he Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 is expensive ($299) and can only fly for 15
minutes on a charge, but it’s still a leading contender for the best
Father’s Day gift you might ever buy.
Getting Started
Flying
Soaring
Getting Started
Flying
Soaring
When I tried out
the new AR.Drone earlier this year, I sensed its entertainment value,
but it wasn’t until I brought it home and took it for a bunch of real
test flights that I discovered the compelling nature of this
remote-control flying and HD video-recording entertainment device. It’s
best described as your own personal spy drone.
The AR.Drone 2.0 is the follow-up to the widely discussed AR.Drone 1,
which made a splash a couple of years ago as a unique iPhone-controlled
quadropcopter. The best part of it? You could see what the AR.Drone’s
standard definition camera saw. The copter responded to the on-screen
flight controls.
Today’s AR.Drone sports two cameras: a standard-definition camera in
its belly that points at the ground and a 720p HD camera. That camera
not only shows you what the copter sees, but also lets you capture HD
video files on your smart phone or tablet (iOS and Android devices).
Setting up the AR.Drone 2.0 is easy enough. It comes with two bodies;
one with protective foam rings for indoor flights (they’ll protect your
plants, furniture, small children and pets from the largish rotor
blades), and a leaner body for outdoor flights. Under the hull (which is
held in place by a strong magnet) is the rechargeable battery and a USB
port (more on that later). There’s a wall-wart battery charger — you
need to charge the battery for about an hour and a half.
The flyer ships with a quick-start guide, but the full manual can
only be found online. That guide was far more helpful than the thick
quick-start guide that devotes 80% of its pages to other languages. The
software you’ll need to control AR.Drone, AR.FreeFlight 2.0, is freely
available for download via the App Store and Google Play.
You can’t fly the AR.Drone until you connect it to your smartphone or
tablet via Wi-Fi (802.11A/B G and N). This, too, is easy. The AR Drone
shows up as a Wi-Fi hotspot. Unfortunately, once you’re connected to the
AR.Drone, your Wi-Fi is not connected to anything else (your smartphone
and tablet’s 3G or 4G will be working just fine, though).
Once the connection is set up, you can open the AR.Freeflight 2
application and start to fly. AR.Drone is equipped with a fair amount on
intelligence to make this less daunting than it appears. The Drone
knows its altitude, its position relative to your phone or tablet, and
speed (up to 1000 millimeters per second). Plus, the Freeflight 2 app
makes it pretty easy to control the AR.Drone 2.0’s precise movements.
I tapped the large green “Take off” button on the screen and the
AR.Drone 2.0 lifted about three meters off the ground. Indoors, I
quickly found that there really wasn’t enough room to fly the
quadrocopter.
I changed out the hull and took it outside, but I have to admit that it was always a struggle to see my iPad
screen and on-screen controls in the sunlight. Eventually, though, I
made it work. (Turning up the brightness on my iPad helped.)
The AR.Drone will hover patiently in one spot until you take control.
The right thumb stick controls which direction the drone points and its
altitude. It’s the easier of the two controls — a move of your thumb to
the right, for example, and the AR.Drone smartly turns 90 degrees to
the right. Once you’ve spent enough time flying the drone, you get used
to turning it slowly in any direction, all by shifting your thumb.
AR.Freeflight 2.0’s left-side control takes more, well, finesse. As
soon as you place your thumb on that circle, the accelerometer in your
phone or tablet is controlling the movement of the AR.Drone. The sharper
your moves (tilting forward and back and left and right), the faster
the copter moves. If you tip hard, the copter tips and its four blades
send it whizzing forward. You have two ways of controlling the copter in
this manner: through your device’s accelerometer or in Joystick mode.
The latter replaces the accelerometer with an on-screen virtual
joystick, makes the control relative to your position and actually makes
the drone ten times easier to control.
Getting good at flying in any mode takes practice. I’d say that by my fourth flight, I felt like I had the knack of it.
But good flying is not the best part.
Yes, sending the AR.Drone 2.0 up to 100 meters in the air (the
default is just three meters) is exhilarating, but also terrifying
because a good wind could take the quadrocopter away and out of your
control. (Keep in mind that you’re connected to it via Wi-Fi, which is
good for about 300 ft.) However, it’s what the drone can do when it’s up
in the air that’s impressive. It can record everything in sharp,
wide-angle 720 P video. That MPEG 4 video will either stream directly to
your phone or tablet (provided they have the on-board room) or to an
under-the-hull USB key (which plugs into the USB port I mentioned
earlier) that can fly with the AR.Drone.
While the AR.Drone is way up there you can fly around, turn it 360
degrees and even perform a flip maneuver. I did all this and recorded
everything. The video looks great. Video recorded with the SD base
camera was just so-so however, and I rarely used it.
You get just 15 minutes of flying time before the AR.Drone runs out
of juice. As you fly, AR.FreeFlight 2.0 beeps to warn you that you’re
running out of power (you can also see the percentage remaining on the
screen). When you get close to 0% remaining, the AR.Drone will take over
and land the quadrocopter before it runs out of power and crashes. You
can also simply hit the large, green “Land” button and the AR.Drone will
gently lower to the ground. Ultrasonic sensors tell it how far it is
from the ground so it’s almost never a hard landing.
Is the foam, metal and plastic Drone tough? You betcha. On one of my
first flights, I sent it careening into the top portion of a very tall
tree. AR.Drone 2.0 has an emergency cut-off so the rotors stop spinning
as soon as they hit an obstruction. This is useful for avoiding injury
and damaging other objects, but it also means that when I crashed into
that tree, the flyer stopped flying and plummeted to the ground with a
significant thud that I heard from 150 yards away. The AR.Drone 2.0 was
undamaged and flew again and again after that. (See the video above for
proof.)
Like I said, the AR.Drone is not cheap. I wish it cost $99, but a
sub-$100 flyer would not have the number of sensors, intelligence and
companion software found in the AR.Drone. Should the battery life be
longer? Maybe, but the flyer likely couldn’t carry a much larger battery
and fly the way it does. That battery, by the way, gets very, very hot
by the end of a full flight. I wonder what would happen if it could fly
longer. There is also the question of what that fast drain will do to
the battery life. It would not be great if the battery was done after
only a few months.
And yet, I love the thing. I had so much fun flying it, capturing
video and even posting it on YouTube. There are games to play, too. They
come in the software, but half of them require someone else also own an
AR.Drone 2.0. As much fun as those games are, (a couple incorporate
Augmented Reality), I prefer simply flying the AR.Drone in a big open
space and capturing the true bird’s eye view. It’s a total rush and, I
promise, dads will love it.unTra lai em niem vui khi duoc gan ben em, tra lai em loi yeu thuong em dem, tra lai em niem tin thang nam qua ta dap xay. Gio day chi la nhung ky niem buon... http://nhatquanglan.xlphp.net/
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