Droning Around

One of my colleague at work had a drone a few months back and had uploaded footage from the device. Looked pretty fun and the main issue he had was the flying time. The drones really eat up the batteries and if it took a couple of hours to charge for a 10 minutes flying time, it was hardly worth it.

So, I initially bought a small drone just to familiarise with the idea. A couple of hours charge, with only around 6 minutes flying time. With no extra battery unit to boot. Not exactly a great deal, but it got us started. And it only had a lame camera attached to it.

After a couple of sessions, Idlan and I decided to go for an upgrade. And oh boy! Upgrade we sure did.

We bought ourselves the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0. Power edition, which came with a couple of high capacity batteries, which would last easily half an hour of flying. And it captured images at 720p, beamed directly and recorded onto the iPad which we used to control it with.

It took some getting used to, but it worked better than the first drone. It cost a fair amount as well. But if we were to do some droning, might as well go for the proper one.

Would I recommend the drone to people? Well it depends if you wanted it or not in the first place, and if you have money to spend. It certainly was not cheap but if you were willing to invest, this would be the best value for money.

Hopefully I could spend some more time flying it as we only managed to fly it at the apartment compound so far. We might just bring it to a park in town but I was sure it would attract some attention. At least we should be able to get some decent footage ....