 Hey guys, welcome to Rotorat, I'm Bobby F.P.V. And I'm Lydred. And today we're going to be taking a look at the all-new DJI F.P.V. system. So DJI just came out with the new O3 Air Unit. This is their newest version of the Air Unit. And it's got some killer new features. And it's finally going to give you a way to fly custom built drones that may be built yourself or ones that we build here at Rotorat with the new DJI goggles. I'm super excited about these goggles. It's been a while since they've like released the V2. So to see something that they've making that's a lot smaller form factor. These goggles are pretty impressive. We actually went into detail about these goggles when we reviewed the DJI Avada. So in this video, we're not going to get too much into detail about these goggles. If you want to learn more about them, go check out the Avada video. The link's in the description. But in short, they're really impressive goggles. But what was a bummer was when these goggles first came out, the only thing you could use them with were the full DJI F.P.V. drone and the DJI Avada. Yeah. There's been rumors that these goggles are going to become compatible with the older Air Units. But that's not true yet. But this new Air Unit does work with the goggles. So now you can finally use these goggles on a full shreddy freestyle drone. The other thing that this new Air Unit opens up in terms of compatibility is the radio. Oh, so the game style radio. Okay. Right. You're going to be able to actually use this radio with your custom built drone. But then when you actually talk about what's compatible with what, it gets all bonkers again. So knowing which combination of drone and controller and Air Unit, it's a mess. Honestly, here's a spreadsheet screenshot this. Boom. This is what you're going to need to look at. DJI has confirmed backwards compatibility for the goggles in a firmware update. But we don't know when exactly that is. They're aiming for some time in December and they sent us this compatibility chart for reference at the time of release. In short, if you started with an Avada or an FPV drone and you've already got these good news, this is going to work for you. You're good to go. Setting up the radio is pretty cool. You just go into Betaflight and all these switches are just pre-assigned to channels. Oh, okay. And even the momentary switches like the start and stop and this pause switch, they just trigger a change in channel. So when you press this button one time, you'll see the channel move in Betaflight and stay there. So even though it's a momentary switch, it's still slatching. So what that means is you can actually use the start and stop button to arm and disarm your quad. That's nice. It's really cool that all the buttons are customizable. The only button that you can't customize is the record button. That makes sense though. Because it just still works. Yeah, so this has an action camera built on board actually, like super nice HD camera. So that start and stops that. The recording capabilities of this are really impressive. We're going to get into it in a little bit. So we open up the Air Unit. It actually comes with the antennas pre-installed. And I like how they came with a plug and not solders like the Vista did. Okay. This will just make the whole build a lot easier. And I assume hopefully we'll see flight controllers also come with just this plug already. Plug and play. I like the braided wire cover. I do like the braided wire. This just feels like a lot more polished of a product. And I think it's going to provide a little bit more protection if you're building your drone and you accidentally touch the soldering iron too. I've killed cables like that. Those older unit cables. If you even get too close with the soldering iron to it, the old cables would burn super easily. I'm not saying that this is going to be like soldering iron proof, but I do think it looks like it's going to be a little more resilient, give you a little bit more room for error. I noticed you said antennas, but kind of interesting. Antenna. No, it is antennas. Because look, there's two separate connectors going into one load. You're still going to get that kind of multi antenna. I think it's called MIMO technology going on multiple in multiple out. But installation is going to be a lot easier because you just got one dongle. Yeah, definitely. But you will have to take, I think you'll have to take off two screws to take it off in order to put the antenna in amount if you have it like that. That's true. Yeah, you have to remove these two screws here. It's a little tiny fillet there. And speaking of screws, you'll notice the only screws on this unit are holding the unit together, meaning there are no mounting provisions to secure this itself. You're back to double-sided taping this to the drill. Which I prefer. Really? I think it's just overall more durable because like I crush hard and like a lot of times my air units will always just move around and I think it's better if it's able to move