Parrot Bebop 2 test

The Parrot Bebop 2 is a high-end drone with surprising capabilities! This drone is the main competitor of the DJI Phantom 3. We tested for you the different features of this drone!

Before being able to fly the drone it is first necessary to update the firmware. This is done simply by downloading the Freeflight application and updating the internal program. Once this step is done, it will be necessary to parameterize the magnetometer of the drone. Simply follow the instructions and orient the drone in the different positions indicated by the setting screen of the Freeflight 3 application.

Once this stage is completed you are on track to take off your Parrot Bebop 2! Once the drone is on the ground, a simple button will take off.

Piloting the Parrot Bebop 2

This drone is childlike simplicity, take-off and landing are assisted by the embedded electronics and the drone is particularly stable and pleasant to fly. The flight controls respond quickly and during our tests we did not feel latency between the controller and the drone movement, so it’s a very good point!

The Parrot Bebop 2 also has a very nice feature of automated looping! Indeed by pressing a simple button on the smartphone, the drone is able to realize a figure of 360 degrees which will impress your friends. This function is a bit “bluffing” because even if the figure appears complex all this maneuver is managed electronically, observers will be impressed even if you do not do much.

In flight, the drone is very aggressive but despite its record acceleration and its high speed it is extremely maneuverable and finally very nice to drive even for a beginner pilot. This drone will be suitable for all persons starting the piloting of quadcopters.

Parrot Bebop 2 Features

One of the exciting features of the Parrot Bebop 2 is of course the “route” functionality that will enable you to program a specific path that the drone will traverse! Indeed the drone Bebop 2 being equipped with a GPS chip, it is able to locate in the space and therefore to follow predefined paths! Moreover, thanks to the management interface, the programming of this route is extremely simplified. Simply click on the different points of stops on a map so that the drone starts to make the course. At each stopping point the orientation of the HD camera is also defined to record an aerial shot of the hair! A view of the route and the recorded points of sight you can go about your activities while being assured that the drone will carry out the task that you have recorded. It’s just the perfect feature to shoot you in action and to keep timeless memories!

Conclusion

The Parrot Bebop 2 isn’t going to match more capable drones on performance, features, or video quality. But if you are happy with a quadcopter that can comfortably tool around your backyard at a modest maximum altitude, the Bebop is worth a look. If you want a model that can fly further, higher, offers better video quality, and is absolutely steady in the air, consider instead one of the DJI Phantom 3 models.

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Back to the future with Yuneec Breeze 4k

Yuneec China 12-minute flying selfie stick not what the world needs.

Good ideas catch on and are quickly imitated, as the selfie stick shows. But it is unlikely that UAV drone manufacturers will look to copy a drone “selfie” like the Yuneec Breeze 4k that gets easily buffeted by the wind with a battery life counted optimistically at 12 minutes.

Indeed, unlike the Yuneec Breeze 4k, if a selfie stick is damaged or lost it can be easily replaced. But the beetle-shaped 1-pound Yuneec drone at US$500 makes the prospect of damage or flyaways a bit costlier.

On damages, the Yuneec Breeze 4K does come with fold-in propellers, but not a dedicated carrier offering foam or other protection. The landing gear in the Breeze is made of plastic that can easily chip or break if carried in a backpack unprotected and hand guards for the propellers are missing-in-action.

Just that R&D effort alone raises question about the commitment of Yuneec to quality and reliable usage as it targets first-time drone buyers in a push that UAV drone manufacturers just starting out appear to have already won with prices as low as $99 for versatile models that can add 4K cameras from other manufacturers.

In fact, even the 4K in the Yuneec Breeze 4K name should be taken with a grain of salt as many early reviewers suggest using 1080P to get a more stable and ready-to-use video because of the patchy connection via an APP to smartphone WiFi and limited range of 80 meters–and then hopefully post it to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube Instagram or WhatsApp.

At that price and for far better camera features at a 2.7K video feed and a 3-axis gimbal and reliability the DJI Phantom 3 Standard is true value for money, especially for first-time drone buyers, and time tested for GPS reliability and under $500. There is really no comparison that the Yuneec Breeze 4K can stand up to.

