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January 2023 - The Pitch Lives on

As I've re-stated several times now, Luke and I had not stopped believing in or from wanting to pursue the idea put forth by our "Pitch". Basically, to do some sort of media collaboration with Porsche to document our dual Euro-delivery trip. The motivation for "The Pitch" was genuinely grounded in the desire to make some exceptionally cool content. We were genuine. And so, despite having received our allocations, "The Pitch" ... lived on.

Oh, how we sorely missed that time, during that brief window in May of 2022, when Michael Maternicki from Porsche Euro Delivery had so enthusiastically connected with us about our media collaboration idea. I recall, when the first sign of a pullback occurred with Michael, he had said that he couldn't help us out until we had allocations ... well, here we were now with allocations. But still, silence. Luke had conducted a short campaign of emails, calls, and leaving voicemails. Absolute silence in response.

We were pretty sure something more was going on. We suspected that someone at some level had decided that we were an irritant, an inefficiency, or a distraction, and wanted any efforts to work with us stopped and for us to follow process like bog-standard customers, communicating through the "proper" conduit - i.e., our dealership. I think - reflecting upon it more than two years later - that if the right people had WANTED something to happen, the necessary protocol exceptions could have been made to at least explore our ideas. Why does everything have to be about business, practicality, and ass-covering? Where's the passion, folks?

And so, with an eye towards keeping The Pitch video current and aligned with the current reality of allocations and order status and Euro Delivery dates - and last but not least, to show our continued commitment to the idea - we released "The Pitch: 2023 Edition".
The GTS Chronicles Pitch Video (2023 Edition)
January 20, 2023 - The Raw Data

Most Porsche buyers who are tracking the creation of their dream car use something called the "Track Your Dream" app (or the my.porsche.com website). In this report, we've already talked about how Luke and I had already set up this app and were anxiously checking it every day for updates. Here's an example of what the app (page, in this case) showed me for January 23, 2023, and the corresponding page for Luke:
Track Your Dream for Cayman, Jan 2023
Track Your Dream for Boxster, Jan 2023
This unchanging display became a bit tiring after a while, and so, always looking for more information, I began to look at the network calls this application was making to its backend server - and I found, there's a lot more data in the responses than is showed on the screen. And so, to poke around a bit and to get more insight into our orders, I wrote a little script that made the same call as the application but printed out all of the data associated with my order (or Luke's, if he ran the same script). Here's a small snippet of the output: 

{
   "commissionNumber":"080951",
   "externalVehicleId":"USC080951",
   "modelId":"982",
   "modelName":"718 Cayman GTS 4.0",
   "isDelivered":false,
   "notificationsActive":true,
   "dealerNumber":"0009522244",
   "vehicleStatusImporter":"V200",
   "currentLocation":{
      "type":"position",
      "ident":"PlantZuffenhausen",
      "latestReportedEvent":"orderCreation"
   },
   "milestones":[],
   "vehicleData":{
      "modelYear":2023,
      "orderTypeCode":"982160"
   }
}


You can see there were several useful extra bits of information - for us, this was the "vehicleStatusImporter", which showed our all important V-code, as well as the "latestReportedEvent". These were things not displayed in the user interface.

But that wasn't all - other calls returned what was basically the entirety of our builds, allowing us to check that everything was specified correctly, right down to each and every individual option we had specified.

In all, a little geeky thing to keep us occupied and to allow us to monitor the status of our orders without needlessly using up "pester points" with Porsche Centre London. And you'll see quite a bit more output from my handy little script as our builds progress during this trip report.
January 25, 2023 - The Last Act of The Resurrection

If you recall from back in early December of 2022, I had more or less completed the recovery work on the GTS Chronicles photo drone that had been submerged for more than a week at the bottom of the Ottawa River. And I had been successful beyond my wildest hopes, basically completely recovering it to the point where it booted, connected to the controller, got GPS lock, and flew and hovered normally. And even managed to get the video feed from the main camera working again. However ... one little final problem remained: a problem had cropped up in the autofocus function of the camera - it was inconsistent, or sometimes did not function at all - even in manual focus mode. I felt that most likely, the problem was some sort of stiction or gunk in the tiny autofocus motor that was packaged in with the camera module itself. I had tried cleaning it out as best I could, but could never get it to behave.

You cannot order a new camera for a DJI Air 2S drone. You have to buy an entirely new gimbal assembly. And THEN ... you would have to find an authorized dealer who would pair the software of the gimbal to the drone - which is a proprietary DJI thing that requires a network connection / authorization to some server in China. So, no way - especially since a new gimbal assembly was like five hundred bucks.

And then I found that I could order a replacement lens-and-focus-motor for my drone for ten bucks apiece on ali-express. So, I thought, I'll just order two of them and we'll see what happens. I had nothing to lose.
Replacement Lens Modules
New against Old
New against Old
I received the new modules after waiting nearly a month. So far, so good. The objective now was to separate the sensor (the thing that actually "sees" and records images) from the camera lens and the autofocus motor. In the pictures above, you can see the original camera module and the attached image sensor and circuit board. Next to that is the bare camera module (which does not come with an image sensor or electronics board). The tricky bit here was that the sensor was glued on to the camera module. A bit of casual prying revealed that it was stuck on fairly tightly.

I ended up having to put the assembly into a vice and then carefully heat up the assembly with a heat gun while simultaneously applying a pry force against the edge of the sensor board. This was tricky - I needed to apply enough heat and enough force to get these two pieces apart - but not melt or break anything. It was a nerve-wracking ten or fifteen minutes, but presently, the sensor started to loosen, then finally I was able to pry it off. Whew!
Prying off the sensor
I was now looking at the bare green sheen of the sensor itself. It looked remarkably clean, and did not seem to have any sort of deposits related to its underwater life in the Ottawa River. Still, it now had a bit of dust on it, and I took some time to clean it off with optical lens cleaning solution and a specially-designed sensor wipe.

Next, it was time to get out some contact cement and place a thin bead around the mount surface on the replacement camera module. I was slightly worried about placement/alignment: what if I did not place the new sensor properly square and at the right distance from the new lens? The autofocus might work but I might still not get good images. I tried as best as I could to precisely align everything as before and pressed the old sensor onto the new camera module. It all seemed to come together properly, with no gaps. I reattached the little ribbon cable. Time to reassemble everything into the gimbal and see if the darn thing would work. It was all a bit of a time-consuming gamble, really.
Finally apart
New Pairing
Re-assembly
After much fiddling (putting the gimbal back together is the most tricky part of reassembling the drone), I was ready for a test. I powered the drone up, the gimbal did its usual self-test successfully - always a good sign, and an image feed soon popped up on the controller's phone display. I looked at it close - it seemed pretty sharp. I switched into manual mode, and sure enough, I could see the focus-peaking zebra stripes, and using the focus slider, I could get them to move forwards and backwards in the scene. It seemed to be working! The new camera module's autofocus motor was definitely responding properly.

I took several photos from the old drone looking down at the new drone, and you can see one of those photos here (titled "Old looking at new"). Look for yourself - the camera focused properly and took a good, sharp picture.
Fully reassembled
Old looking at new
And with that, I could finally -- and incredibly -- say that the GTS Chronicles Aerial Camera Platform Disaster Recovery Project ... was complete. Only took three months and probably a hundred hours of labor!
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