This thing is finally hitting the shelves through the official channel here
The price is more than reasonable, $389 being the common low price for online stores on the most popular national price comparator for electronics. It makes it an expensive toy, but the cheapest "decent" quad around, cheaper than the GAUI for example, but with hardware in a whole other category.
I was just forced to get one, especially as I had recently decided to get myself an iThingy in the end... namely iPad. I'm usually an anti-Apple, mainly because of their business/marketing practices, but have to admit that in this device category they're doing better.
So my colleague (who is the opposite and has pretty much everything Apple makes) and I both got one.
Mine hasn't flown so far because my 2nd-hand iPad is only reaching me tomorrow, but we've had a run with my colleague's one indoors, on his iPad and iPhone 4 (snowing outside...)
The control means feels a little awkward at first, seems the smaller iPhone is more conveneient as a remote for standard flight, at least in accelerometer mode. Didn't try the 2-joystick mode yet. But tilting a large pad just feels weird.
The aircraft is VERY stable, especially in altitude with its ultrasonic altimeter. When it's on autonomous hover it really stays pinned where it is. It does take a a large roomy house though if you want to play a bit, with the X-UFO like indoor shell it is quite wide. Also a clean floor is preferred if ultrasonic altimeter is activated, as if you fly over something it will adjust height to keep ground distance constant. That does feel a little weird... and might require a lot of effort from my part as I always have so much mess everywhere
If you're looking to do FPV the iPad is heaps better of course, thanks to the huge screen. With these 2 devices at least it's largely possible. Framerate and quality is good, even in low light, and delay was impressively short, I'd say <0.3s. That's quite a bit by absolute standards, but as the thing pretty much flies itself it's not a problem. I've read that older iPhones (3G/3Gs) can lag a bit more with their slower processors. In any case, very fun to fly to the other end of the house in FPV!
One can choose to display the front camera or the bottom one, and also both PIP combinations.
That's pretty much all on the practice side until I get my iPad... so in the meantime, it has seen a litle disassembly...
Pics there:
http://s18.photobuck...Parrot ArDrone/
All very clean, seems the version you saw was very close to final. They've polished the motor assemblies a little, with a black motor and hidden cables, but they look like the same geared brushless sets you saw. I'm still wondering a bit about that choice, especially as the gears make it very noisy. Guess that was the price to pay to have lighter drives and maintain good flight times even with the shell that makes nearly half the weight of the machine. Flight time is indeed very good with about 10-12mins on the 1Ah stock battery. The battery tray will happily take the blue 1300mAh Flightmax packs from UH, of which I happened to have 2pc still in the box, so that's very nice... the supplied charger connects to the balance plug, which is also the same as said batteries, so that's really an easy replacement. I just changed the plug to a Deans type, the original is a Tamiya connector.
The control hardware is really mobile-phone type, not RC-type. The mainboard has a powerful ARM processor (interstingly with Parrot marking, not some generic chip) with its RAM and flash, running linux, a WiFi chip with 2 PCB antennas and a few peripheral components like a power management IC. There are the 2 cameras, typical of the main camera + frontal camera you'd find on a mobile phone, however it can sample both at the same time as the bottom one is used for flight control even when the front one is used for downlink. That could be one of the reasons they needed a customised chip...
A second board holds the sensors, one ultrasonic pair, a 3 axis gyro (the neat new IDG500) and a 3-axis accelerometer, with a PIC24 that takes care of these. 3 connectors are on the mainboard, one for the front camera, one for motor power supply, and one for motor data. Interestingly there are 3 data wires to each brushless controller. I'd have expected a simple I2C link, but it seems more complicated... Parrot implied in a post on their forum that the motors were controlled by PWM, and as the software can read and update the software version on the controllers there must be a digital interface.... so maybe both, I2C for generic data plus a PWM for control, even if it makes little sense.
Will be able to say more when I can test it for real, but for now it looks really decent - the first big question at this point is whether WiFi range is any practical in real life, it already seems like indoor is a little "compromised" by the requirement for a large room, and 50m doesn't seem like a lot outside. The second is support, as even if the device has been available for a few weeks already at some places we so far haven't seen anything of the fun stuff they were showing off. All there is is a "free flight" application that allows you to fly the thing, but no game whatsoever ("will be available soon"), even if it's the main purpose of the aircraft, and the limitations of free flight show quickly...
Additionnally, there have been several reports of the thing flying away on its own, most likely due to a software crash of the main processor, with the lucky people who had the battery being quite low "only" suffering bad crashes, and the other less lucky ones completly losing their quad that had flown away too far for them to find it again. That's where the PWM was mentioned, the Parrot representative was saying that PWMs for the motors are hardware-generated and thus stay in free run maintaining the last orders in case of software crash... and so far all Parrot says is they can't reproduce the issue. They WILL need to add watchdog protection...
We'll see what comes... I feel it's promising, but would really need to be completely open-source on the software side. That would allow LOTS of fun things... I read the header on the bottom has an USB and a serial port, to which a GPS could be connected, as well as a longer range radio modem, or more...
Edited by Kilrah, 29 November 2010 - 10:17 AM.
