guys check this out can you believe it? sunshine! after all this time we finally got a day of sun and I've been looking forward to this day because I've been planning something special for the first day we had that was nice, and I think it's going to be today, so I think some of you also remember that day when I had that box on my bike and I know some of you been wondering hey what's in the box, well today we're going to find out and it is actually a new piece of tech, so stick around because that is today now before we start this video there's one thing I want to point out under full disclosure, this is not a paid review, this is not a paid advertisement, I am in no way paid or endorsed by this company and required to say anything on their behalf, they have simply agreed to send me their product with no control over my content whatsoever, with that said, on we go okay, so what this is some of you got a sneak preview and a few episodes ago and this is actually a brand new model of splash drone from swellpro and swellpro is a name you know I've worked with them before, but I've been waiting for them to come out with something that was meeting my expectations from what I had from you know all the different drones that I've used in the past and I think this is hopefully going to be that drone, I was the first person actually to take a waterproof drone and put a gopro on the bottom of it and the gopro can be made wireless and I actually introduced a wireless video circuit to the gopro that was also waterproof that would work when the gopro was underwater, so that you could still receive the video transmission on your display or on your headset -- and this is one everybody's been waiting for to see if we could actually make it work and we've got it is the wireless fpv, so as you can see we've got the camera on there in its stock waterproof housing but we've also introduced a waterproof wire harness that comes from the camera through the base and into the inside of the mariner to where the video transmitter is now situated now I think it was 2015 when I actually wanted to do something better than that, we had some gimbals out then, but the gimbals were far from waterproof they you know they worked in air to stabilize the camera, but I wanted something that would allow me to actually land the drone on water with a gimbal and not ruin the camera because back then we were going through one gopro a month, seriously it was an expensive hobby but I was one of the first ones getting some of those shots especially with a waterproof drone and I talked to the owner of swell pro about my idea and he pretty much said no it's not possible, we've tried it we've experimented, but we can't make it work and I said no I'm pretty sure it can work so how about if I make it work and prove it to you that it can work, will you build it? and they said okay show us, so I did -- everybody's been waiting for this waterproof gimbal forever and I've been struggling trying to make it it's been a little bit tougher than I originally thought there was a few things to overcome but we've overcome them and I've got a home built one here that at least proves the point that it will do the job and then we'll be able to make something a little bit more substantial from there and you remember we had the waterproof fpv we tested in the last video, so now we're going to test the two of them together and make sure everything works, you see the gimbal is working all right, so let's bring it over to the pool and lower it down hover around the water and in she goes all right we'll steer it around a little bit a little bit forward turn it to the right, so with the fresh water test out of the way let's move on to salt water we'll try it at the beach and see how that works out, this has been our biggest problem is trying to get it to work in salt water because of course it's much more conductive than fresh water, so let's have a try with this new version and see how we make out so far everything looks good it looks like we got a winner this time it was pretty amazing stuff for the day but that was the first waterproof gimbal for filming underwater from a drone, so now we have a fully waterproof version that is completely waterproof including 4k camera, 3-axis gimbal, and we have not one or two, but three waterproof cameras that come with this drone that we ordered with everything in the same package and it also has the waterproof bomb drop or payload release that's what they like to call it, I like to call it bomb drop because I have some ideas we'll discuss later about that, but what we want to do here is just have a quick look at what's inside because there's a lot of cool stuff in this box and you can see it comes as a complete package almost ready to fly, the first time you just have to assemble the basic components you can see we've got the new controller which is fully waterproof as well it's got the gimbal guards on it that are rubber insulated, all the buttons are waterproof so this thing is fully water resistant a good as well, we have our propellers and such inside here they are all carbon fiber propellers as you can see here, and then we pull out the drone itself and as you can see they ship it without the camera attached or anything, so that nothing is broken and shipping, but it's in a good protected package right underneath the drone right here they have finally gone to a professional battery that is smart intelligent, has the computer circuits in it monitors voltage, temperature, charging, everything, and automatically determines if everything is good on the battery, now in here this is the main camera, this is what it's all about and I've waited years for them to actually perfect this and I'm hoping that they have done it with this edition and this my