tvandijck

Here are a couple of reference images of the device compared to a QStarZ BT1000EX. It's quite a bit smaller, and a few grams less.

Yes, I still hope to find a manufacturer that actually makes a 5" panel flexible transparent OLED, so I can 'stick' it on my full face helmets vizor, 'computers' these days are so small and powerful (see iphone), that we can do crazy stuff like what you suggest.

nah, I disagree.... visual feedback and certainly with numbers and other fancy distracting graphics is just too difficult to process when you are wingsuiting. It's hard enough to keep your eyes on your direction, the people around you, and the tandem canopies you don't want to fly into. FlySight.ca solved this exact problem with audible feedback, which is easier to process and less distracting.

First 20 jumps I used my Crossfire 2, 159... never had any issues, but instructors recommended me buying something not elliptical. So I got me a Storm 170.. So far is has given me more spins and twists then any other canopy I've ever owned. The upside is however, even though it spins up on me, I've not had to cut it away yet, it's nice and stable, keeps flying straight etc... I'm sure if I had had 7 twists under my crossfire I'd be facing earth very fast... At MOAB, DSE said it was mostly body position, so I made some changes and haven't had issues since. But it appears that my Storm is 'influenced' more by this wrong body position than my crossfire.

It was great being there, awesome scenery and nice people to jump with. A bummer we (Stefan and I) had to cut things short, but so if life. Anyway, thanks to Jeff and DSE for putting up with me and organize some great jumps, I had tons of fun leading and trailing the flocks. If only I could get my hands on the footage and pictures. Anyway, good meeting you guys again, and hope to see you at FnD, or elsewhere.

Not an expert here, only recently got my P2, made about 30 jumps on it so far... I found that rolling my shoulders and 'bending' my elbows slightly gets me the best performance... I stretch my toes as far out as I can, I basically try to make my lower body as 'long' and stretched as I can, no bending the knees. Got a 42mph this weekend (avg on protrack) with a 5ft10in, 210lbs body... so it is doable, it just needs practice and playing around with the suit in the air really.. like the others said, getting comfortable in the suit and enjoy your jumps is probably more important at this stage. I found the GPS 'path' pretty useless and doesn't help me at all right now, but others may have different experience. Before shelling out the 100-200 dollars on it though, I'd just have fun and play around for another 20-30 jumps, and try to find people to jump with so you have a reference in the air. I found that certainly the later thing helped me more than anything.

I got the BT-Q1000EX, pretty accurate logging, but the software that comes with it is a pile of crap. And there is not really a good way to mount it, apart from duck tape. I bought it because Jarno told me it would be fun to log my jumps, but so far I found it all but enjoyable.. ;) I see a freaking line on google maps that tells me where I have been, but that I already know... I was there when I made the jump, so yeeeeehh awesome, but it has little to no value to me... so if anyone wants a BT-Q1000EX ;) I got one available for cheap... I might be a MOAB, or otherwise I'll bring it to some other boogie.

I'm in the area having fun on my own, but rather jump with others...

Finally got my own suit now as well ;) whoohoo... up to many more of these fun jumps... In Perris all week next week (May 25-30), so if anyone wants to do some jumps.... ;)

Hmzz, bummer though... source code links appear to be down since February 1st 2010... so little you can do on it without that.. I'm not signing up to yet another forum though.

whatever works for you... I think having a high resolution and sharp/clear stereo picture is more important than the field of view. One thing I did think about however, is that stereography really requires 'features' in the image, so making a shot from below would probably not work very well, considering the background is all blue everywhere. that said though, if the background is all blue, I don't really need anything special to figure out the wingsuits as long as they are not the same blue ;) I think in the end we'll end up with multiple algorithms all 'voting' on where that algorithm thinks a wingsuit is. My experience with motion detection etc is that under varying light conditions the quality of the results differs a lot, and my opinion is that for this to work we need something that is very reliable... having it miss just one jumper is basically not an option.

so ;) get me some pictures then ;) hehe...