In fact, unlike the Yuneec drone, the DJI Phantom 3 returns to the user at the press of a button and does the same if the control signal is ever lost and the stability of the drone in flight and hover brings back razor-sharp images.

However, the Yuneec Breeze 4k camera is not mechanically stabilized when filming in 4K, though images are electronically stabilized at 1080p–showing that 4K is not always 4K.

All of this has caught the attention of initial reviews of the Breeze with comparisons not at the nimbler and reliable models like the DJI series, but at newer drones that have flying times more than double the Yuneec Breeze 4K.

And the inevitable comparison of the Yuneec Breeze 4K is to the Yuneec Q500 4K, which has struggled as a bulky product beset by internal WiFi card issues and GPS reliability. Yuneec has attempted to move on from the Q500 4K with the Typhoon H class-but the legacy problems have reportedly impacted production and engineering fixes for the hexacopter.

In fact, some drone pilots suggest Yuneec risks getting lost in the crowd of low-end drone manufacturers that for now are not in the long-term game of innovation to gain customer loyalty like DJI.

 

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Does the Hover Camera Passport worth its price？

The Hover Camera Passport is a delightful little gadget: It’s a foldable, portable drone that has a built-in camera and auto-follow features. It comes with all kinds of bits and pieces, including an extra battery, The Hover Camera Passport price is $599 and it’s significantly cheaper than other auto-follow enabled drones like the DJI Phantom 4 or Mavic Pro.

Best of all, it’s easier to carry than most drones with similar features. Drones like the Phantom are big, bulky and hard to carry, especially if you’re hoping to bring them on a plane. If you’re looking to bring a drone with you everywhere, the Passport might just be the answer to your prayers. But does it live up to the hype? Let’s find out.

If you do want to fly it higher (it can hover as high as 164 feet or 50 meters), you can use its companion iOS or Android app to position the drone with simple onscreen taps and swipes. The app will have automatic options for shooting panorama videos and 90- and 360-degree orbits as well. You’ll also be able to transfer photos and videos to your device for immediate sharing.

Its 13-megapixel camera is on a tiny gimbal that helps stabilize the camera and can tilt it up and down. Electronic stabilization is also used to smooth video, which can be captured at resolutions up to 4K.

As with most small drones, battery life appears to be the biggest downside at just up to 7 minutes per charge. The batteries are easily swapped out by simply sliding off the top.

This isn’t unusual for small drones, but you’ll routinely find that drones with battery lives in the 8-10 minute range cost significantly less than the Passport. Drones that are in the same price range as the Passport, like the DJI Phantom 3, have 25 minutes of flight time… a marked improvement. However, it’s worth noting that older cameras like the Phantom 3 don’t have 4K video or well-developed apps.

Unless you’re a professional videographer, the occasional shaky-cam shouldn’t be much of an issue. Overall, if you’re willing to part with $599, the Hover Camera Passport is a good choice. If you want something cheaper or with a better battery life, you may have to compromise on things like camera quality and auto-follow modes.

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Xiaomi’s first quadcopter drone which can records 4K video

We knew it was coming, so it’s not a total surprise. But, the very fact that Xiaomi — best known for its phones — is getting into the drone business is a bit of an eyebrow raiser. The company revealed the Mi Drone, a 4K camera-wielding quadcopter that looks more than a little like DJI’s Phantom series. The two Chinese firms are now technically rivals, of course, as more and more companies decide they want a slice of the (apparently booming) quadcopter business. No one was expecting Xiaomi to reinvent the wheel, but there was a good chance it’d be competitive on price: 2,999 yuan (about $460), which is considerably cheaper than even DJI’s Phantom 3 4K.

Xiaomi‘s Mi Drone includes a number of impressive features and is built by Flymi using carbon fiber materials, and weighs just 140g. What’s more, it has a 5,100mAh replaceable battery which should see it last up to 27 minutes per charge and a range of up to 3km.

