Saturday, February 4, 2017

Because this I did not try Yuneec Breeze outdoor flight

Yuneec Breeze

Yuneec Breeze markets itself as a drone that is easy to fly without any experience and is pretty hard to crash.

However, scan Amazon.com for feedback from Yuneec Breeze buyers to discover reviews like “Not ready. Flawed indoor flight.” and “Please be very careful indoors. At the moment I cannot recommend the Yuneec Breeze indoors. ” Reviews like these should cause any potential Yuneec Breeze buyer to reconsider their impending drone purchase.

Below story comes from a buyer on Amazon.

The build quality of Yuneec Breeze is pretty good, and having two batteries and an easy to carry device were definitely bonuses. That being said, once it became flight time the fun flew away. I quickly found that it does not like flying over the vast majority of indoor setups. Had I first had the user manual I would have not bought this product.

Here are the indoor flight limits: No flying over- sparse surfaces, surfaces with patterns/textures, reflective surfaces, water, moving surfaces, or moving objects like blowing grass or animals, areas with lighting changes, dark or bright surfaces, surfaces with repeating textures or patterns… When I managed to find a surface capable of taking off from, the Yuneec Breeze drone had a tendency to wander the room rather than hover in place. I have darker carpet in my house. When I take off from the bed, which is the only surface I’ve found that does not throw a warning preventing takeoff, if the Breeze drone drifts over my carpet rather than reacting like the FAQ says and maintaining altitude, it goes up altitude and tries to power through the ceiling. To make matters worse, it would not land or react to the emergency button when this happened. I had to resort to the risky grab it out of the air and hit the power button the stop the props. On my tests where I manged to keep it from trying to scrape the ceiling, the constant warnings from the “Optical Flow Module” made the already sluggish tablet/phone based controls neigh unusable. The tablet/phone controls, while seeming nice at first as you have less gear to manage actually turns out to be a negative. The lack of a controller and joysticks that go with it means you have no fine control. What control you do have is very limited. When your OFM is freaking out, and you are trying to steer the Yuneec Breeze to keep it from wrecking, not having fine motor controls is a huge limiting factor. All in all I felt like I could not trust this Yuneec Breeze to either hover in place or follow me and capture video. Because the initial indoor tests went so poorly I did not try outdoor flight for fear a repeat of the ceiling scraping issue would cause the breeze to fly off never to be seen again. This product is not yet ready, in my opinions, and might be on the verge of being unsafe.

In Yuneec forums,many pilots noted the indoor crash. “I had several crashes indoor, I would say out of 8 flights the Yuneec Breeze went drifting and ignoring my command 6 times. I could catch her a few times then shutting off, but I got my piano and some probs damaged.

It is certainly an issue with the optical flow sensor or some similar sensor. When the drone flies over a carpet, my black or my grey couch I noticed slow response to my commands. The drone starts drifting. In two cases, after a short side drift, it went crazily fast to one direction until it crashed (the motors are switched off then).

Please be very careful indoors. At the moment I cannot recommend the Yuneec Breeze indoors. Even an experienced pilot can’t do anything as the drone ignores all commands from my phone in these cases (except emergency shutdown). Low light conditions seem to have a big impact on the sensor.

Yuneec should provide a manual control mode to fly the drone without the optical sensors or just let the pilot override the automatic reactions. Until then I’ll stay outside.”

What’s your story with Yuneec Breeze?

 

The post Because this I did not try Yuneec Breeze outdoor flight appeared first on Drone Inner.

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