One of our team members picked up a new Parrot MiniDrone Rolling Spider from Best Buy for $99 and decided to take it for a test flight!
UNBOXING:
Opened the boxed, put the wheels together, downloaded the FreeFlight3.0 app, installed the battery and let it charge overnight.
FIRST THOUGHTS:
Awesome! Can control it from my iPhone! Sounds like a buzzing bee! Can roll around anywhere! Even on the ceiling! Can take photos too!
ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY:
Guessing it might be broken by then…
PROS:
$99 drone!
Rolling wheels act as bump guards
FreeFlight App is intuitive and easy to use
Takes “drone-selfies”
CONS:
Does not take video
Takes low resolutions photos (300,000px)
Does not come with a controller. (uses FreeFlight App)
While this is a great purchase for anyone getting into the “quad/drone” market, it’s pretty limited with what you can do compared to what else is out there. Even though we love this toy and have been playing with it everyday since we bought it, we recommend getting Parrot’s BEBOP drone instead that does all the “drone basics” without spending over $1,000 USD (like the DJI phantom2).
11/1/2014 UPDATE
Will the parrot Rolling Spider lift a GoPro off the ground? No, but it will with 18 helium balloons attached to it!
For our test, we attached a GoPro3 silver with some 3M adhesive foam tape to the Parrot Rolling Spider. It made a valiant attempt and the propellers went into high mode but unfortunately wasn’t able to lift the gopro off the ground.
Our next test was to attach 18 helium balloons to the Rolling Spider. We had a string of 18 helium balloons that we tied each end to each of the 2 circle wheels. It indeed lifted the gopro off the ground but barely. It went into high mode and slowly lifted off the ground up to a maximum of 5 feet. We couldn’t control the spider via the FreeFlight app and was fully dependent on the wind to push the balloons/spider.
REFERENCES/LINKS:
http://www.parrot.com/
http://www.dji.com/
5 Responses to “Parrot MiniDrone Rolling Spider”
The rumor is that Parrot’s MSRP will be around $350. I’m going to predict something more in the 400-500 range though. Parrot says BEBOP will be released in the 4th quarter of 2014 which started a month ago. I hope i’m wrong about the price for my sake because i will definitely buy one for $300-350 but not $400 or more. That’s out of my price range for a toy that can fly away or get damaged easily. I have the parrot rolling spider ($99 @ Best Buy) and it’s a great intro to mini-drones like you said but if using the rolling spider via Parrot’s FreeFlight app is like the BEBOB, i will probably end up destroying it within 6 months due to my own incompetence and fun/risk factor. It’s a toy! So of course i’m going to “play” with it. Regardless of the reason, $400 is out of my price range for a toy that takes HD video. However, if i made money from it, that’s a whole other story!
Apparently Parrot is just testing their “prototypes” now; in the so called “4th quarter” when they said it was to be released. I heard they might be having a lot of financial difficulties which is causing the hold up. If you look at all the products they are planning to deploy, it makes sense.
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