Budget Quadcopter Xiaomi MiTu Mini RC Drone

In this review, I will talk about a bud­get quad­copter — Xiao­mi MiTu Mini RC Drone. It is intend­ed for novice pilots, and will help to mas­ter the basics of fly­ing, to move on to more pro­fes­sion­al-lev­el mod­els. My mod­est expe­ri­ence in pilot­ing quad­copters comes down to a few very sim­ple mod­els — which did not even know how to hov­er in one place. There­fore, I want­ed to try some­thing more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced, but at the same time inex­pen­sive. This mod­el became Xiao­mi MiTu Mini RC Drone.

Sup­ply

Sup­plied in a blue box. The design­er Mitu also came in a sim­i­lar box.

Spec­i­fi­ca­tions are list­ed on the stick­er on the back of the box.

Drone Options

• Case mate­r­i­al: impact-resis­tant plas­tic.
• Con­trol: 5 GHz.
• Proces­sor: 4 cores, 1.2 GHz
• Cam­era res­o­lu­tion: HD 720 pix­els
• Type of engines: col­lec­tor.
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tion range: up to 50 meters.
• Mem­o­ry: 4 GB.
• Bat­tery: 920 mAh
• Flight time: about 10 min­utes.
• Charg­ing time: up to 1 hour.
• Height hold func­tion
• Hand throw launch
• Smart­phone tilt con­trol
• aer­i­al acro­bat­ics
• Air bat­tle
• Dimen­sions: 91 × 91 × 38 mm.
• Weight: 88 g.

Set

The box con­tains a quad­copter, dis­as­sem­bled, with­out bat­tery and screws. Packed well, noth­ing was dam­aged dur­ing ship­ment. The quad­copter has a round shape, a cam­era and an infrared sen­sor on the front of the gad­get imme­di­ate­ly catch­es the eye. At the bot­tom of the box are the rest of the nec­es­sary acces­sories to oper­ate the drone.

The total pack­age of the Xiao­mi MiTu Mini RC Drone quadro­copter includes

— the main mod­ule of the quad­copter, with a cam­era, an IR “gun”, motors and a con­trol board.

— a lithi­um-ion bat­tery for 920 mAh, or 3.5 Wh, the bat­tery is com­bined with the bat­tery cov­er, on the back of it there is an arrow point­er for the cor­rect instal­la­tion of the bat­tery, and an image of the Xiao­mi brand­ed hare is squeezed out

Blades — 6 pieces, half of which are marked with red dots, for prop­er instal­la­tion on engines. For flights, 4 blades are need­ed, the rest are spare. Pro­tec­tion for quadro­copter pro­pellers. Although they make the air­craft heav­ier, they are a nec­es­sary thing for begin­ners.

Charg­ing microUSB cable, you can use any oth­er. By the way, all these acces­sories are avail­able for pur­chase sep­a­rate­ly from the quadro­copter.

Design

Quad­copter engines have dif­fer­ent mark­ings — two are marked in red, for installing blades with a red dot, and two are unmarked, white blades must be placed on them, with­out mark­ing

Under the engines, there are rub­ber semi-cir­cu­lar plugs that act as land­ing legs. In the cen­ter of the body is a sen­sor that reacts to obsta­cles.

On the front of the drone, there is a dual mod­ule — 720p HD cam­era, and an IR sen­sor, which is used in air com­bat mode.

On the left side is the pow­er but­ton. Turn­ing the quad­copter on and off is done by long press­ing this but­ton. There is a bat­tery release but­ton on the back. It’s just a mechan­i­cal lever that removes the latch that holds the bat­tery. On the right side is a micro USB con­nec­tor, which is used both to charge the device and to view the inter­nal stor­age with cap­tured pho­tos and videos.

Assem­bling the quad­copter is intu­itive, but you can also use the com­plete instruc­tions. Although it is in Chi­nese, it is pro­vid­ed with detailed draw­ings, thanks to which the assem­bly order is clear.

First, install the bat­tery, which is also the top cov­er of the quadro­copter.

The next step is to install the blades. A pair with a red mark and a pair of white marks are tak­en and installed on the cor­re­spond­ing engines.

The last assem­bly step is to install the pro­tec­tion for the blades. It is fixed in spe­cial recess­es of the engine hold­er and pro­tects the blades in case of col­li­sions.

Before fly­ing, you need to charge the drone, charg­ing takes about an hour, while the blue LED on the bot­tom flick­ers.

