a couple of thicker zip ties and in addition, ran around the rubberized velcro strap too.

Let’s go fly! Here’s some example flight footage with the default settings, except for being recorded in 1440p 60fps and stretched from its 4:3 ratio to a 16:9.

Onto more video samples for science!

🎥 Video samples

The RunCam 5 offers you the following 7 resolution and framerate variants:

So I went ahead and recorded a sample 1 min clip of me doing the same thing 7 times each time with a different resolution selected. I think this playlist allows for somewhat decently quick comparison of all different possible resolutions.

All clips were recorded on the same day, in sunny, but late evening daylight conditions, flying against and away from the sun to really put the camera to the test. All clips were recorded using the default camera settings, the only thing changed between flights being the resolution. There was no post-processing of the clips, except whatever compression YouTube applies to videos. You will notice that the available resolution options are 7 and the clips in the playlist are 8. That’s because clip #5 in the playlist demonstrates how dynamic stretched 1440p video looks. The other caveat is that you cannot really preview the full 120fps on video #2 as YouTube only supports up to 60fps.

Check out all the different samples. To show the playlist click the playlist button at the top right of the video player.

Here’s the thing about FPV videos. You are the judge of what you prefer watching and how you would like to express yourself in the videos you make. For instance, to me, it’s more important to have the video with buttery smooth 60fps than to have a 4k resolution. In fact, I don’t think there even is a need for 4k. 2.7k at 60fps would be awesome, but alas, the RunCam 5 records 2.7k at up to 50fps. It’s not the end of the world, but it sure is not 60fps.

Since I got the RunCam 5 I’ve recorded a bunch of videos, and I have come up to use mostly the largest possible 60 fps option - 1440p. And I didn’t very much like the linear stretch of the XV resolution options. What that does is basically stretch the entire image.

And this brings us naturally to the video post-processing part.

🎦 Post-processing video files

Video processing is not among my strongest knowledge points, I definitely have a lot more to learn and that’s the reason why I really enjoy the dynamic stretch solution I’m about to show you.

Dynamic Stretching of 1440p from 4:3 to 16:9 ration

I’m just sharing what I learned, but I really feel I need to give all the credit possible to Joshua Bardwell for sharing about the tool to stretch videos. The tool in question is called superview and lives in this open-source repository on GitHub. Follow the requirements and installation instructions on that page. You want to do two things - download and add FFmpeg to your path (there’s a link in the readme file in the repository) and grab a copy of the superview binary for your operating system from the releases page.

Once you have those, the way to use the binary is as follow from a command line:

./superview.exe -i RC_0001_1234.MP4 -o RC_0001.MP4

What did we do here? First, we type in the filename of the executable we want to run - superview (in this case I’m using a Windows machine, hence the .exe). Next, we have to provide an input filename after the -i flag. This is our original 1440p 4:3 input file. The -o flag points to output, after which you need to provide a name for the output (different than the original and don’t forget to add the .MP4 file extension). This example assumes the superview executable and the file you are transforming are in the same directory, as well as you have FFmpeg in the path.

Let me know if something is not working for you or you have questions by using the Ask a question button below the article.

Why this dynamic stretching is better than linear stretching is because it tries to keep the center of the video as unstreteched as possible, but stretching mostly the sides and then progressively reducing the amount of stretch towards the middle. I think it looks much better than just linear stretch.

🆚 RunCam 5 vs RunCam Split 2 comparison

Now, this part is a bit far fetched for a number of reasons and is not necessarily very scientific, but I found it interesting nevertheless and wanted to share the findings. We are going to compare the footage from the RunCam 5 with footage from the RunCam Split 2 (this link is for the slightly newer RunCam Split 2S version).

Why is this interesting? I’ve mentioned a number of times that I personally am a fan of split cameras. In fact, my raw, unedited, single pack flight footage YouTube channel is full of RunCam Split 2, RunCam Split Mini and Caddx Turtle V2 videos. There’s a lot of convenience in this setup and it works nicely if you need decent, although not the best of the best footage quality.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

I’m using the RunCam Split 2 (the original oldest version), since then a RunCam Split 2S has come out, and it seems like a RunCam Split 3 might be underway (I know nothing, just guessing).
Both comparison videos are using stock camera settings.
The RunCam 5 costs $100, the Split 2S costs $80. However, $20-$30 of those $80 can be considered as the money you would anyway need to spend on an FPV camera for flying, so the actual money comparison is more like $100 vs $50.
You will see the props and the stand-off or parts of the frame through the fpv camera, and you would not see those through the RunCam 5.