friends is a fully waterproof 4k camera with 3-axis gimbal everything waterproof including the wire housing so this harness is designed to plug right into the bottom of the drone and you'll see that everything in the bottom of the drone has been capped off so it is fully sealed in case you just want to fly the drone without any cameras because you can fly it like a racing drone if you want or just bolt a fixed camera or anything there's three different cameras that you can put on it, but the landing gear is removable and it's all carbon fiber the antennas are now on the outside which is a big advantage because they used to have the antennas on the inside and it always gave problems with interference because with a drone like this there's a lot of magnetic interference goes on inside the drone itself so having these antennas outside is a very good idea and I'm very happy to see that, the lid is no longer removable it's a fixed part of the drone so there's no worries about water leaks there or anything anymore and the battery you don't have to get inside the drone to put the battery on anymore it's simply a matter of this mechanism right here and it's a latch just like a gopro system and that opens up and your battery is inside, so get a hold of the handle and pull it out this is a big improvement for swellpro I gotta say good job guys, so we put that back in lock it and it's always a good idea of course remember with anything waterproof including gopros check this gasket because this waterproof gasket or that silicone gasket is the only thing standing between water getting in or not and if water gets in even a few drops can really mess up your day so always important to keep that clean lock it down and put the latch on, so it can't open now you'll notice that these antennas are adjustable, so that they can be moved up or down on the drone because if you're going to be flying long distances it's best to keep them down like this if you're in high altitude if you're going to be flying a lot around the boat and dunking it in the boat it's better to keep them at higher altitude because as soon as it goes in the water as you know radio frequencies are decreased, so it won't receive signals when it's underwater like that, you put it up like that if you're going to be using it short range just around the boat in the water, but back to the cameras again we've got this guy as you see and that is our new waterproof 3-axis gimbal but not only that, the system comes available with two other cameras, so you can pick and choose whatever camera you want to have with the system but one of them is this guy right here and this is night vision, and oh yeah you can just imagine I'm gonna have some fun with this, and this is here this is a simple one axis camera and this one is much lighter, so if you want to entertain flying with heavier payloads on the main drone because the drone will handle a payload up to 2 kilograms, that's a lot of weight so if you want to decrease the weight of the camera because obviously this camera has some weight to it and you don't need you know to have elaborate video footage or anything this is just a single axis lens that will bolt onto the bottom and allow you to decrease the weight which will increase your flight time and also increase your payload capacity but the other thing that's very unique about this drone is this drone is designed for search and rescue, so not only would you want to use the night vision possibly for that if you're having to do search and rescue in the dark, but they also have rescue devices like this one here now I gave some of you a preview of this a while ago, but this is an automatic inflation life ring that you can actually deploy from the drone in the air, so it is meant to be suspended from the payload release device you can take the drone up and if you know there's somebody out offshore that's falling out of a boat or drowning or anything like that you can literally just fly this out in a matter of seconds faster than you could ever swim out to them look down through the camera line this up with them and just let it go and when this thing opens up you can see inside it's an auto inflation... it's an auto inflating device and this is the trigger device right here, so as soon as that gets wet the whole thing explodes and blows up with air and now they have something that they can grab onto that will at least keep them alive until you can get there very cool, so for now I'm going to put the drone together where basically I'm going to bolt this camera onto the bottom, so I'll show you that quickly, I'm going to put the payload release onto the bottom and then we're going to take it ashore and do a quick setup because we have to recalibrate it of course this has been in shipping from the other side of the world so always important when you get a drone, any new drone no matter where it comes from you need to recalibrate it for the first flight, so that's involving a calibration for the magnetic compass inside, that's important and it also has the accelerometers inside that need to be calibrated as well on a flat level steady surface, so you can't do that on a boat don't try and set it up on a boat it will fail miserably, doesn't matter what drone, any drone take it to shore do your setup there and then you're good to go, so we're going gonna do that today next okay, so before we start to build this thing we have one last look inside the compartment here in the case because yeah the last couple things well oh this is one thing I did want to point out this manual, very nice job guys I mean I've been getting these manuals from these companies for a long time and they're always written in changlish like chinese english and it's horrible it's so hard to understand and it never makes