The powerful antennas in the remote should mean you rarely lose control of the drone, and if it does lose signal, there’s a built-in ‘auto return’ feature to bring it back to you automatically. There’s also real-time battery and position monitoring, with a built-in alert to tell you when to fly it back if battery levels start getting too low.

The flying experience in the Xiaomi Mi Drone was actually rather nice. The stability was very good and it takes advantage of well known features such as automatic return and route planning.

The drone flies very smoothly and it gradually picks up speed in a safe and controlled manner – sometimes I felt that the response time was a little slow (perhaps excessive stabilization compromises the response time?)

One thing that I personally don’t like is how this drone lacks any excitement. It is almost too stable and too safe making this drone boring… Nevertheless, if your looking for something that does what it says on the tin and will just fly from A to B then the Xiaomi Mi Drone will do just that for you.

For Xioami, it’s important to use the offline and online resources so that they can properly explain what it means to fly safely to the Mi Fans, drone enthusiasts and potential users. Now Xiaomi provides flyer insurances and third party liability insurance, but these are only after the event has happened. The top priority for Xiaomi is to improve the safety awareness of the flyer and with that, reduce the frequency of accidents. As for the medias, we have to teach basic drone knowledge to the public, we have to teach them that we have to be careful while flying even if it has a low cost, otherwise, it would be a horrendous development for the drone industry.

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Yuneec Breeze VS Phantom 3

Breeze is the first drone released by Yuneec targeting the mass market with the price $499. Yuneec cut down on costs by opting to use smartphones (iOS and Android) as the controllers instead of having a dedicated remote control.

So the Yuneec Breeze drone is completely controlled with the Breeze Cam mobile app, offering several flight modes – Selfie, Follow Me, Orbit, Journey and Pilot—that will work both indoors or outdoors with the help of GPS and optical sensors.

The Breeze Cam mobile app also allows users to instantly share aerial photos and videos on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp

With its connected Breeze Cam App, the Yuneec Breeze is able to work with a variety of automatic creative modes.

• Selfie Mode keeps the drone in a single place, facing the user.
• Pilot Mode allows full manual controls.
• Orbit Mode has the drone circle any object.
• Follow Me Mode makes the drone follow the user’s smartphone with GPS.
• Journey Mode uses camera pitch to allow the user to make and view a trajectory for the drone to fly, reach a designated spot, and fly back to the user.

Yuneec employs what they call their Indoor Positioning System (IPS) to hold the Breeze drone in place either indoors or out.

Compared to the Phantom 3 series, despite being introduced 20 months ago, has blossomed into a mature and reliable platform with many 3rd party accessories and apps. The prices have come down while the capabilities have increased (due to apps and some DJI improvements). This being the case – it’s hard to come up with a better value than the Phantom 3 series. The Standard is for the (relative) beginner who is on a budget and wants to get his or her feet wet in aerial photography – while the Advanced and Pro models have advanced features that still keep the competition on the ropes. Many experts claim DJI is 2+ years ago of most other camera drone makers – and the P3 line seems to prove that point.

Breeze is considered a selfie drone and is made for those who belong in the social media generation. This seems to fall in competition with the Phantom 3 Standard. Both are completely different designed. The Breeze’s camera is in the body of the aircraft. But the Phantom 3 Standard has a more traditional gimbal which can produce better image. And at the same time, Phantom 3 Standard has longer flight time and farther controlling distance.

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Hover Camera Review: Just a flying camera?

My first drone flight experience was with the DJI Phantom 3 Professional, and as much as I appreciated its advanced capabilities at the time, I longed for something more compact — a device so small that I wouldn’t need to carry a separate bag or case for it. Eventually, a Chinese startup called Zero Zero Robotics released the $599 Hover Camera Passport, which comes in the unique form of a foldable cage while packing cool features like body tracking, face tracking and orbiting. I got to spend some time with the Passport over the past few weeks, I find time to take it for a quick spin and the Hover Camera review.

