Comment by Michael on January 19, 2013 at 2:49pm

They still need to work on quality of the drone and make it so you can add a radio, like a real one, not a phone, without hacking.

Comment by Tad Pole on January 19, 2013 at 2:56pm

Four jigs? Is that one for each motor? (I know, it was a cheap shot...)

Developer Comment by R_Lefebvre on January 19, 2013 at 7:42pm

Yeah, I don't really get it.  So many people hacking on these things, but from what I've seen, they're not very capable outdoors anyway?  Even 20 km/h gusts can blow it away.

Comment by Anglebender on January 19, 2013 at 10:23pm

The AR Drone is an over-engineered piece of trash. The designers, for whatever reason, opted to place the sonar pointing upwards to act as a "ceiling detector" and a downwards facing camera to monitor altitude (WTF?). When taken outside, the parrot's firmware will sometimes glitch, and the parrot will suddenly think its indoors, and will shoot skyward in search of the ceiling. After a few seconds it will timeout and change to hover mode, but by then it's 150 feet up, so it floats away on the wind. Leave it to the French to use their customers as Beta Testers :\

Comment by Quadguy on January 19, 2013 at 11:20pm

They made it more like a consumer electronics items. Not as a drone

Moderator Comment by Gary Mortimer on January 20, 2013 at 1:09am

They might not be very capable now but my word they make the entire experience simple. With a registered user base of 30k people on their site and as Chris as said 500k sold they have trained lots of people the AR way. If I was a GIS company and I could buy a $300 unit to train my guys and then move upto say a $1500 unit from the same company that operates in the same way I would be happy.

Most people here know my day job for the last 25 years has been flying passengers in hot air balloons. This has hardened me to waiting for weather to be able to fly. I don't see the light wind thing as a restriction.

In fact again if I had a GIS company I would put a wind limit of 10 knots surface on my operators as experience has shown me often you can have 25-35 knots at 500' and you don't know it on the ground. I often wonder if that's a flyaway contributer.

Lets face it a quad is just 2 sticks with some motors attached. Very much like the world of RC cars or helicopters where people just add bling or buy bling. The RC trade love them because people up grade them with expensive after market bits. That does not tend to happen with aircraft. The work created by platforms is what will make some stand out from the crowd. Whoever makes the easiest workflow will win.

Tin foil hat and flame proof suit fitted.

Comment by Andrew Radford on January 20, 2013 at 3:57am

This is good. Should bring more people keen to develop for Mavlink into the community who have only so far been exposed to the AR Drone.

Comment by firesq38 on January 25, 2013 at 4:18pm

How will it send/receive data between the new gps flight recorder and computer? Is there a receiver that comes with it?

Comment by John Wiseman on January 25, 2013 at 4:32pm

This is good news!  I've really enjoyed hacking on my AR.Drone, and it's out-of-the-box stability is very impressive.  The inertial + optical flow + sonar + barometer sensor fusion seems to result in some awesome positional accuracy.

Comment by Anglebender on January 25, 2013 at 11:54pm

John: have you taken it outside yet? I'm sure it works fine under high ceilings, like in a warehouse, but that "Rocket Man" glitch is a showstopper for me. I've also heard that recording video to thumbdrives can be problematic. Good to know that it's hackable, that jostles my purchasing decision somewhat. I'm still waiting for my ArduCopter kit to arrive, and since I'm a total noob and have absolutely zero UAS/RC experience, I'll let the fairly dismal Amazon user reviews attest for the engineering quality of the Parrot AR.

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