any sense this is the first one I've seen actually written and perfectly translated to english, so good job moi bien this last machine piece that braces the drone for shipping when you pull this out okay underneath this is the charger we're not using standard lipo chargers they have a proper battery charger now and I've already gone to liberty of charging a couple of the batteries I haven't done the one in the drone yet but these ones are already charged up you can see that they're already set okay they both got four lights running, so they are fully charged and charging is easy it's just a matter of plugging this in, but the one thing that messed me up for a little bit is they've now set up batteries, so that they won't just automatically charge and that's, so that the voltage here disconnects when it's not on the charger or not in the drone, so if you set it down on something it can't be shorted out which is a good feature but when you plug in the charger now what you need to do, plug it in connect the device to the battery like so, and then when this is plugged into the wall you push this button once and hold it down and the battery turns on and as soon as you do that now the battery will go into charge so that was one thing it took me a little bit to figure out because of course I didn't read the directions first, but I figured it out afterwards, so we'll shut that off unplug it and we'll put the charger to the side, now I'll put the batteries back in here for now we'll deal with them shortly I'm just going to move this away to the side here and we're going to bring the drone whoops up here, but I'm going to put this underneath it just, so we don't scratch the nice new top on it now on the bottom you'll see right away that everything is really well machined like I am I'm quite impressed I mean everything I've seen so far this is such a step up from the last splash drone it's amazing I'm very impressed I just hope it flies as good as it looks, so we're gonna plug in our first two devices and if you look at the bottom here you'll see that there's one, two, three four different plates, and those plates are for all our different hookups any different options that we want to hook up to it, the first one we're going to do of course is going to be the 3-axis camera so when we remove this and flip it upside down and you'll see that it lines up with these holes right here, so it's going to mount right there and right under here it says gimbal camera and that's where this is going to go on, okay so the wiring harness is going to be we have to take this lid off and put this harness together and screw that on in its place, then we're going to do the same thing for this other adapter and this is in one of the the body locks, when you pull this out this is the payload release, so the payload release is something that you can use for multiple purposes I mean if you just want to drop like I said the safety device to somebody on the beach if you want to drop a fishing line these are specifically designed for offshore fishing, so if you want to take your bait and your lure you can hook it in here and take the drone up in the air go out and hover over the surface maybe 50 or 100 feet up look for the schools of fish activate this when you find one of the schools of fish and drop your lure with your bait straight into the school of fish and it just deploys and opens up that lever right there and off goes your... off goes your bait, it's it's really cool something I haven't tried yet, but I'm really looking forward to trying that that's going to be some fun, now the entire drone from what I've seen is designed to work with one tool which is great and actually I forgot to get it out here, but the tool comes with the drone, it's in the package it's right here you can see they've just put it right into the side of the box here and it's just a very small allen key so look for that before you take your box apart and with this we're going to open up the screws for the gimbal camera that's one and I'm just gonna put them here on the plastic and two, okay so this is for the wire harness door and we just need to get the door out of there there we go, and you can see these are waterproof doors, so if you look really close at this you can see inside that there is a waterproof gasket around it, okay, so that gasket right there the camera itself you'll see does not have a gasket on it but the screw package that comes with the camera which is right here has the extra gasket right there and all of the screws that are necessary, all the screws are exactly the same size length and thread, so you can't mix up or mess up any of the screws here which is a very nice touch and the gasket needs to go around the terminal side of the harness and just snapped in place just like so, okay so just like that you can see how I've just put it in place there just make sure it's on nice and even make sure there's no dirt around it, okay so both surfaces are clean and then you're fine and it's designed it will only go in one way, so just make sure and line that up first, so don't force it and lay it right into position there like, so and it will just sit right in there, and then we just take one of our screws put it in place and get our allen key... and just lightly put it in not going to tighten it right in yet until we get the other one in as well and now tighten them down, don't over tighten you never want to crimp too hard on the gasket, but you do want to make sure that it's it's tight, okay so that is good, now we'll take our gimbal mount sure that it's lined up fore and aft so the camera obviously is going to be on the front of the drone we line it up with the holes that are set there that say they're for the camera gimbal and we start lining them up to put into