Control Application

While the quad­copter is charg­ing, you can install a con­trol appli­ca­tion from the Play Mar­ket called MiDrone­M­i­ni. For­tu­nate­ly, in the appli­ca­tion, you can choose, in addi­tion to Chi­nese, Eng­lish, which great­ly sim­pli­fies life. To enter the appli­ca­tion, you need to either reg­is­ter or log in using Face­book, Twit­ter or Mi Account. I chose the last option.

The first time at start­up, 8 infor­ma­tion screens are dis­played, which con­tain infor­ma­tion about flight safe­ty, con­trol using joy­sticks on the smart­phone screen, flight modes and con­trol.

To con­nect to the drone, of course, you need to turn it on before that, the appli­ca­tion scans wi-fi net­works, finds the drone’s net­work, the first time you need to enter a pass­word, it is 123456789 by default. When you restart it, you don’t need a pass­word.

A few sec­onds after estab­lish­ing a con­nec­tion with the drone, a pic­ture from its cam­era begins to be broad­cast on the smart­phone screen. The con­trol screen is sim­ple and clear, the main part is occu­pied by two joy­sticks — the left one to con­trol the climb, descent and turns, the right one — course, for the direc­tion of move­ment. In the upper left, the sur­face take-off and hand but­tons, in flight mode they change to land­ing but­tons, then the air com­bat mode but­ton, head­less mode, and smart­phone tilt con­trol mode. Below them is a but­ton that opens the modes of aer­i­al acro­bat­ics — drone flips in the air. In the upper right part — the bat­tery lev­el, and set­tings.

In the set­tings, you can go to the drone stor­age gallery to view pho­tos and videos, set up a wi-fi net­work, and update the firmware. There is a win­dow where the lim­it on the max­i­mum climb is set, from 2 to 25 meters.

Quad­copter hor­i­zon­tal cal­i­bra­tion mode, for which it must be installed on a flat sur­face. Set­ting the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of the joy­stick, by default it is low, I have enough for now, maybe when I prac­tice enough, the sen­si­tiv­i­ty lev­el will need to be increased.

First indoor test take­off. I’m used to the fact that it’s hard to con­trol a quad­copter indoors — it col­lides with some­thing very quick­ly. But here every­thing is dif­fer­ent — the drone sta­bi­lizes itself in the air.

All flight tests — you can see in the video review, then in the text there will be sev­er­al screen­shots from the video

The quad­copter reacts to an emerg­ing obsta­cle in the form of my hand and flies off to the side. After the obsta­cle dis­ap­pears, he returns to his place.

Even in the absence of expe­ri­ence in con­trol­ling quadro­copters, MiTu Drone is easy to pilot even in a small space. Fly­ing in an apart­ment is easy.

Fly­ing on the street. There is cer­tain­ly more room for maneu­ver here, but due to the fact that the drone is very small and light, it is high­ly depen­dent on the wind. Not even a very strong wind blows it to the side. You can fly nor­mal­ly either in com­plete­ly calm weath­er — or at low alti­tude.

Launch from the hand — when the mode is acti­vat­ed, the blades start spin­ning, after that the drone needs to be gen­tly tossed and now it is already in the air. Due to the wind, my attempts to reach the max­i­mum height were not suc­cess­ful, the max­i­mum that I man­aged was 10 meters.

Drone cam­era, shoots with a res­o­lu­tion of 1280 * 720 pix­els and a fre­quen­cy of 30 frames per sec­ond. The video qual­i­ty is aver­age, like that of cheap smart­phones, but it’s hard to expect any­thing bet­ter from a bud­get drone. Since the cam­era is not equipped with a sta­bi­liza­tion sys­tem, the image is jerky.

All flight videos are in the video review above.

Exam­ples of pho­tos tak­en with a quad­copter cam­era, the pic­tures also have a res­o­lu­tion of 1280 * 720, the qual­i­ty is sim­i­lar to video.

Although for some domes­tic pur­pos­es it will do, for exam­ple, to find out what is hid­den behind a high fence The only thing you need to make sure that the drone is not blown away by the wind over this very fence.

As a con­clu­sion, this is an entry-lev­el quad­copter, although not a cheap toy that is dif­fi­cult to con­trol and breaks in the first few flights. It will be inter­est­ing for a gift to a child who can fly even in cramped con­di­tions of the apart­ment. It will help to learn the skills of pilot­ing and aer­i­al pho­tog­ra­phy.

Thank you for your atten­tion

Where could I buy?

Gearbest Bang­good Aliex­press JD.ru

Table (updat­ed) on the Xiao­mi ecosys­tem