instead of having the stress on the little through holes where it mounts, if that makes sense. Check out these warning labels. I know there's all the warning labels on this. Make sure to install the air unit in a position that's well ventilated. So this thing must get really hot. Oh, oh, it gets toasty. It's toasty. Like I've, it hurts. It'll shut itself down eventually and just go into like a thermal protection mode. But before it gets to that point, it gets pretty caustic. This is a product that's unlike what DJI usually makes which is a complete solution. This is a component product. You need to put this into a drone to flat or if you're uncomfortable with that, we got you covered. We have tons of pre-built drones available with this built-in to it. So you can have that DJI technology built into a true carbon fiber freestyle drone. Runaway.com. There's the plug. There's a plug. Move the system, but I want to see how much, how far I can push it. So I'm going to see how far around the building I can fly all the way around the back. All right. So I'm on the other side of this building right in front of us. Video has nothing wrong with it. Looks crystal clear. Let's go see if we can go inside. All right. So I'm in the courtyard. Got one little start of there, but nothing bad. Okay. So I'm in the courtyard and going all the way. See if I can go on the other side of this of these two buildings now. Oh wait. Okay. So this is the very back. I'm a drop below safely because. Okay. Can I? Let's see. Okay. Oops. It's getting choppy. Okay. Nope. So up, up, up, up. Video is getting bad. I'm all the way behind all the building. So I'm all the way behind all of them. If video is bad, like it's fly up. Let's let me try to go back. Ah, this is flyable, man. And I'm not right there. I mean, I'm all dude. I'm so far. I'm behind so many brick buildings, dude. I'm going to go low to the ground, push through it. Yeah, that's insane. Dude, let me just go up really high and do the flight back up high. How far I went. So I'm in between this big building right here, this big building right there, this big building right here. And then we are back here. That's insane. Basically the back of the whole school. When he was like, I'm going to freestyle with the clip on ND filter on the FPV camera. I was like, so you're throwing away ND filter falls off. It's gone. You're not going to find it. So you might as well just let it go. I am impressed that it's not falling off yet. So it says bandwidth 40 megahertz one channel. Are you going to put yours on manual? Yeah, give me a second. I put yours on manual. This is like just a completely different way of managing channels. All right. Three options for bandwidth are 40, 20 and 10. I'm going to 20. I'm going to 20. Okay. I'm on 20 now. Now we got three channels, one, two, three. I'm on one. You're on three. Yeah. Want to try that? So what is the Hertz mean? Is that like better image quality or? That bandwidth setting is how much of the band are you using? So there's the 5.8 gigahertz band. Yeah. And the bandwidth is like literally like what hump of the spectrum are you taking over. Higher bandwidth is going to allow you a higher bit rate. So I noticed when we were at the 40 Hertz band was setting, I was getting 50 megabits per second. Okay. And then when we went down to 20 Hertz, I went down to like 25 megabits per second, which is what we're kind of used to on the older versions. So I think that on auto channel mode, it was just automatically figuring that stuff out for us. So that's interesting. If you're an auto, it'll just lower the bandwidth and make more channels available. So if you're all on the new DJI system, you can all just leave it on auto mode. And who knows how many piles you can get up to, but at least two, no problem. But my concern is if you're on the auto mode and you're flying with systems that don't talk to the system like analog or a different HD system like avatar or something like that, the DJI is just going to spam everyone. I mean, that's using the whole bandwidth. It's on all the channels. It's on literally. Yes, that's what that means. When it's got that wide of a band, you're using the entire 5.8 band. So basically, if you end up flying with other pilots that aren't on this newest DJI system, be courteous, go in, lower the bandwidth probably all the way down to 10 so that you are on like a single traditional channel so that more people can fly. I think the most compelling thing about this new air unit is that DJI wants you to be able to use this as your recording camera, not just your FPV camera. Yeah, so basically it's kind of, they're trying to replace the GoPro or whatever action camera you're using on top. The FPV camera doubles as the action camera. So it records onto a little SD card in there. The air unit. It's got built-in storage too. It does have built-in storage. So the air unit itself has 22 gigabytes built-in. And then yeah, you can put an SD card in there to get as much storage as you want. It does up to 4K 60fps, which