bought myself a drone, to pass some time whilst house bound.
bloody heck, how hard are they to control….up and down is ok, but steering is nigh on impossible.

anyone else got one?

Ton , seem to be loads by mine , if I see one over my garden again I will brick it ., intrusive devices …tuts and goes off to fashion a catapult

no but I fancy one, what you got? you need a VR headset by the way.

mine is a itsy bitsy micro drone, for indoors, to buzz the dog and wife with. they are both frowning already. 😆

cough

Got a Hubsan X4, brilliant indoors but as soon as you go outside and it gets the tiniest whiff of a breeze it’s completely uncontrollable. Also the battery only lasts 7 minutes at a time and the motors die pretty easily 🙁

This is a drone.

This is a toy quadcopter.

I sincerely hope that no one has allowed you anywhere near a drone, ton! 🙂

Bought a ‘quadcopter’ for my son we took it out once… in a really wide open space and it still got away from us!! Still haven’t got the hang of it yet. Think it’s a SymaX5HW.

Also bought spare batteries and spare rotors etc.

Buy a small, cheap drone first and learn how to fly it indoors and then in your garden.

DO NOT buy a superfast racing drone with no “return to home” option and try to fly it after watching a 5 minute how-to-fly-a-drone video on YouTube. You WILL lose it. 😳

Banggood is the best place for cheap FPV gear.

Amateurs! 😆 I love my sons (that I bought us for Christmas) syma drone. 360 flips at the touch of a button is the shizzle. I somehow ordered 9 batteries as well so we get plenty of practice. They really don’t like any breeze at all though!

I bought one of these just to mess about with https://store.parrot.com/uk/airborne-night/461-swat-3520410028748.html?gclid=CJ2JvpTL1M4CFckp0wodZH0AOA it’s really easy to fly indoors (it has an auto hover function which helps…). Ultimately though it gets boring pretty quickly, the iPad control is a bit laggy (and on a normal sized iPad a bit cumbersome).

It still held my interest longer than a micro quadcopter that I couldn’t even trim properly and I spent most of the time cutting carpet fibres from it’s rotors (the Parrot one was given to my 12 year old nephew, I suspect he’s bored of it now to).

Yeah I have a little Syma X7 toy quad.

Great fun to fly around the living room. It handles flying outside okay as long as it is a pretty still day.

When you start off it is best to keep the tail facing you and just do roll/pitch moves (i.e. tilts left/right or forward/back). That way it is intuitive while you get the hang of the basics.

Once you have the hang of that then turn 90 degrees (yaw) and do some more roll/pitch stuff. The biggest brainmelt is trying to control it when it is facing you – once you get past that then move onto the more dynamic banked turns using yaw and pitch.

Incidentally you’ll probably want something like this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B013ZTVFPQ

4-way multi-charger and batteries – lets you fly for more than 5 minutes. Make sure you get the right battery size for your quad.

if I see one over my garden

FWIW overflying built up areas is illegal.

When you start off it is best to keep the tail facing you and just do roll/pitch moves (i.e. tilts left/right or forward/back). That way it is intuitive while you get the hang of the basics.

That basically.
Check out the Flitetest channel on Youtube. There’s some decent tutorials on there, which I’d assume are in a playlist somewhere (possibly hidden in amongst some fixed wing stuff). Couple of years old now, and iirc they used a tri-copter, but the principle’s the same.

FWIW overflying built up areas is illegal.

So is smashing someone’s property with a brick!

THis was interesting.
Drones

It seems that police have the ability to stop drones from flying in controlled areas – see the end paragraphs

They’ve updated the Cheerson CX-10 that was popular in previous drone/quad threads.

It is still palm-sized, but now it has altitude hold, auto take-off/land, a camera, and FPV through a phone! And still ~£28 from banggood. Amazing.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbkWobTty24[/video]

(Note: the app issue mentioned in the video has been fixed).