The Perfect Size: A Drone for Acrobatics and Combat
This drone is the perfect size because it can do a lot of acrobatics with it, and it's large enough to carry a 720p camera. It's not so big that it will hurt anyone unless you fly directly into their eye or hair. The drone has about a 10-minute flight time, but what really makes it stand out is its IR emitters and sensors. With these features, you can fire USB missiles at other drones, making it the perfect platform for drone combat.
The Drone's Features and Accessories
One of the most exciting features of this drone is its ability to be upgraded through USB. This means that users can easily update the firmware to improve performance or add new features. The drone also comes with a four-slot battery charger, which can charge four batteries at once. This is perfect for those who want to fly their drone continuously without having to stop and recharge.
The Camera: A Fun but Inhibiting Feature
One of the accessories that come with this drone is a camera. While it's fun to play around with, it does add a bit of inertia to the drone, making it noticeably more sluggish. However, when flying with the camera, you can control whether or not it's recording video or taking pictures from the remote. This is a nice touch that adds an extra level of immersion to your flight experience.
Trimming the Gyros: A Crucial Step for Flight
When using the drone with the camera and rotor guards, you'll need to trim the gyros to make sure the drone flies smoothly and accurately. This involves making adjustments to the drone's balance and stability, which can be a bit tricky but is crucial for getting the best performance out of your drone.
A Modular and Upgradable Drone
One of the things that sets this drone apart from others is its modularity. The motors are easily replaceable, and the firmware can be upgraded through USB. This makes it easy to customize and upgrade your drone as you see fit. Whether you want to add new features or improve performance, this drone is a great platform for doing so.
A Brief History of Drone Combat
The concept of drone combat dates back years, but it's only recently become popular with the rise of quadcopters and other drones. In the past, I built an RC10 remote-controlled truck that would follow another RC10 with an IR beacon. It was a lot of fun for about 20 minutes until the batteries gave out. Now, with this drone, you can experience a similar level of excitement and competition without breaking the bank.
Conclusion
Overall, this drone is a lot of fun to play around with, especially when used in combination with other drones or accessories. While it's not the most powerful or advanced drone on the market, its unique features and modularity make it a great platform for learning and experimenting. Whether you're a seasoned drone enthusiast or just starting out, this drone is definitely worth considering.
A Word from Wendle
If you have any questions or want to share your own experiences with this drone, please come visit me on the forums! I'd love to hear from you and see what other cool things you've done with your drone.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe by robot tabletop drone fire so this drone is the perfect size because you can do a lot of acrobatics with it and it's large enough to carry a 720p camera which is one of the accessories but you won't hurt anyone unless you fly directly into their eye or their long hair it's got about a 10-minute flight time uh but the cool thing is that it's got IR emitters and sensors so that you can fire USB missiles at other drones it really works best if you have more than one in fact it'll do flying configurations up to four so you can have these sort of flying quad rotor battles or whatever uh that's really cool in terms of ir emission because each quad rotor has its own infrared emitter and receiver if you know one of the enemy quad rotors manages to land an infrared hit on you know the target quad Rader uh it'll behave differently depending on what weapon was fired from the enemy quad raders a direct bomb hit can cause the motors to stall out entirely for about 5 Seconds scores kept by the drones themselves and and that sort of thing so it's a really sort of fun interesting quadrotor game this little fell supports different flight modes as well the two main modes are absolute mode and normal mode absolute mode means that the gyroscope in the quad rotor keeps track of its orientation and forward backward are always the same relative to the pilot no matter the orientation of the Quad rotor so in normal mode backward forward Etc is relative to the orientation of the Quad rotor itself there's a front of the Quad rotor and a and a back of the Quad rotor and you know left and right side and when you press those controls it'll move in the direction without taking into account its Spin and so this is normal like think about like how you would pilot a you know a radio control helicopter or a radio control airplane or a radi controlled car it is always you know normal mode but in absolute mode it's actually a little easier when you're flying a quad rotor like this because when you press up or down or left or right it's going to move in those cardinal directions relative to you not relative to the quad rotor so it actually makes flight a little easier although acrobatics can be a little bit more challenging absolute mode is definitely a lot easier for noobs to master so it's easy to toggle between the two modes um you just sort of hold down the settings button and then you hold the red button down and it'll toggle the mode and then in the manual um on the website which is quite good it's quite well documented I was very surprised by that because usually when you get stuff like this it's like I don't know it's going to be some English I don't know but it was actually really good then you can hold the two red buttons down on the top and actually see the configuration that the LEDs will