Brian Moses is at it again. He’s put together an excellent write-up about his EconoNAS build for 2019. This year, the heart of his build is an AMD Ryzen CPU. I’m excited about this, because there’s such a wide range of Ryzen processors, and most motherboards can accept anything from a power-sipping dual-core chip all the way up to 12-core and 16-core monster CPUs.

Brian likes to build the servers that he writes about, and as always, he’s giving this one away! You should most definitely check out his blog and sign up for the giveaway.

I think Brian did a fantastic job at leveling up his video-recording setup and skills this year. His production quality is way up. He even managed to combine his usual timelapse build, a discussion of his parts, and some information about the giveaway into a single 24-minute video this year. He’s doing a good job!

Manufacturers seem to be calling every drone with prop guards and an HD camera a cinewhoop these days, but the majority of those drones won’t get you cinewhoop footage that even remotely resembles what Paul Nurkkala can do with a proper cinewhoop build.

I don’t think Nurk invented the cinewhoop, but he definitely popularized them, and he is almost definitely the king of long, one-take cinewhoop flight edits. In this video, he explains what you should be thinking about when you’re planning a cinewhoop flight. You should be moving in ways that can’t be replicated with a video camera on a gimbal. Make use of altitude changes, and fly through things that no human camera operator could reasonably climb through while filming!

In the second half of the video, Paul walks us through choreographing a real cinewhoop flight. He explains his thoughts to everyone, and then he manages to record an amazing shot on the first take!

I usually do my best to maintain a diversity of topics when I write up these posts about videos. Two drone videos in a single post seem like too much. Am I being lazy, or am I just tickled by the idea of building a quadcopter out of Dremel tools? It is up to you to decide.

Yes, the Rotor Riot crew built an FPV miniquad out of Dremel rotary tools. It weighs four times as much as my own freestyle miniquads, but they do manage to get it in the air.

I don’t want to spoil too much, but they did get it to fly. I was a little terrified when David was test flying a single Dremel tool, but I was definitely impressed that it was able to generate lift at all!