Nice ;) I'm on vacation for a few days and we have something awesome popping up ;) We've been talking about doing this for a while indeed, but I've not found the time yet to look into this. I did several eyetoy games for PS2 a couple years ago, so I'm familiar with some of the motion detection stuff, but haven't done anything with it for a while... if you have code or papers to share, I'd be happy to take a stab at it... PM me if you do... As you said though... a test video shot from above or below would be a needed ;) Another option I've been considering is stereo imaging. Basically if I have two pictures shot, and know the distance between the two lenses some depth calculations can be done, and considering depth between the people and the ground is pretty high it should be reasonable doable to get the outlines of the wingsuits. It would require a helmet with two cameras that are entirely in sync though..

new version online, the above problem should be fixed.. and I added the tolerance settings in the exported image, not sure if I really like it though.. http://www.tomvandijck.com/flock/bin/FlockBriefing_0_8_18_beta.zip

interesting that it even works ;) hihi... on my G4 Macbook, it didn't even startup.. Bug can be reported in Mantis, the message from the terminal would be a good start yes, but ultimately I just need some time on an intel mac. A friend of me here in Vancouver is totally mac, so I might be able to borrow one for a couple hours.. Heading to the XP Paraclete tunnel for some 8-way training the rest of this week though, so I'll not be able to look at this until Monday.

I'm also a Mac user and I can higly recommend VirtualBox http://www.virtualbox.org/ as an free alternative to VMWare Fusion. Of course you still need a Windows disk... Actually, the application is written in .NET, and is apparently Mono compliant... Mono can be downloaded for Linux, FreeBSD and MacOSX.. so it should be possible to run the application on all of those platforms. I'll may have to make some changes here and there, but in theory there should be no real issues. I tried it on my old G4 Mac, but that didn't really work very well, but if anyone has a newer intel mac and wants to give it a try, I'd welcome the feedback. you can get mono here http://www.go-mono.com

Just looking at the 16 way I tried, the stretch there is at 75% orso, which is thus an even bigger deviation from what you did. Personally, I'd say totally allow that.. the formation looks uniform, is exciting to look at, and even with very low tolerances I can get all dots green. I'd take more issue with non-uniform formations. things that look totally off, asymmetrical, etc. That 16 way, even though it's compressed that much.... totally awesome..

yes, I liked how small I could get them, with just showing 2 people outside of the dots.. it's in no way to mean those 2 guys did a poor job or anything.. I'm not in any position to make that call.... it was just an example.. not sure, I'd have to try a couple things... shouldn't be too hard, but the hard part is making numbers meaning full to begin with.. the numbers right now are pretty absolute numbers in pixels.. so dotsize == 200 just says the dots have radius of 200 pixels. but that is somewhat 'random' since photo resolution is then a big factor.. same count for distance, and most other numbers. those are indeed percentages... so 50% is width is 50% of height. 200% is width is 200% of height. pretty simple... it's one of the few numbers that actually is relative, and thus not subjective to resolution.

I got a feature request for that in mantis indeed... just haven't gotten around to adding it... I'll try it somewhere next weekend if the weather sucks again ;)

nice screenshots ;) If you click on "Project / Export..." you can export the image with the markers, lines and dots. without getting the full UI in your picture...

New version available online, same link as the opening post. I used it to quickly get the attached result on the elsinore 16-way. or quick link: www.tomvandijck.com/flock/ changes: * added stretch, and rotate to 'kallend' method. * scaled markers with wingsuits. * made wingsuits transparent. * added quick edits for angle/distance tolerances. * added visuals to show whether error was due to angle or distance. * couple bugs here and there. enjoy.

sweet... why not post those to dropzone.com?

obviously, as soon as I posted this, I actually found two articles.... one about the gear-check, which is obviously very important and the future of wingsuiting, which didn't appear to be safety related. That said thought, it's 3-4 clicks away from the main-page, which is quite a bit more than what is needed for the other disciplines... I was more searching for what to do and don't do when participating in flocks, break-off procedures, etc.

Just noticed this. Here on dropzone.com there is the "safety" link in the top, which I occasionally read, and now that I started wingsuit, I thought, hey lets read that part and see what tips they got.... turns out, this is the list: Disciplines: * Formation Skydiving * Freeflying * Swooping * Canopy Relative Work * Skysurfing * Freestyle * Style and Accuracy * Para-ski * BASE Jumping I see no wingsuiting there... there is an area for pretty much every discipline, except for wingsuit skydivers. Now, I'm not that experienced yet, did some flocks and docks at F&D6, got Jarno to tell me some do's and don'ts, but that's pretty much it... It would really suit (no pun intended) this community well to write some articles for dropzone.com, so I can read more do's and don'ts, but more importantly, not just me, but for others who are seeking this info... I know it all comes down to training, and ask many many questions from more experiences people, but you know, not everyone has access to the highly experienced coached at their home DZ, so they seek information online... anyway, just saying....

hmzz.... ordering wingsuit right away.. can't wait for more. Jarno, why isn't it done yet? I emailed you the form like 6 hours ago...