Yes, the Parrot AR Drone is finally shipping! And we of course couldn’t pass up using Hijinks Inc. as an excuse to test out the AR Drone ourselves (since we’re not cool enough to go to CES). Our ceremonial unboxing pictures can be found here.
In case you’re unfamiliar with how the AR Drone works, it broadcasts a wireless signal (802.11 b/g) and you connect your iDevice to it via WiFi. Basically just an ad-hoc wireless network. In our tests we had problems switching between multiple devices, our iPhone connected/disconnected fine, but when we went to try it out with an iPad we couldn’t lease an IP. Un-pairing the drone didn’t help, nor did restarting it entirely. Hard coding an IP address on the iPad also yielding no results.
Out of the box our drone flew around for about 4 minutes before needing to be charged, but naturally the battery wasn’t fully charged when we received it and in Parrot’s defense, we were technically supposed to charge it before using it for the first time. Estimated flight time is 15 minutes on a full charge, though we were able to squeeze out a few extra minutes if we were flying indoors and were taking it easy. Sadly, outdoors with even just a bit of wind can easily cut your battery life in half. Charge time is around an hour and a half, so you might want to consider investing in a few extra battery packs (which will set you back $29.99 a pop).
Another battery issue, is the amount of battery drain that occurs simply when you leave the device in “standby”. Seriously, I ran the device down to 46% and set it down on my coffee table for around an hour as I answered some emails, when I reconnected to the device it now showed only 15% remaining. Bugger. Thinking the battery gauge might have lied to me when it showed 46% I ran the same test on a full charge with similar results.
The control interface via the AR Free Flight app is quite simple and easy to understand, controls are overlaid on a live video feed from the drones front camera (you can switch views to the bottom camera as well). There’s an icon in the bottom center of the screen for firing up the blades, as well as powering them down to land (landing is pretty much handled automatically). The right hand D-pad can be used to rotate the drone or increase/decrease it’s altitude. While the left hand toggle is for controlling movement. Since we’re men, we didn’t read the manual, and it took us a few minutes to figure out that you need to press down on the left hand toggle to enable the accelerometer based steering. Once we figured that out we were quickly able to grasp the concept of piloting around our office and we found the steering to be incredibly responsive.
Let’s talk hardware for a minute. The AR Drone sports an onboard computer running a 468MHz ARM9 RISC processor, 128MB of RAM, and runs Linux. Front camera runs at 15fps at 640×480, and the bottom camera runs at 60fps at 176×144. Nothing crazy hightech, but kinda cool nonetheless. I would definitely like to see a higher resolution front facing camera in future versions, or at least something capable of a higher frame rate.
Now that you know how slow the refresh is on that front facing camera, you can understand that it really can’t be used to safely pilot the drone. Unless you’re crazy, you need to be within line of sight of your drone to properly operate it. I know, there go your dreams of spying on your neighbors while hiding in your garage. But that wouldn’t have work anyway, because this thing is loud. Really loud. Louder than a Toshiba Satellite trying to play a Flash video. Obviously this isn’t a surprise, or even that big of a deal, but it can get fairly annoying when flying indoors.
Bottom line, this is an awesome device with solid engineering, and a step in the right direction for nerdy toys, but at $299 this isn’t going to be this years must-have Christmas item. Especially when you consider you have to own at least an iPod touch to pilot it, and the battery only lasts 15 minutes so the amount of continuous fun you can have is limited. That said, if you have some extra money for toys like the AR Drone, there’s nothing wrong with buying one. I could see this developing quite the hobbyist following though, since Parrot has made a wide range of replacement parts and even a a special set of repair tools easily available.
We here at Hijinks Inc. can’t wait to see what Parrot has in mind for the AR Drone 2!
[ Order your AR Drone | Additional Battery Packs | Previous Gen iPod touch for a controller ]
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