The Hover is Zero Zero Robotics’ first product and is designed to be safe, portable and savvy solution to allow let anyone to “effortlessly capture exciting moments indoors and out, from creative new perspectives.” Using Embedded AI to intelligently navigate its environment and the Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight drone platform, Hover Camera captures personal moments, but is not viable for tracking sports beyond the family Thanksgiving football game.

As the Hover Camera review, we should first focus on the camera specs, the core function of drones. Equipped with 13-megapixel camera, it’s capable of shooting 4K video at 30fps and at the same time offers live 720p HD video. Furthermore, it uses electronic image stabilization (EIS) for anti-shake. But EIS and No-GPS means shaky video in strong wind and outdoors.

Some of the issues with the Passport might get fixed in the future, since the drone gets software updates fairly regularly. My first gripe, and one that may be fixed, is with the auto-follow modes. It’s actually a little difficult to get the camera to follow you if you aren’t moving extremely slowly and staying in its field of vision at all times. So, it’ll follow you on a run in a straight line, but it tends to cut out or “lose” you if you turn — even if you go slowly. That’s just for the body-based follow mode. The face-based mode should follow you based on facial recognition, and I only got that one to work once.

Keep in mind that the auto-follow modes are one of the Passport’s biggest selling points, so this is kind of a big con. However, like I said, the drone gets software updates, so this issue could be resolved. The company even said they might add auto-follow for animals or objects (which isn’t available yet).

Compared to Mavic Pro 7KM controlling distance, Hover Camera’s 20M Wi-Fi distance may be not that satisfied. So does the 10mins flight time, if you want to shoot something great, you need to prepare more batteries.

That’s the simple review of Hover Camera, that’s not to say the Hover Camera doesn’t have some cool features. It does. And if you’re looking for a simple way to snap a selfie and video quality isn’t that important to you – go for it.

But $599 puts you very close to the Mavic Pro. Spend the extra $150…and you’re not just hovering. You’re flying.

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Parrot bebop vs DJI Phantom 3 comparison of my experience with both

Since I now have both, a Parrot bebop 2 and a DJI Phantom 3(advanced) i thought it might interest some to read a quick comparison of my experience with both.

Flight characteristic/stability/speed

In fairness, I think both are impressive. The Phantom 3 is heavier, has more inertia and you feel that, but on the other hand, its more stable too. It can descend much faster and without wobbling, the GPS position and altitude hold also seems to work even more accurately. Parrot bebop 2 is good enough here for me. Maybe when doing time lapses it matters, otherwise, not so much. The bebop is a more nimble, and because its so light and small, its more fun to toss around without worrying too much.

Video/photo quality

It won’t surprise anyone the Phantom 3 wins this handily. The camera, particularly of the advanced version I have, is WAY better. Even when shooting in the same resolution and frame rate as the Parrot Bebop, its so much sharper and with more detail.  Its like comparing a gopro hero black with a 720p keychain cam. No more blurry trees or grass, everything is razor sharp and shooting in 60FPS makes it oh so much more smooth. The gimbal also just works a lot better than the electronic stabilization, particularly when tilting/panning. On my first landing, I managed to tip the phantom over. On the video, you cant even see that anything happened. If the video of the phantom is clearly superior, still images are in a different league all together. Yeah, same megapixels, everything else is beyond comparison. But you probably already knew that. One major disadvantage of the Phantom 3 for me is the minimal interval time of 5 seconds. When doing mapping, 5 seconds is too long and I end up waiting or slowing down a lot for the camera.

Range and endurance

I haven’t fully range tested the Phantom 3 yet. But I’ve gone out about 1km with no impact on reception at all, video remained completely smooth and free of artifacts. That’s despite missing one antenna. The resolution with lightbridge may also be better, but I’m using a 5″ phone right now, so I would lie if I said I noticed. I do notice the reduced lag. Light bridge really works pretty well, I have to admit. Using the skycontroller, I generally found the range of the Parrot Bebop to be more than adequate. It does suffer a lot more from freezes/artifacts at > 3-500m, but Id still call it good enough. The latency is more annoying in my opinions, lightbridge is much closer to an analog FPV experience. Closer than I would have thought.