📑 Conclusion

Ok, so who is this NOT for? If you really want, need and must have the best of the best footage quality AND have a lot of money, then the answer is probably still GoPro (although that gap is closing very fast and is starting to be less and less of a factor).

If you live in the States and can make use of BestBuy’s return policy, then again GoPro is still the answer, as you can then easily turn in your broken GoPro and replace it for a fraction of its price.

But if you are anywhere else (like me), if you want very crisp HD footage for a fraction of the price of a GoPro, then the RunCam 5 might be for you. If you don’t fly a hell of a lot of concrete or asphalt, and mostly do grassy or dirt areas, chances are your crashes might not be as devastating and the RunCam 5 might survive longer.

I personally am very happy with the quality of the footage that comes out of the RunCam 5, especially the 1440p stretched one, still at 60 fps. And for just $100 the initial investment is really not that significant. Basically, you get 90% of a GoPro for 33% of its price. That’s my personal opinion and I love what the RunCam 5 brings to the table! And most of all, at this price point I’m sure it’s going to make taking high-quality HD footage accessible for many more people.

Happy flying!

If you are still with me, thanks for reading all of that. I tried to make it interesting and useful to you. If you are considering purchasing the RunCam 5, or anything else really, I’d like to remind you that if you use the links in this blog to Banggood, you would also support the blog and I would really appreciate that. Thanks!

My FPV drone gear for 2019

Wed, 10 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

The gear I use in 2019 and the quads I fly the most! To get a sense of how I fly, follow FPVTIPS on Instagram or have a look at these Georgi FPV videos on YouTube. We are gonna take a look at anything from quads, goggles, and transmitters to props, batteries and other accessories.

🤓 Goggles & antennas
📡 Transmitters
🚁 Drones
🔩 Custom Builds
🔋 Batteries
🔌 Chargers
📷 Cameras
🔨 Tools
🎒 Backpack
🌀 Props

Legend:

🔥 = highly recommended (a mix of high quality and great value for money)

🤓 Goggles & antennas

Skyzone SKY02X 🔥

The Skyzone SKY02X goggle are some of the best mid range priced goggles in 2019. They are very comfortable, have bright screens with clear picture, decent built in diversity modules, plenty of buttons that make it very easy to adjust various functions and even a camera you can use as a passthrough to see the real world, while wearing the goggles.

AOMWAY Commander 🔥

Been using the Aomway Commanders for over a year and I love them. Great value, in terms of what you get for how much you pay. Bonus points for being a complete package - comes with a built-in diversity receiver module. No need to buy your own module on top of buying the goggles.

Aomway 5.8GHz FPV 4 Leaf Clover Antenna 🔥

Realacc Triple Feed Patch Antenna 🔥

So you don’t have to bend your antennas again.

All those antenna options are pretty solid, been using some of those for almost 2 years, still no issues.

📡 Transmitters

FrSky Taranis X-Lite 🔥

I started testing the X-Lite on April 6th, 2019 and kind of switched to it as my main radio since then. It’s actually a pretty awesome radio with a different form factor than most traditional radios, but also full-featured. Read the full review and set up guide.

FrSky Taranis Q X7 🔥

I loved my Taranis Q X7, used it for over a year, recently switched to X-Lite, but might still fly my Q X7 every once in a while, it’s still a great radio and an awesome value for money. How to set up the Taranis Q X7.

🚁 Drones

Emax Hawk 5 🔥🔥🔥 (mini quad)

Started testing the Emax Hawk 5 in June 2019. I immediately fell in love with the tune and the Avan Flow 5 props on it. The quad itself has high-quality parts, the build quality is very good and the tune is outstanding. Great value for money and a highly recommended purchase for beginners and more advanced pilots alike. Read the full review and setup guide.

Mobula7 HD 🔥🔥🔥 (micro 2S / 3S quad, cinewhoop)

The Mobula7 HD was my first cinewhoop, my 2nd quad from HappyModel, and my 4th micro drone. I absolutely love flying it! Even though it’s a micro quad, it flies really almost like a 5-inch quad. You can fly it safely in parks and playgrounds and even somewhat close around other people without being scared of injuring anyone. Read my full review and setup guide or Watch the video review on FPVTIPS.

Eachine Wizard X220 🔥🔥 (mini quad)

I have crashed my wizard so many times, as it was my learning quad, and I have swapped out so many of its parts that it is hardly a wizard anymore. Nevertheless, I still love flying it.

Eachine Trashcan 🔥🔥 (micro 1S / 2S quad)

I loved flying my Trashcan last winter. Read the full review.

🔩 Custom Build Drone “Phoenix” Parts:

This was my first quad build from 2018, still alive and kicking and I still love flying it! The parts list is below. It will cost you about $270 to build in parts alone. You can definitely build for cheaper, but this build was focused on good value high-quality components. Read about my experience building this quad.