position, so we get the first one in and don't over tighten yet leave some room there to be able to move the mounts around until you get all four screws in sorry I know it might be hard to see this with the camera, but I kind of need to keep my fingers lining the device up until I get the screws in now we can go and start tightening them in but just finger tight they don't need to be too hard here, there's no waterproof seal here this is just for fastening the camera to the shell, okay so that's all four tightened down, now the other thing we're going to do at the same time while we're here is open up the payload release because we got to try the payload release right? how can we not try the payload release, so we're going to open up its panel adapter here and then we have that lid as well so don't lose these lids you want to keep these in case you ever want to close this back up again and not fly with the external options so we're going to put that back in the bag okay, so we're going to keep these two extra pieces in a small zip lock bag, so we always have them there to put it back together without the camera or the payload device whatever we need okay, so now we're going to do the payload release device that's this guy right here and the two holes for mounting it are here you can see we've opened up the panel for the adapter right there, so this is going to mount here and you want to make sure if you're looking at this... this is right down the center line of the device, so the payload always rides in the center of the drone, now again payload device comes with its own bag of screws and gasket okay, so we need to get the gasket which is this guy right here, and you'll see there's a ridge right around there on the inside and that's what the gasket is going to set into so just pull it tight on one side lay it over make sure it's rolled down and snapped into position and that's it, again we line it up in the proper position down here, push it in and put in our two screws, so we now have both devices hooked up to the bottom of the drone just like so, and you can see the camera is free to move and it'll move to the right or the left up down everything is clear and on the back we've got the payload device right there, and when we get it hooked up it will be able to push in and out just to release whatever cargo that we want to contain so that's it, now we need to power it up we are here in the field out behind the marina just got a little bit of an open space because I just want to do a little bit of a test hover here and see how it's working, first thing we need to do is obviously put the SD card in and that is something is on the camera itself, okay so we got this waterproof receptacle on the bottom you open that up and you've got a USB interface and the interface for the SD card, SD card's locked in place now it's very important to make sure that this rubber seal is pressed in all the way around because that is the only waterproof seal for the card housing inside the camera housing and if that leaks you're going to have a bad day trust me, remember this is a waterproof drone it's designed to go in the water, so you have to keep that in your mindset when you are preparing this drone for flight everything needs to be sealed and clean and we are going to turn on the drone by pushing once and then pressing and holding drone is turning on, you'll see the camera go through its startup sequence there I'll press and hold to turn the remote on we just need to wait it does take him a few seconds for it to link up everything and coordinate everything, now while it's doing that we're going to switch over to the phone because this has a wi-fi system in it, so it's wireless and you connect your phone to the wireless transmitter and then you activate the app, the app is called SD Fly and it's available in the app store or google play but what we need to do first is switch over to our wi-fi system and connect it to the controller so I've already put in the password it's the swp bae network and we are connected, so no problem there now we switch back over and load up the SD Fly app okay, so login device, SD card inserted, and there it comes up with the live view of the camera already so we are good to go, now the other thing I've already gone ahead and done in advance and it just took a few minutes was just to do the calibration and everything I could show you that, but it's very easy it's it's outlined in the directions and basically just involves having to do some rotations of the drone on horizontal and vertical axis and then doing the IMU calibration, so it's very easy very straightforward and it's all accessible from right inside the app, if you look at the payload release mechanism I'm going to push this button right here which is the payload release and as I push it you see it opens, and that's when it would release the payload while it's flying you let it go and it closes again, so that's all connected and working, the camera is working you can see the gimbal is obviously working very well nice and stable I'm happy to see that and I'm going to try a power up so basically that's the same as most other drones, you just pull in your sticks to the inwards and down okay they are rotating, powered up a little bit, left right can hear the difference in the motor, so it's responding it's doing what it's supposed to and then we bring the throttle down and hold it, and shuts down, perfect okay everything is doing as predicted, so now we are going to introduce our propellers, so we match those up to the engines this one says right here clockwise and this one says right here counterclockwise, so this propeller says counterclockwise and it has a dot on it, so we just line this up with the dot, push down and twist and now it is locked