It's for my 9 year old son but I'll surely play with it too. Who knows what he'll take pictures or videos of. I suspect I'll have to get myself one as well. Perhaps with live video. :nerd: I grabbed him a starter unit to see if he likes it: Udirc U818A 2.4GHz 4-Channel 6 Axis Gyro RC Quadcopter with Camera RTF Mode 2 (paid $65 USD total) Anyone else play with these mini-drones? What's your experience been?
Not the most recent, last Wednesday a new one got out (about freemium games, a winner too). RC planes are damn nice, drones must be too.
I hate the term drone, why do 4 props suddenly make it a drone even though rc choppers etc aren't. Personally I have a Cheerson CX-10 that was $19: And a Skyking X39 that was $39, both are great, the X39's really good, only flown it twice so far, then was messing with the calibration and got it so far off at the moment it can't be flown till I figure how to re-trim it well enough, unfortunately that needs a still day which is unlikely to happen for months at this time of the year.
As I was searching for birthday gifts for my sons's upcoming 10th, last week's South Park may have influenced me. I'll need a much higher resolution camera for that type of fun/trouble though. @DCX, so it's still flyable in some wind? These things are really light so I presume a gust will make flying a bit more challenging. While this is a mini-copter, I love the term "drone". It's gotten a really bad rap and I'd like to be some small part of that.
That's cheap compared to some I've seen on things like "The gadget show" - some were close to a grand, they did have amazing quality cameras on them though, and you could spin the thing any which way you liked and the video would stay perfectly centred and the correct way up, no shaking - they flew it through a huge fireworks display and it sent back pretty amazing videos
Light wind, but anything more than ruffling your hair you might struggle in, depends on the model though and how it's been calibrated for flight.
RC quad copter /= drone. Sorry. An RC quad copter is still remote control, where as a drone is automated. But from the size of that thing, you could probably put a beefy arduino or raspberry pi on it and turn it into a proper drone, if you're good at programming. An arduino will be better for power, but an underclocked raspberry pi would be pretty good too, might be able to get the raspberry pi to under 300mA.
It arrived today. It's larger than I'd imagined, perhaps 15" wide, which is great. I tested it in front of the house and it's a blast! Too bad it was really windy today. We'll have to take it out to a field somewhere tomorrow. I kept hitting trees and such with all the wind and my inexperience.
After seeing this thread took some time today to trim my ~12" X39 and get it working again, Quad Copters are brilliant, I can hand launch it off my balcony fly it around and land it by hand again, so good, chased a cat as well! Next step is fix my 2" CX-10, bent the prop shaft on that though, so need to solder a new motor on, just need time to do it.