is like basically the same as like all of the top-end action cameras that are out nowadays. Pretty awesome. I'd say the one drawback is that you can't go lower than 60 frames a second. Oh, you can't? No, I personally like to film in 30 frames a second. Image you're looking at when you're flying, you want that to be as crisp as possible. You have the most dynamic range so you can see into the shadows. You want the highest possible frame rate so that you've got the lowest possible latency. But with recorded image, maybe you want a little bit more contrast. Maybe you want motion blur. Motion blur? I don't want to fly with any motion blur. That will be interesting because I'm going to fly with the ND filter. I want to see if that like messes me up at all. You can always record in 60 and then export at 30. It still doesn't look the same. It never looks the same. So we've got a couple of our drones already built with the system here. So you can see how it installs. It's really clean. I do like how compact the system is. Like it fits really nicely in my Mark III which only has 20 millimeter tall standoffs. Like perfect for that frame. Yeah. It's going to fit in a lot of the five inch frames that are already out there. However, mounting the camera is a little bit more challenging. The original air unit camera was 19 millimeters wide which was actually kind of the standard width of FPV cameras since the days of analog. This new camera is 20 millimeters wide. Okay. That one millimeter probably won't be too big of a deal but you might end up wanting to make a tweak to maybe a 3D printed part or something like that just so that it's not so tight in there. The other difference is the distance from the mounting holes on the camera to the front of the lens is definitely different on this camera. Oh yeah. It's like super slammed. So what that means is between having that shorter distance between the mounting holes in the front of the lens and having that ultra wide field of view is you're going to have to push the camera way further forward in the frame than you may have had to before. So for comparison, this is the Skyliner HD built with the original DJI air unit and you can see how far back we were able to put the camera and you still don't see any of the frame in the field of view on that new camera to get it positioned so that you didn't see any carbon on the recorded image. Look how far forward it has to be. These little plastic pieces are actually sticking out in front. Now on our CL2 we actually did some more modifications to it because we wanted to get this set up so that in the recorded image you not only didn't see the frame but you also didn't see any of the props. We wanted to set this up so that you could truly use the camera as the main recorded image without having any of the drone in your view. So the front arms are pushed further back rather than being symmetrical front and back. The other thing we did is we have these 3D printed mounts that can be set up so that the camera is out in front of the frame. Now I know what you're thinking. This doesn't look like it's offering much protection and it's not. So if you want to chase some drift cars or do something cinematic where you're less likely to crash or just in general the image quality is the most important thing. This is going to be a great option. And what I like about these mounts is you can just flip them to the inside to get that protection. That's pretty neat. So with one mount you can have it set up to protect the camera for freestyle or flip it around and get you no frame in view for cinematic. I think it's really cool that DJI actually built-in image stabilization to the camera itself. So you can turn it on in the goggles and the recorded image that you pull right out of the O3 is already going to have some image stabilization. And if you need even more stabilization it has built-in gyro data so you can plug this into gyro flow and get like the real study type look that you want for cinematic shots. You do have to be recording in some specific settings but it works really well with gyro flow. The size of this is small enough that you are going to be able to fit it into a 3-inch drone. You know, one of those Cinewhip style drones. So you pair that up with using gyro flow and you're going to be able to get that ultra stabilized Cinewhip style shot. So actually, let's try that out in the warehouse for the skylight. So everybody talks about wanting to look through a GoPro and I feel like this is... I think this is the closest we've gotten so far. Yeah. The less thing you have from the drone to feel different, like you have more power. Yeah, oh yeah, there's a bunch more in there. That's a 1550 mAh battery. No way. It's a bit heavy for what most people would run on this style drone. Most people would run like 1,300 maybe even down to 1,000. Damn it, 14, 3, and 5 minutes. At this point, I'm just going to bring it back. I really like the tune on that for real. The video quality, I mean, from last time it looks just