blink in a certain pattern depending on what the specific points of configuration are another cool thing is the simulator now you don't even have to buy one of these you can go to the website right now and download the simulator and play with it but the cool thing about the simulator is that the simulator can interface with the remote that the quad rotor comes with through USB so you can plug this controller into your computer and use it like a controller with this simulator and so you can learn to fly the quad rotor in the simulator which is great because you're not going to destroy your propellers and motors and people around you and eyeballs and other stuff like that so out of the box you get the Drone some rotor guards two battery packs one for the quad rotor and one for the remote although they use the same type of battery pack a USB charger um a standard micro USB cable and four spare rotors now take care when replacing the rotors there's actually two different kinds of rotors so if you put the one wrong one on it's not going to fly one kind of propeller generates lift uh when turning counterclockwise and the other one generates lift when turning clockwise and they're they're set on opposite Corners so that the quad rotor is balanced um when it's spinning so that you don't have any sort of weird forces and so that it will fly correctly there are about 40 LEDs on the quad rotor and it supports the IR combat situations I mentioned before with up to four independent quadrotors and so of course it comes with some different stickers that you can use on the plastic components um to sort of decorated however you want depending on if oh it's I'm normally red or I'm normally blue or whatever one cool accessory is the camera the camera is Tiny and powered by the quad rotor itself it does come with a 4 gig micro SD card on which it records photos and videos it's 1280 x 720 or 720p that 4 gig card will hold about an hour of footage give or take it also has this Nifty USB adapter that lets you load the video on your phone from the SD card via USB on the go or you can use it as a regular computer USB memory adapter installation of the camera on the quad rotor is pretty easy but you can't really fly it with the rotor guards and the camera both installed so make sure you're a decent pilot before embarking with the camera one thing when switching between with and without rotor guards and with and without the camera is that you will need to trim the Gyros to make it Fly well be sure to check out the manual for the trim procedure and actually I think that you know out of the box they come pretty well trimmed but you should go through the trim procedure again just to make sure that it it flies because it's a lot easier to fly and it's a lot easier to fly accurately if you've put a little work into trimming it so that the the quad rotor is basically stationary when it takes off and your hands are off the controls if you you know launch the quad rotor and it's sort of drifting to the left or right front and back you can trim that out of it so that when your hands are off the controls the quad rotor is basically not moving at all another accessory you can get for this is the four- slot battery charger that'll charge four batteries at once this is cool if you also order some extra batteries um four slots is enough that if you've got batteries to fill that you can basically fly this thing continuously because it only takes about 20 or 30 minutes to charge the batteries and the discharge time is on the order of about 10 minutes it's a little less when you get the camera I'd say it's probably closer to 7 minutes with the camera without the camera 9 10 minutes something like that it's pretty good while messing around with these I also managed to burn out one of the motors by getting some hair caught in the motor sorry in turn number four fortunately a replacement pair of Motors was just $9 and no permanent harm done I like that it's modular and I like that it was really easy to replace the motors uh when I screwed it up so that was nice the firmware on the quad rotor is also upgradeable through USB though I couldn't find any custom firmwares you guys will need to buy these and hack the crap out of them so we can do other cool stuff with USB way back a long time ago many years ago I built an rc10 uh it's a remote controlled truck that would follow another rc10 with an IR beacon that was a lot of fun CU I would drive the RC with the IR beacon and then another RC would follow that RC and it was really great fun for about 20 minutes until the batteries gave out we need to do that but with quad rotors so that's been the bir robot tabletop drone fighter have you picked up one of these you know they're they're sort of fun toys it's a toy it's not not going to kill you if you run into somebody unless you run into somebody's eye in which case that's bad or possibly their hair but I had a lot of fun playing with these um you really need to get more than one if you're going to get you know one if you're thinking about getting a larger quad rotor this would definitely be a good platform to learn on because it's not going to you know destroy anything if you do any sort of Mis piloting the camera was a lot of fun to play with but I think if you're going to do the fighter thing you're probably not going to use the camera because the the camera definitely adds a bunch of inertia it makes it noticeably more sluggish but it's kind of cool cuz you can get okay quality video out of it when you're flying it around so it's sort of fun you can control the camera like whether or not it's recording video or whether or not it takes a picture from the remote which is a nice touch overall as a toy I had a lot of fun playing with these um if you've got one or something like this come over to the forums and let's talk toys that are quad rers and basically autonomous because that' be a lot of fun I'll see you in the forums it's wendle signing out\n"