in position, okay same thing with the clockwise one and it pushes down and locks in the other direction you can look underneath the drone see the green lights are aft and red lights forward everything is glowing constantly, so that means that it is locked and ready to go it even has a strobe light on top because remember this is designed for search and rescue so it has to classify as a flying aircraft and be able to be recognized by other aircraft in the area, so it actually has a strobe light in case it is flying at night, now you can see on my display and if I turn the tilt, I can turn that up or down I can actually pan it left or right also if I need to re-center it, so we'll leave that where it is and we've got set for 4k 30 frames per second, we have 20 minutes of capacity on the SD card I'm going to hit record and I believe it is recording yep it's four, five, six seconds so the drone is now recording now I'm going to start it up and I'm basically just going to take it off and hover it and make sure it does exactly what it's supposed to do that's why we wanted to stay out here away from everything and... you know it's the first time you test a drone you should always be in a remote safe location, so sticks in okay, and up we go okay all right there it is, that's our first hover that looks pretty steady we have a little bit of a cross breeze, but not too much we'll turn it around, so back it up a little bit, take it up and stop, yeah we've got about a five to six knot cross breeze right now not significant not a lot but just enough it's perfect for our first test I'm going to bring my gimbal tilt down a little bit, I'm not going to go too far this is just a test because yeah I will tell you that we are in an area with some very expensive boats and I didn't really get permission to go fly around the big yachts yet or anything, so this is just a short test, we just want to make sure it flies, but yeah you can see there's the dock there's some yachts there that we don't want to get in trouble with, so I don't want to get too close to them, and here we come in towards us and there we are, not bad I think we'll call that a pretty good first test I want to have a look at the footage see how it looks, I know I need to do some control settings and the adjusting of the settings and everything on it to you know just smooth out the pan and the tilt and everything but hey this is just getting it up and running the first time so no it was very stable, I was not unhappy with that at all I do just want to do some corrections in the settings, but we'll get to that next episode okay, so I'm going to stop there because I have to tell you that while I was there recording all of that the drone was not recording anything, I have no idea why, I checked my display it said it was recording and I checked it numerous times but when I got back the SD card was completely empty zero recorded footage, now I can't explain that I don't know why it happened, but I have seen it happen once before on an underwater drone that I was testing a few years ago and it was basically a communication issue between the app and the remote control itself and I have to think that something similar is going on here because I did go out the next day to try and get some more footage, I wanted to get some footage for this video obviously and I used the button on the remote controller this time and I got footage, I have to think that there is some kind of an issue between the app and the remote control, something I think they're going to have to address rather quickly or it's going to be a problem when these things hit the market, now once I had the footage and had a chance to look at it I noticed there was some things about it that were a little bit glitchy, not to my liking now first of all the camera does not follow the drone properly, the camera is supposed to stay centered like this and as the drone yaws the camera will slowly follow nice and smooth but in this instance as the drone yaws the camera stays steady until the landing gear in the shot and then all of a sudden it snaps back to position sometimes it comes back smoothly but a lot of times it snaps back, that doesn't make for good footage in my views and I'm sorry but that's completely unacceptable I've talked to them about that at the factory and they said yes we're aware of the issue we're working on new firmware to correct it, so I will hold judgment on that for now until we get the next firmware upgrade, but yeah we've got to get that fixed because in my books that makes the drone completely useless for cinematic filming like I do, aside from that when it comes to flyability I have to say the drone was very impressive, it did exactly what it was supposed to do when it was supposed to do it it was smooth I could keep the drone in close and visually watch it and it had lots of reserve power, so the powertrain is great good engines good propellers you give that thing some gas she takes off, so I was happy to see that and it stayed well in control, but again if you're watching it through your screen the only issue is that because the camera is always pointed at something different you really don't know what direction the drone is flying until you actually just see it moving in that direction, aside from that the only other criticism I would have is the remote controller, now the controller works good feels good, it's solid in the hands, it's got good controllability, but I don't know what they were thinking with this display, I mean they've gone back to a dot matrix display that in my mind makes me feel like I'm back playing pac-man in the 80s or something and I just don't understand why they would go to this kind of display from the last model they had which was the splashdrone 3 plus it had a very large full screen color display, it was much better than this it was daylight viewable and now we have this, okay we've got a great interface now for the smartphone, but still for my data and everything I would really like to see something a little bit more elaborate than that I have a hard time finding that they would call that an upgrade from the last drone and you know you have to keep in mind with this drone we're getting into the classification of almost three thousand dollars with the fully waterproof three-axis gimbal camera in 4k that's a lot of money, we're talking in the same category as the mavic 2 pro with smart controller, the phantom 4 professional with a smart controller maybe, you know, the autel evo 2 system with a smart controller that's where you're starting to get into the same money, but those systems I feel you're getting a lot more for the money especially when it comes to the controller, now they've also got these waterproof boots in here which are nice if you're going to be standing outside filming in the rain or you're standing in the water anything like that in case it gets wet but I remember from previous versions that they will create some kind of a humidity problem or moisture problem inside the device, so what happens is you create a waterproof environment in here any moisture is trapped inside there and this starts to heat up as you're using it over time and of course that moisture condenses and the display fogs up and sometimes it shorts things out, so something to consider I mean it's nice to have a waterproof remote, but keep an eye on your displays if they start to fog up, it's time to shut it down, controllability of the drone the drone does what it's supposed to do I mean it was responding to my inputs very well, but as you know I like to fly very cinematic, I like slow smooth movements through the air with the drone as I follow and track my targets and then gracefully change to a new target or a new center of focus that's very difficult to do with this one it responds fairly quickly and I'm used to having exponential settings that you would be able to adjust and slow down the yaw, you know or your pitch and roll or anything like that, but this one they put in a different type of device called smooth control, now that means if you want to slow it down you have to push this button here and then it releases control from the yaw stick and transfers it to this I have no idea why you would want that because all you can do with this is just turn it and it changes the degree of a circle that the thing is just going to sit there and rotate in a circle constantly, if I'm going to fly I'm sorry, but I want the control right here with all axis and control right from the sticks right where they're supposed to be, but give me an exponential setting where I can control the sensitivity of the sticks from everything else I've seen that's my only other complaint, I would just like to see an exponential setting so I can control exactly how much response there is from the sticks to the drone that's it, I do not want these I can't imagine where anybody is going to want these I mean seriously when are you going to push that and switch to manual yaw control and push this and switch to manual pitch or roll, for what? that doesn't give you any control over the drone it's just going to sit there and do exactly the same thing until you turn this again or turn it off and that's not flying the drone if you just want to do autonomous flights maybe it's for you, for me it's not in the game, so that's the only thing I would ask them to add in there some exponential settings I'm sure they can be incorporated into the app somewhere and the app by the way is excellent, the visibility was great only problem was the visibility of the recording time, I couldn't actually tell without going into the shade and really looking very closely at the display if it was recording and see the numbers counting indicating that it was recording let's see I'm going to get the camera recording and push record and nothing happened it's very strange, I just can't tell if it's counting or not it's at 105.41 let's stop the recording
okay I don't get it. they've made the numbers in like a light gold color against the background which of course is whatever I'm filming at the time and if I have any kind of movement or color in the background it's almost impossible to see the digits against that background, change them to white just like everybody else that would be so easy and then we'd be able to tell exactly what it's doing, simple things, but again it just needs a change in the app, so hopefully they're going to address all these issues with the next firmware update maybe the next app update as well I'm going to reserve judgment until then, so for now I'm going to have to put it on the shelf can I recommend it? well I think I'd like to wait and see how those changes come through first and then I'll be able to tell you, so it might be a little while before you see the next video because it depends how long it takes them to update the firmware and we can go out and test it again and as you know we got our hands full right now with getting the boat ready for travel we have a big project list on the way and capitan Jr as well, so our hands are full I want to get into doing as many of these as possible for you, but right now just this next couple weeks going to be a little bit hectic so anyway stick around, hold out for it I'll get back to you with another review as soon as I hear back from them, they're usually pretty quick to respond we'll see, and I will let you know, so until then I hope you enjoyed this part of the review and we'll catch you in the next one, so have a great one guys we'll see you out there, take care for now
2021-10-30