A long time ago I bought myself a small rc helicopter. It was quite tricky to fly and fairly limited in abilities. The battery life was poor and the batter was hardwired. All in all it was probably not the most awesome experience. Roll on perhaps 7/8 years and technology has moved on a great deal…
Last week I bought myself the hubsan x4, a cursory search shows this is a very popular micro-quadcopter and a recommended choice for a beginner to learn to fly quadcopters with. It is cheap enough and robust enough that it can handle a few crashes without a serious problem 😉
It is a great little toy, very easy to get started with. It is so small that you can fly it around indoors easily enough. I almost immediately ordered extra batteries, because you can easily swap them over. So whilst each one lasts perhaps 8-10 minutes of flight, you can swap out a new batter in a few seconds and carry right on flying.
I took it up to the heath to have some fun flying outside. It was a pretty windy day and all credit to this tiny little flying machine, I was still able to control it and fly it around despite the wind. Though I did have to go into ‘expert’ mode. In normal mode I just wasn’t able to tilt into the wind hard enough to move against it. I took some video and cut it together:
