The IT Nerd

Last year I reviewed several drones from Parrot. Recently I got the chance to see a sneak peek of their new and updated drones. Starting today and for the next few days I will reviewing these new drones, staring with these:

On the right is a Jumping Race drone. On the left is a Jumping Night drone. The differences? Other than cosmetics, here’s what’s different between the two of them:

• The Jumping Night drones are equipped with two powerful LED lights with adjustable intensity. That allows you to pilot them in low light conditions.
• The Jumping Race drone is capable of quick acceleration with 8 mph bursts of speed.

In either case, here’s the key specs:

• Wi-Fi 2.4 or 5 Ghz connectivity via the free FreeFlight 3 application for iOS or Android.
• Embedded camera: they are equipped with a wide angle camera that streams live, immersive views on the screen of the piloting smartphone or tablet. They take pictures and videos which are directly stored on the internal 4GB flash memory.
• Embedded speaker and microphone:
  • They talk: Depending on their mood, they ‘bip’, ‘ziiip’, ‘groutch’.
  • Walkie talkie: You can talk and listen through them.
• A patented spring-mounted system: They can jump up to 2.5 ft. in height and length.
• Automatic movements: the Jumping perform acrobatics, without the need for training: spin around, jump, roll upside down, push or hit an object.
• Retractable wheels: large or compact mode to adapt to all driving styles.
• A programmable road plan: a ‘road plan’ enables you to program a course and actions. The itinerary appears on the app among the predefined movements. You just have to click on it to see the Jumping Drones maneuver autonomously.

I tested them on my iPhone 6 and after downloading FreeFlight 3 and updating the firmware, I was able to connect to them over WiFi and pilot them. It doesn’t take long to figure out how to control them well given the fact that you get a first person that allows you to pilot them effectively. You can take photos and videos via FreeFlight 3. Here’s an example of the quality that you can get:

It’s pretty good and I feel that you won’t have any complaints in this area. These drones are powered by small lithium polymer batteries that last about 20 minutes. That doesn’t sound great, but they charge in 25 minutes if you get the 2.6A charger. You can also get extra batteries cheaply.

I found them to be very fun to use and they would do well with kids and those who are kids at heart. I’d consider them for a really good gift this holiday season. Expect to pay $239 CDN for one.

I attended a event put on by Parrot where they were showing off their next generation of mini drones. You’ll recall that I reviewed their first generation mini drones a few months ago. But this next generation step things up in a number of significant ways. Let’s walk through the lineup:

Parrot Jumping Mini Drones – For those who want to have a ground based mini drone, Parrot gives you two options to choose from:

Parrot Jumping Night Mini Drones feature a pair of LED lights that allow you to pilot the drone at night.

Parrot Jumping Race Drones are designed for high speed action as they are capable of speeds up to 8 miles per hour.

Either way, you get these features:

• Wi-Fi 2.4 or 5 Ghz connectivity via the free FreeFlight 3 application.
• Embedded camera: they are equipped with a wide angle camera that streams live, immersive views on the screen of the piloting smartphone or tablet. They take pictures and videos which are directly stored on the internal 4GB flash memory.
• Embedded speaker and microphone:
  • They talk: Depending on their mood, they ‘bip’, ‘ziiip’, ‘groutch’.
  • Walkie talkie: You can talk and listen through them.
• A patented spring-mounted system: They can jump up to 2.5 ft. in height and length.
• Automatic movements: the Jumping perform acrobatics, without the need for training: spin around, jump, roll upside down, push or hit an object.
• Retractable wheels: large or compact mode to adapt to all driving styles.
• A programmable road plan: a ‘road plan’ enables you to program a course and actions. The itinerary appears on the app among the predefined movements. You just have to click on it to see the Jumping Drones maneuver autonomously.

Each model is available in three colors and will go for $239. Availability is slated for Q3 2015.

Parrot Airborne Mini Drones – Just like the Jumping Race Drones, you get two choices:

The Airborne ‘Night’ which is built to fly during the day and night thanks to two powerful LED lights with adjustable intensity.

The Airborne ‘Cargo’ transport drones are able to carry figurines or toy “bricks” meaning the building blocks that kids play with.

In either case, you get these features:

• Ultra-compact and light-weight at 1.2 lbs.
• Connectivity using Bluetooth Smart via the free FreeFlight 3 app for smartphones and tablets.
• Removable polyamide hull to protect the propellers.
• A 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis gyroscope measure and analyze each movement or inclination of the drone and, thanks to the autopilot, rectify the position of the Minidrone.
• A vertical camera compares, every 16 milliseconds, an image of the ground to the previous one to determine the speed of the Minidrone. It also enables the Minidrone to take snapshots, which are saved on the 1 Gb flash memory. Perfect for aerial “selfies.”
• An ultrasound sensor analyzes the flight altitude up to 13 ft. Beyond, a pressure sensor controls the Minidrone in altitude.
• The ‘Airborne’ can do high-speed flights: they rush up to 11 mph, turn right, turn left and perform flips with amazing fluidity and stability. A ‘swipe’ on the piloting screen and the Parrot ‘Airborne’ turn 90 or 180 degrees in a flash.
• Toss them into the air and their sensors detect it instantaneously: engines start automatically and the ‘Airborne’ stabilize in the air.

The Airborne ‘Night’ is available in three colors and will sell for $159. The Airborne Cargo is available in two colors and will sell for $129. Both versions will be available in Q3 2015.

Parrot Hydrofoil Mini Drones

A new addition to the Parrot mini drone family is this water based Hydrofoil mini drone which are flying Minidrones that can be attached to a hydrofoil. They rise out of the water to hover over the surface and hit speeds of 6 miles an hour in the water. Once the engines are on, the upper part of the Hydrofoil positions perpendicularly to the nautical structure. Thanks to the four propellers of the Minidrone, it slides through the water and stays about 2 inches above the surface with amazing stability and agility. Communication is via Bluetooth and the free FreeFlight 3. Two colors are available and it will sell for $229. Expect to see it in Q3 of 2015.

During the event that I attended, I got the chance to try out these new mini drones and I also managed to capture some videos of them in action:

I’ve requested them to review and as soon as I get them, you’ll see a review of these new mini drones online quickly.

Drones are hot at the moment. So, it’s no surprise that I’m taking a look at one that will get your attention.

This is the Parrot Beebop Drone. It’s a quadricopter. It comes with a 14 megapixel camera with image stabilization that does 1080p video and has 8GB of internal storage. On top of that, it has embedded GPS which opens up all sorts of possibilities. GPS lets the Parrot “find home,” which automatically puts the drone on a course to its point of origin if it’s above 10 meters off the ground. There’s more functionality coming that will expand on this in future software updates. The Bebop Drone is both light because it is made of ABS plastic and hard, impact-resistant foam. The rotors can be easily removed using an included wrench. Now you can pair this to your Android or iOS smartphone or tablet via WiFi and use an app to control it. But by doing so you can only fly it short distances. Fortunately, Parrot can help you with that.

This is the Parrot Skycontroller. Simply supply your own tablet or smartphone (in my case, I picked a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1), install the app, and then use WiFi to pair the tablet to the Skycontroller. The Skycontroller will automatically find and pair itself to the Beebop drone. Once you do that, you can fly to up to 2 kilometers. It also allows you to connect via HDMI, USB, and to first person view glasses as well.

So, how do this combo work? Very well once you get the hang of it. It took me a while to get used to flying it and I have to admit that I had a couple of rough landings before I got comfortable with it. But once I got the hang of it, it was very very fun to use. Hint, you should learn to fly it in an open field with grass to avoid breaking the drone. Plus use a large tablet so that you can fully use the first person POV that the onboard camera gives you. Controlling it with the Skycontroller makes life so much easier as you can make incredibly precise adjustments in mid flight. Both the drone and the Skycontroller are powered by common lithium ion polymer batteries. While the battery in the Skycontroller had power to spare after 1.5 hours of use, I had to replace the battery in the Beebop drone after 15-20 minutes of flying. Fortunately, I had four of these batteries at my disposal and I used all four in my testing.