Parts list:

🔋 Batteries

I currently fly mostly these battery brands.

Happymodel 3S 300mAh batteries

BetaFPV 2S 350mAh batteries 🔥🔥

GNB 1S 450mAh battery

Radio batteries

18500 Li-Ion 1200mAh Battery for Taranis X-Lite

7.4V 2S 2000mAh Lipo Battery for Frsky Taranis Q X7

Accessories

Realacc Waterproof and Fireproof Lipo Bag

🔌 Chargers

I mostly don’t do parallel charging yet, except on 1S batteries. I prefer charging 2 batteries at a time on separate chargers.

imax B6 LiPro Balance Charger

Charsoon 2-4S Li-poly/Li-ion Battery Charger

XTAR USB Battery Charger For 18500, 18650 Battery

📷 Cameras

RunCam 5

RunCam 5 is pretty awesome, especially having in mind it costs only $99. Read the full review and setup guide or subscribe to FPVTIPS on YouTube for the upcoming video review. In addition you can watch this RunCam 5 vs RunCam Split 2 comparison video or this playlist showcasing all of RunCam 5’s different resolution settings.

🔨 Tools

The Eachine ROTG02 is very useful for recording DVR (or just watching and sharing with other people) on your smartphone. They have an iPhone version as well. I’m using the Android version on my Pixel 3. Read more how to set it up and which app to use.

🎒 Backpack

Realacc FPV Racing Backpack 🔥💜

I have been using this backpack for a while now (read more about my experience here) and it’s been awesome having it around! It can take a massive amount of gear inside and compartments you can arrange any way you want really help with that.

🌀 Props

Dalprop Cyclone T5040

I fly this prop by far the most and on everything.

Ethix S3 Watermelon Propellers

Gemfam Hurricane

Avan Flow 5

Happy Flying!

Georgi's Blog

What I learned from 4 years of CrossFit and why you should try functional training too

👋 Who am I and how it started

😅 The humbling beginning

🏋️‍♂️ The structure, the vibe, and the gamification

🤸‍♂️ High-skill movements and the “extra 30 minutes”

📈 Scalability and Community

🧠 Mindset shift: Training as a reward

🥗 Ripple effects: Lifestyle and consistency

My 2025 year in review

Table of contents

Journey > Destination. Social animal

⬜ Goals for 2025:

2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣5️⃣

👨‍👦 Father and son

🏋️‍♂️ CrossFit journey

Helsinki Midnight Run

🇧🇬 One month in Bulgaria

❤️ Love, friendships, family, community

🌳 Return to (the Bulgarian) roots

💕 I love them both

✨ AI and the spark of engineering

✍️ Content, creativity, inspiration

2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣6️⃣

⬜ Goals for 2026:

Review and setup Jumper AION ExpressLRS nano module for Taranis X-Lite

Build a 65mm micro drone from the Mepsking kit parts

Table of contents

📦 Unboxing

📝 Specifications

🛠️ Build

⚙ Setup

🔗 Setup ELRS binding phrase

🐝 Check the Betaflight configuration

🚁 Flying

My 2024 year in review

Table of contents

”💙 A heart and soul filling adventure called life!”

⬜ Major goals for 2024:

◻️ Minor goals for 2024:

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👨‍👦 Being a dad

🏋️‍♂️ CrossFit progress

🏃‍♂️Helsinki Midnight run

🍸 Sobreity continues

🇪🇪 A couple of days in Tallinn

🇧🇬 Trip to Bulgaria with Anton

🇨🇾 Trip to Cyprus for my sister’s wedding

🇪🇸 Trip to Tenerife

🎞️ Movie review

❓ Other topics

2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣5️⃣

⬜ Goals:

My 2023 year in review

Table of contents

“The best dad I can be and double down on CrossFit skills”

⬜ Major goals:

◻️ Minor goals:

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🏋️‍♂️ CrossFit! Double down on skills!

👨‍👦The best father I can be

🏃‍♂️Embracing running

🥈 Helsinki Tough Viking

☀️ Finnish weather in 2023, a rare long spring + summer

🍸 On being sober for over a year

🇩🇪 Trip to Berlin, Germany and the CrossFit semifinals 2023

🇪🇸 Trip to Spain

🛳️ Cruise trip to Sweden with Anton

🥑 Health

💻 Work, professional life

💰 Finances and budget

🎞️ Movie review

📈 My success stories of the year

2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣4️⃣

⬜ Major goals:

◻️ Minor goals:

Road to Ironman 2025

📚 Story and why

🏋️‍♂️‍ Preparation

🏃‍♂️ Running