As for endurance, the surprise winner there is actually the Parrot Bebop. It comes much closer to its advertised flight times than my Phantom, which only lasts 18 minutes in my tests. In fairness, that was in windy conditions, and I have a crashed one with one motor that’s turning a bit rough and that will be replaced. Maybe a new motor will increase flight times.

Features/flight modes

In general, the Phantom 3 is a much more complicated platform with a ton of features that you may or may not find useful. A few things that stand out for me because I missed them on the Parrot Bebop: POI circling mode. This truly helps making cinematic shots. And is very useful for my photogrammetry experiments. I’m also delighted to discover the Phantom 3 has a FPV mode for the gimbal, that makes it roll in turns, which can make dynamic flight shots all the more, well, dynamic RTH, flight mode and navigation features are a lot further developed, to the point where I actually had to read the manual to figure it out.

Robustness

Neither platform is a real winner in this regard, they both are fragile. My Parrot Bebop wouldn’t take a 3 meter drop on grass without the cross frame breaking, the Phantom 3 I bought had suffered a slightly more serious crash, but the damage was also a lot more substantial. Particularly the camera gimbal is unbelievably fragile. On mine, one of the alu gimbal arms was bent by nearly 45 degree. I couldn’t imagine what crash it would take to do that, since its normally protected by the landing gear, until I tried straightening it. The aluminium bends almost as easily as rubber. Except that it breaks, where rubber doesn’t. I’ll still grant the Parrot Bebop this category if for no other reason than that repairs are a lot cheaper. Most of parrots spare parts are actually reasonably priced.

Portability

What you see is what you get in this regard. When paired with the skycontroller, the Parrot Bebop requires about as much space as the Phantom + controller. Of course the drone itself is in a league of its own for compactness, so if you don’t use a SC, easy win for the Bebop. Fun fact: the Phantom controller is almost as small as the Bebop, and the skycontroller comparably large as the Phantom 3.

Price

Now the Phantom 3 Advanced version is $699 and Phantom 3 Standard costs $499,while the Parrot Bebop 2(white) is $499.

So which one should you buy?

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DJI Phantom 3 has cost advantages over Yuneec Q500 in roof inspections

The Yuneec Q500 has had many problems, not the least of which is that it is not the most affordable option for some jobs.

It could be that Drone Girl has too much time on her hands. Or maybe she is better than the rest of us at thinking about the known unknowns-, like whether our roofs have holes and need repair.

Either way, she has done a public service by alerting us on the most cost-efficient way to inspect roof tops. Not to mention, she has now helped many a person avoid a trip up a rickety ladder and a possible dangerous tumble off of a garage roof.

Through her work, Drone Girl confirms what many might not know, that an RC quadcopter or hexacopter to inspect your roof doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. She did a comparison of DJI Phantom vs various models from other UAV drone manufacturers to arrive at her conclusions.

The figures speak clearly. A Yuneec Q500 will set you back $699 to buzz above the shingles on your roof and beam back pictures of any trouble spots. But in DJI Phantom 3 comparison, she finds that one of the most popular drones ever will do the same job but cheaper.

“This drone (DJI Phantom 3) is incredibly wallet friendly,” Drone Girl tells us. “The video streams through your smartphone or tablet, which you can use to get real-time video.”

By “wallet friendly” Drone Girl means $499, hundreds of dollars less than the Yuneec Q500.

And just to show we are not making light of using a drone to see what is on your roof, we leave you with some insight from Drone Girl on the matter.

“Roof inspections can get fancy,” Drone Girl tells us. “You could add a thermal camera (particularly if you have solar panels on your roof). If you had a huge roof and needed to fly the exact same route every time, you might want to use Skycatch, which could even generate a map for you.”

“But for most roof inspectors, all you want is a relatively small drone that is stable, easy to fly, can get close to the roof, is safe, and offers both a live video feed and generates high qualities images or video that can be saved.”

Indeed, food for thought.

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