so I've actually done a few flights with the AR drone but uh this is the first
one that I'm going to be doing on camera so
uh just want to show you guys the Drone itself I did an unboxing but I'll just
give you a general overview so included you've got the uh inside Hull so the
indoor hul I'm not going to be using that since I am flying outside today so
I have the orange orang and yellow uh outdoor Hull the outdoor Hull 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 uh 1,000 Mah LiPo
battery it's fresh off the charger so I should get about 12 minutes of flight
time out of it depending on uh how hard
it has to work so just go ahead head and put that in like that now immediately
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 Hots spot so you'll see the Wi-Fi
will turn on there and then all you do is go into I've got AR free flight and
then actually have a couple of third party apps drone Ace and drone control
these are cool um they allow for some additional functionality like uh
flashing the LEDs different colors uh performing a couple stunts like wiggling
back and forth spinning in circles that kind of stuff as well as recording um
video and photos I'm just going to be using the AR drone
OEM one to start with here actually
sometimes it takes a minute to uh to connect properly and to boot up
so uh why don't I finish finish let's
see oh yeah there we go so connecting checking updating bootloader and
checking version I did have to update the air drone the first time I used it
but it was a simple process and it was just a matter of uh doing an overthe a
upgrade it took about 5 minutes between the iPad and the air drone itself so you
can see the front mounted camera here I am 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 and picture view mode where we can see the bottom camera here
and the top camera here or the front camera here and the bottom camera here
okay oh 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 GU moving around so pressing down on the iPad here allows
me to control the air drone front back Side by to side 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 uh 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 hull on it's just a matter
of slipping it on the front here all
right now this drone has actually been through some uh fairly impressive
crashes so far and I have to say the durability of this thing compared to RC
uh 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 hulls 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 then what happens is that prevents further damage
to the more delicate Motors and gear assemblies versus if they did not cut
out when it 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 could pretty much build an AR Drone from scratch if you wanted to you
can get replacement housings bases um
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 8 ft high so that was bad so this
broke off and you 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 flight 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
take off time so the AR drone automatically takes
off and hovers a couple feet above the ground so here let's show you guys the
uh the basic controls 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 which is
very cool so here you go I can control the yaw don't worry I'm not going to
point it at you okay so I'm going to rotate it until I can see myself
here hold on a little bit more a little bit more let's go nice and
gently gently okay I'll just move there you go
so now you guys can see you don't have to keep moving I'm moving myself so you
can see me in the iPad right there you
go you can also see the AR drone holding itself still in the air over
there so let's go ahead and uh 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 it 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 uh
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 okay so like I
said no matter what you're doing let's say you're going uh here let's bring it
this way so let's say you're moving forward let go of the controls boom AR
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 going to take you guys around the other side of my house you're probably
going to want to be looking at the iPad here because uh 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 uh 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 low low enough that we won't touch on those so here we go we 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 uh 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 like 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 3 m the AR
drone can control its height within a very accurate range 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 5 m and fly over those Hedges on the left as soon as it
is above the hedges it would take off 5 m 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 going
to fly it up 20 ft it's going to jump up another 20 ft 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 uh which is just a standing because there's mods
to uh 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 uh I think that's pretty much
it so why don't we bring it in for a landing
here just press the landing button and
down it goes thanks for checking out my demo video the parrot AR drone just so
you guys know the way that I'm flying it now I've only flown it about uh 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