When it comes to the camera, it was impressive, if only I cleaned the lens first. First, here’s a picture. Click to see it at full size:

Now here’s a three minute video of a flight of the Beebop Drone. There’s no sound because it is not capable of recording sound. Set it to full screen and 1080P to see it in full quality:

If it were not for the fact that the lens was dirty, the image quality would be absolutely perfect. Tip: The best way to get the video off the drone is to connect it to your computer via USB and drag and drop it off the drone. I tried to access it wirelessly using the app on the Android tablet that I was using to test it and I couldn’t get that to work.

So, what does all this drone goodness go for? This combo retails for $1100 CDN. Clearly at this price point, the Beebop Drone is no toy. But based on my testing, those who would pay this kind of money are not looking for toys. That makes the Beebop Drone and Skycontroller a must for someone who wants a drone that allows them to get great quality video and precise flight control. If that’s you, you should be getting yours now and I assure you that you’ll have zero complaints.

You might recall that I had the opportunity to try out a couple of Parrot’s mini drones a few months back prior to them being released to the public. Now I have the chance to try them out and use them now that they’ve been released. The first of these drones is the Rolling Spider Mini Drone and the second is the Jumping Sumo Mini Drone.

Now the Rolling Spider which is a flying drone was easy to put together and set up. It comes with a pair of wheels that give it some protection from walls and the like and after you pop them on, all you have to do is pop the battery in and charge it for a couple of hours. While it was charging, I downloaded the FreeFlight 3 app to my iPhone 5s. Once charged the Rolling Spider was instantly found by app via Bluetooth 4.0 LE and I was good to go. Almost. When I connected my phone to to the drone, I found that it required a firmware update. But doing that over Bluetooth 4.0 LE is impractical as it takes about an hour to do. Fortunately you can download it from the Parrot website and plug the drone into your computer and copy it over to the drone which takes a minute or two. The FreeFlight 3 software doesn’t make flying as intuitive as it could be for novices, but it’s easy enough to learn in a day and it’s fun to use. Beyond two on-screen joysticks that can be reconfigured somewhat to user tastes, collectively enabling height, rotation, and Z-axis movement, hidden buttons can be tapped to make Rolling Spider spin 360 degrees forward, backward, left, or right in the air. The Rolling Spider has a bottom-facing 640×480 camera that can snap photos in flight to be transferred via USB to your computer. There’s no ability to livestream your flights which would be a nice feature to have. The picture quality is acceptable given that it’s a 640×480 camera. There’s one downside to Rolling Spider which is the battery life. It only lasts about 10 minutes. That seriously cuts into your fun. You can get additional batteries to extend the fun though. One big thing that it has going for it is the price. It’s $119 at the Apple Store. Thus it’s low priced choice if you want a drone that flies.

Now on to the Jumping Sumo Mini Drone. This is a ground drone that operates over WiFi using the FreeFlight 3 software. To set it up, I simply had to go into the WiFi settings of my iPhone 5s and pick out the Jumping Sumo WiFi network. Then I should be able to open FreeFlight 3 and I should be good to go. Except that I couldn’t get that to work on my iPhone 5s. Fortunately, I had a Samsung Galaxy S5 Active that I was testing and it worked perfectly with that. I’m guessing that the FreeFlight 3 app for iOS needs an update to properly support iOS 8. Operating the drone is easy and intuitive. It only took me minutes to figure out how to steer and make it jump into the air. One thing that I have to say is that it’s quick. Very quick. Fortunately it is easy to modulate the speed. One cool feature is that it has a front facing camera that allows you to livestream, snap stills, and record videos of your adventures.  It’s a 640×480 resolution camera that does roughly 15FPS frame rate and that’s acceptable given the price of this drone, which I will get to in a second. One thing that caught my attention was the fact that if you touched the drone or went near it, it would make some interesting noises and the lights on the front of the drone which are clearly supposed to be eyes will flash. That will amuse young kids. The only downside to the Jumping Sumo drone is the battery life. It’s about 20 minutes. While that’s longer than the Rolling Spider, it will cut into your fun. Fortunately, you can get spare batteries. It’s $179 at the Apple Store and it’s a good choice for a ground based drone.

So, did I like these Parrot drones? Yes. These are both are good choices to get your feet wet in the world of drones. The battery life is kind of brief, but as long as you have spares handy you can have fun with these drones. Check them out if you’re in the market for a drone or two.