Gadgetory

so I've actually done a few flights with the ar.drone but sad this is the first one that I'm going to be doing on camera so just want to show you guys the drone itself I did not boxing but I'll just give you a general overview so included you've got the inside hull so the indoor hall I'm not going to be using that since I am flying outside today so I have the orange and yellow outdoor hall the outdoor hall doesn't provide protection for the propellers but it does offer slightly better performance because it's lighter weight as well as better battery life once again because it's lighter weight so the motors don't have to work as hard so I've got the included one thousand milliamp hour lipo battery it's fresh off the charger so I should get about twelve minutes of flight time out of it depending on how hard it has to work so just go ahead and put that in like that now immediately I plugging in the battery the LED lights turn on I'm just going to put the unit over there for a second and I want to show you guys the binding process so what you do is you go and look for the Wi-Fi network that is AR Drone whatever your AR Drone happens to be so once you've connected so the AR Drone is its own hotspot so you'll see the Wi-Fi will turn on there and then all you do is go into I've got a AR free flight and then I actually have a couple of third party apps drone ace and drone control these are cool they allow for some additional functionality like flashing the LEDs different colors performing a couple stunts like wiggling back and forth spinning circles that kind of stuff as well as recording video and photos I'm just going to be using the AR Drone om one to start with here actually sometimes it takes a minute to to connect properly and to boot up so why don't I finish let's see Oh yep there we go so connecting checking updating bootloader and checking version I did have to update the airdrome the first time I used it but it was a simple process and it was just a matter of doing an over-the-air upgrade took about five between the iPad and the air drone itself so you can see the front mounted camera here I'm standing in front of it now those are my feet so here this should give you some idea of what the delay is like on the camera can you see my foot as well as the iPad okay so you guys can see that so it's not instantaneous but it's pretty darn good and then there's also the bottom mounted camera so now you can see the ground underneath the AR Drone so you can switch between those and there's also a picture in picture view mode where we can see the bottom camera here and the top camera here or the front camera here in the bottom camera here okay well I'll show you the basic controls as well before we get started here so you can reposition the joysticks anywhere you want just by pressing down so you can see this the guys moving around so pressing down on the iPad here allows me to control the ar.drone front back side but set aside movement just by tilting the iPad and then this guy does up-down and then rotating left and rotating right so like this okay up and down like that okay ah there's also an emergency button to cut out and then this is the takeoff and land button I'm not going to press that just yet so let's go ahead and put the whole on it's just a matter of slipping it on the front here alright now this drone has actually been through some fairly impressive crashes so far and I have to say the durability of this thing compared to RC devices that I've used in the past is outstanding actually here I'll show you a couple of the durability related features so number one is the awesome foam that they use on the hauls themselves they can take quite a beating now I've had pieces of them actually snap but I was able to I can't even find the part that was broken on this one anymore I was able to repair them quite easily using a little bit of epoxy the propellers are also made of a very flexible material so that means that once they hit something they do have some give to them so they won't just snap instantly and also they the electronics in the AR Drone will allow it to actually cut out all four motors as soon as one of them encounters resistance so if you hit a branch for example it'll cut out all the motors the AR Drone drops down and what happens is that prevents further damage to the more delicate motors and gear assemblies versus if they did not cut out when I hit the ground and bad things happen okay now I did have one particularly bad crash I just want to show you guys this can you see that that's kind of mangled and can you see that the gear is kind of bent you can get replacement parts actually I should mention this for almost every part of the ar.drone with the replacement part list you can pretty much build an AR Drone from scratch if you wanted to you can get replacement housings bases motherboards all that kind of stuff anyway you can get replacement gears I don't have any and I do need to use it for this video so what I did was what happened was I hit a branch and then it fell down directly onto a curb so the odds of this kind of thing happening were pretty much slim to none but it happened to me of course it fell from about eight feet high so that was bad so this broke off and he can you see the bend there okay so what I did was I glued it to tack it in place and then I melted the plastic back together and it actually see the gears still work so it actually flies okay which is kind of remarkable so I'm just going to show you guys a quick plate here around my backyard and I apologize for that segment of the garden we haven't done anything with that yet that's more like what we're aiming for here but it's sort of one year at a time here so here we go takeoff time so the AR Drone automatically takes off and hovers a couple feet above the ground so here let's show you guys the the basic control so here's your up as soon as you let go of the controls the AR Drone will actually hover itself which is remarkable compared to most other RC devices out there it actually uses the bottom mounted camera to keep itself from drifting around just very cool so here you go I can control the yaw don't worry I'm not gonna pointed at you okay so I'm going to rotate it until I can see myself here hold on little bit more a little bit more just go nice and gently gently tuck I'll just move there you go so now you guys can see good you don't have to keep moving I'm moving myself so you can see me in the iPad right there you go can also see the AR Drone holding itself still in the air over there so let's go ahead and let's move it around a little bit so as I mentioned before as soon as you put your thumb here you can start to control the AR Drone by tilting it back and forth so that's your general movement control now I can move quite fast so let's go ahead we'll just go forward and we'll just kind of do a little circuit here now I would definitely recommend for your first few flights that you do them indoors because it's a little bit tricky to get the hang of especially when the orientation of the drone is changing around in the air in front of you so sometimes it's kind of hard to tell which way to tilt it to turn the way you want to turn okay so like I said no matter what you're doing let's say you're going on here let's bring it this way so let's say you're moving forward let go the controls boom a our drone will hover just like that very cool right okay so now there's a lot of debate on the interwebs about whether the AR drone can actually be piloted when you don't have a line of sight to it I would say yes but slowly so here I'm gonna take you guys around the other side of my house you're probably going to want to be looking at the iPad here because the AR Drone won't be visible very soon so here we go hold on like I said when you let go of it it will immediately stop so here I don't want to get too close to those branches so I'm just going to check around make sure we're not too close to anything here that's good that's good so I think we're we're high little low enough that we won't touch on those so here we go you can stop at any time we can look around there's my ladder there's my gas meter there's my barbecue and there is uh here I'll show you guys where I am hello I'm over here can you see me yes or no yeah you can see me okay so that's what the responsiveness is like when you're flying the AR Drone in a no line-of-sight type scenario okay let's bring it back around to the front and take it back over there and now you can see I have brought the drone back from where it was now there's a couple things to bear in mind when you're flying the drone one is the amount of advanced electronics that's in there Thanks couple cool things so the camera keeps it from drifting it also has an ultrasound transmitter and receiver on the bottom of it that's how it knows what height to stay at so if I go and I put it at this height up to I believe it is three meters the AR Drone can control its height within a very accurate ring check this out so you can see it hardly drifts at all now what that means though is that if I were to take the AR Drone and I were to put it up at a height of about five meters and fly over those hedges on the left as soon as it is above the hedges it would take off five meters above that so be careful with your drone if you go and you try and fly over a shed or over your house you're gonna fly it up twenty feet it's going to jump up another twenty feet get caught in a cross breeze and get blown away and then you're going to be buying some replacement parts so yeah I think that's pretty much all there is to say about it right now there's a great modding community around for this thing already which is which is just outstanding because there's mods to to control it with a standard RC controller there's mods to do all kinds of neat stuff with it and it is a very very cool device there's also extended batteries out there so you can fly for about 20 minutes at a time and I think that's pretty much it so why don't we bring it in for a landing here press the landing button and down it goes thanks for checking out my demo video of the parrot ar.drone just so you guys know the way that I'm flying it now I've only flown it about 10 to 12 times so that should give you some idea what the learning curves like this thing is outstanding compared to other RC aircraft that I have used in the past