Well, I spoiled myself and bought a little drone!!
The DJI Tello
Let me tell you, this thing is going to be a fun little toy. And as far as drones go, this one is dirt cheap.
I ended up picking up a few little extras to go with it. Some extra props, an extra battery, a wifi extender, and a battery for the wifi extender. Still, this drone cost me less than $200 CAD.
It's a perfect way to get into drone flying without breaking the bank on anything that's going to cost $1000 or more. It's certainly not the most advanced drone considering it doesn't even have GPS, but it's going to be pretty fun to play around with. But, considering it's less than 250g in weight means it doesn't apply for any of the drone laws they are coming out with now.
Initially the range on this little guy is only 10 meters. That was no good. So, I did some looking around before I bought it and I found out that if you just hook a wifi repeater to it, it will increase the range to over 100 meters. That's more like it. The wifi repeater only cost $20 and the battery to go with it was only $13. Small price to pay to increase the range by over 10x.
I also found an app that will remove the 10m altitude distance and it allows me to go up to 30 meters now. That makes it way more impressive for such a small drone.
I took some shots with it to test it out for it's first flight. It was getting dark the video's I tried aren't worth sharing, but I'll surely get some better ones tomorrow.
A little bit out past the fence.
And farther.
And farther.
And higher.
I didn't really get a chance to push it to it's range yet because it was getting dark. Without a GPS, the drone relies on being able to see the ground to keep itself still and it was getting a little funny near the end of the flight. It was a bit darker than the pictures seem because I brightened them up a bit. Tomorrow will be the real test day for that.
The camera takes pretty nice shots though for only being 5 MP. The video's don't look too bad either although it was hard to tell because they were getting a bit grainy as it got dark.
I'm also liking that it is VR ready. That's going to be fun to try out.