like what the Avada did. All right, so we're here at Orlando Water Sports Complex and we wanted to see what type of cinematic footage we can get using the built-in HD camera on the DJI-03 area in it. We're going to do some of the footage using the built-in stabilization. Out on the boat, we have Drew. He's going to be talking to us and Shawn is going to be the guy on the wakeboard doing the jumps and the flips and the spins and whatever they do on that. Yeah, drone retriever makes these. So what it is, is inside of here, they have some substance and a clip that when it dissolves, it takes five seconds to dissolve. It'll punch the CO2 cartridge and after it does, it turns into an airbag and drops it to the top of the water so we don't lose it. The last video. Yeah, no, the video just cut out on me. I was right over here in the video. Boom, done. When we've had drones go reflection, there's no mistake in this big obnoxious orange thing. What did the drone do when it fell out the sky? He thinks he sprayed it. Yeah, because I was like up high though. Like I was literally above him. Video gone. I think he sprayed you. I think water got on the drone. You should kill that. So SD card. We got files. Yeah, that's what's up, man. We tried freestyle ripping. We tried an interior fly-through. We chased some vehicles. We chased a wakeboarder over water. We tried to put this thing through as many different scenarios as possible to see like, is this the new ultimate video system? I think that the image quality and the penetration like the RF link is probably the best out right now. Okay. As for the onboard recording, I think it looks better than like the action 2 in my opinion. I'm liking it. Yeah, I'm liking it. I think the DJI action 2 camera isn't a crowd favorite. I've been using it on my freestyle rigs. I'm happy with it. But I think people generally prefer a GoPro. Yeah. I agree. It beats the action 2. Yeah, which is crazy. It's literally doubling into an FPV camera. But is it on par with a GoPro? After watching the clips of the wakeboard, like I was honestly blown away. Like this looked really good. I'd like to, you know, try to color grade it, push the clothes as much as I can compared to GoPro footage to see how it compares in the post production world side. But overall, I think it's like really good. So going into this, I thought the idea of using your FPV system as the only recording device just was never going to work. I mean, and I still think that the theory that what you want to see in the goggles is always going to be so different from what you want to record in terms of the frame rate, the motion blur even the field of view that I don't know if it's the best option. But I do think DJI has done a really good job. Almost presenting two different images from the same sensor. You get a brighter, more dynamic range image in the goggles and the contrasty, more photogenic image in the recording. It's interesting how they did that. So I don't know that it could be your 100% of the time recording camera, but I think there's a lot of snares where it could be, especially for freestyle. Yeah, I think freestyle is where the using it as your HD camera is really going to shine. Because yeah, the benefits of weight savings over not necessarily being able to fully optimize the image and lend themselves more to freestyle. Yeah. And then it becomes kind of a calculus problem. This is going to be the most expensive video solution. Yeah. It's going to be $250 per unit. And you have to put one in every drone, versus if you bought a GoPro, you could move it from drone to drone. There's also the thing, if you break your action camera, now you don't have an action camera none of your drones, but you have an action camera built in, if that makes sense. So it's just like, you know. I think it's the math is how many drones do you need to build. So what's the increased cost per drone to put this in every drone and at what point could you have just bought an action camera? Yeah. And then gone with a cheaper video solution. It's still got everything you want. I don't know. That's kind of one way of looking at it. A lot of personal preference in that. So if you guys are interested in checking it out, we're going to be selling the system standalone for all you DIYers. And we're going to be building a ton of different drones with it so that you can get a Rotorite drone ready to rip with the new DJI Air Unit 03 and have this awesome video quality, both for flying and for recording. It's pretty cool. Yeah, if you guys like this video, make sure you hit the subscribe button and the like button. Let us know in the comments below what you think about this whole HD camera FPV combo all in one because I'm really curious to hear what the whole community has to think about. Would you use this to record your videos? Would you ditch a dedicated camera and just rip this? I think there might be. I think there would be a lot of people that will be happening. Thanks for hanging out. We'll see you next time on Rotorite.