The inevitable has happened. I bought a drone.
Nope. Not the AR.Drone 2.0. Parrot wi-fi quadricopter in Pismo priced at around 27,000 php that I’ve been drooling over with. I think my twitter followers (wow! As if I have 1M followers!) know that I’ve been dreaming about it ever since it got released in the US but I didn’t want to buy because IT IS VERY EXPENSIVE. Good thing minidrones got in the picture so was able to get myself a Rolling Spider minidrone which is smaller and cheaper compared to AR.Drones. It’s still Parrot nevertherless and I got it for just 18% of the price of AR.Drones.
My Rolling Spider is just 3.54 x 3.54 inches without the wheels and 6.69 x 6.69 inches if you attach them. The wheels sort of serve as a protection for noob drone pilots like me. I’ve crashed it a lot of times already but it never really gets broken (as of this writing) because the wheels are always there to save the day.
To be able to fly it the first time, I needed to install an app called FreeFlight3. (It’s free and available for both iOS and Android) After installing the app, I just had to connect it to my drone via Bluetooth and voila! I was able to do a “takeoff”.
The app has 3 modes for piloting: Normal, Ace and Joypad. Normal mode uses your mobile phone’s accelerometer to control the movement while your left finger controls the direction of the drone’s front. Ace mode is the most difficult because it only lets you use one finger for all the drone’s activity. You can think of Normal mode as A/T and Ace as M/T. The Joypad is the most special mode because it disables the use of accelerometer so that it can continuously record and take photos while your drone flies around your neighborhood. All modes have a “takeoff” and “landing” button.
When I first made it fly, my initial thought was that it’s very stable. It can even do right, left, back and front flips–you name it. It can also roll on your wall like a, well, rolling spider. I haven’t really tested my drone “outside”, like in a windy park, but I want to test its stability considering it only weighs 0.065 kg.
Here are some of the pics that I took (Normal mode) while our cat was eating:
Indoor Adventures of My Parrot Rolling Spider MiniDrone
Sadly, the camera is just 0.3 megapixels. But for its price, I think that resolution is just fair enough.
The battery only lasts for 6-8 minutes but it’s understandable given its size. Plus, I’m not planning to fly it for hours straight anyway.
Overall, I am very happy with this purchase and I am just sharing it with everyone! 😀