A drone for the boy

I have been getting my birthday shopping done early this year. The bad thing about getting gifts from online portals is that I feel a need to give them out as soon as I receive the items, in order to test them.

Anyway, this year the boy received a drone. He had seen one a few weeks ago and remarked that he would like to own one - as I was fresh out of gift ideas, I was only too happy to oblige.

I picked the SYMA X5X from Qoo10 and it soon made its way over from China. The drone itself is entirely made out of plastic and is very lightweight - making it hard to control the drone in even moderately strong winds.

I also ordered 3 extra batteries. Extremely glad I did that because each battery only provided between 10 to 15 minutes of flight time.

The remote control requires 4 AA batteries

The drone itself comes with one battery

The camera module that comes with this drone is passable, just don't expect high definition videos. There's a switch on the remote control that lets you snap a pic or start a video recording. There is however no indication on the LCD panel of the remote control of whether the camera has taken a picture or whether the video is recording, so that's kinda hit and miss.

Getting the drone to fly was a breeze, getting it to go where we wanted it to go, not so much. It was a pretty windy day though at West Coast Park, so we'll give it another go soon. Hopefully it'll go better than this time and I won't go crashing into trees as much.

We also captured phots and video footage using the camera but we crashed so frequently that neither of them was worth putting up. Better luck next time I guess. Already itching to capture some aerial videos of my neighbourhood.

D doing a better job than me!