One night at the end of summer, we watched various drone videos on YouTube. It made us think that it would be cool to have our own drone. You could do anything, from bombing the Middle East to delivering packages.
Not to mention how handy it would be to film your own beautiful, teardrop-shaped body floating in a bubble bath at some ski resort's after-party. A drone is a must!
Well, let's get down to business and find a suitable factory in China. The hope was to find a drone with sufficient flight time, good usability, a reasonable camera, or at least a place to mount a camera and above all, that would follow its owner like a shark on a boat.
As we are reasonably asshole-ish and our customers even poorer, it shouldn't cost much more than a hundred either.
There is a dearth of drone manufacturers. Of course, anyone can see that by browsing a bit of any online shop. We went through the promised specifications, looked at pictures and videos. In the end, we ordered half a dozen of the most impressive ones, from manufacturers who had enough sales abroad.
After a couple of weeks of waiting, the packages started to drop and the feverish testing began.
None of our expectations were met. The flight of all the drones under a hundred was more like that of a drunken old man flying without a transponder over the East Sea in the dark. Not to mention the shitty Chinese mobile phone apps that let you snap shit pictures with pixels the size of Lego blocks. On top of that, none of them came with optional air-to-ground missiles.
Total crap.
No longer have any desire to get a cheap drone. They are confusing devices with a mind of their own. As a rule, cheap drones want to fly into a tree or a wall. The pilot's tracking feature is essentially that you have to play ninja when the drone takes dives towards your eyes.
In practice, none of the features advertised in the packages were anywhere near true. So still the poor man has to wait for the technology, and especially the shitty Chinese software, to reach at least some sort of plateau. So no further. I'll have to look for something new to sell again.
So remember these when you buy a drone for under a hundred:
- They're totally toys, totally shitty toys. They don't come with weapons, and they won't fly you in a hammock.
- Make sure they have at least some sort of compass and GPS, otherwise they'll fly wherever they like. Usually even those with compass and GPS will fly mostly into your own eye.
- For a hundred bucks you get more out of a beer than a drone. The flight time of a cheap drone is only a few minutes, while a pint of beer can easily take 15 minutes. A cheap drone gets boring in half an hour, and a hundred bucks buys quite a few pints in an alepub.
- Charging times are pathetically long. After one 5-minute flight on the kids' juice box, the next flight is in about a day.
- A good drone costs a ton, and you don't buy it from the Chinese to begin with.
What we expected:
What we got:
