Cheap Quadcopter With Camera for Beginners. Quadrocopter Skytech TK 106

Recent­ly, there have been a lot of quad­copters around. Almost every­where you look in the blo­gos­phere, they are every­where. Var­lam­ov pho­tographs Moscow from a quad­copter, Naval­ny pho­tographs some­one’s dachas, and Sergey Dolya takes great pic­tures of nature (don’t wor­ry if you don’t know who all these peo­ple are, con­sid­er that they are just those who take pic­tures from quad­copters).

There­fore, of course, I had a desire to pur­chase a quadro­copter for myself, and for a very long time. Peri­od­i­cal­ly, I asked my fly­ing friends, they say, what would I buy this for a start. They sent me a link. I opened it. Closed. Because I have no desire to spend 500 dol­lars on some­thing that I can eas­i­ly throw away lat­er. A quadro­copter is not a SLR, you can’t sell it on the bul­letin board.

But then some­thing inter­est­ing hap­pened — Sergey Uvarov came up with the for­mat of the Chi­nese Flea Mar­ket for the Youtube chan­nel iXBT.com, and Chi­nese goods fell on us. Ini­tial­ly, we thought that we would show only smart­phones there, or, at worst, tablets. But in the com­ments they demand­ed “Give us video cards! Note­books! Damn bald!”

As a result, I decid­ed to take a chance and order an inex­pen­sive cam­era quad from Tom­Top. It’s called the Skytech TK106, and it has a cam­era, a remote, and four screws. In gen­er­al, every­thing you need in order to try. Briefly about it you can see here in this video of the “Chi­nese flea mar­ket”.

A quadro­copter came to me in a card­board box, pret­ty exhaust­ed by the deliv­ery of Russ­ian mail. On the box there is a mod­el num­ber, the name of the com­pa­ny (Skytech, I didn’t notice it dur­ing the flea mar­ket), and briefly the char­ac­ter­is­tics that don’t real­ly tell me any­thing, but warn­ings that chil­dren under 3 years old should not be giv­en a quadric, in 6 lan­guages ​​includ­ing Russ­ian (and with­out Eng­lish 0_o).

Inside, the quad­copter is packed very high qual­i­ty, the device itself was put in soft foam rub­ber, the remote con­trol was in card­board, so, in gen­er­al, every­thing inside was intact. The deliv­ery set inspires some bewil­der­ment — it, for exam­ple, has a microSD (okay, this can still be under­stood) and a microSD card read­er (why is that?). Instead of all this junk, an extra bat­tery would be much more use­ful (and I will explain why lat­er). How­ev­er, the kit also includ­ed the nec­es­sary, under­stand­able things: land­ing “legs”, screw pro­tec­tion, a cord for charg­ing the bat­tery, a remote con­trol, a screw­driv­er.

When assem­bled, the quad­copter looks very nice, some­what sim­i­lar to the more expen­sive Syma prod­ucts.

The remote imme­di­ate­ly resem­bles the one used in the Microsoft XBox. You need to shove as many as 4 AA bat­ter­ies into it, for all the time that I dri­ve the quadric, they nev­er sat down.

Next, I will talk about some odd­i­ties, which, as it turned out lat­er, are char­ac­ter­is­tic of all quadro­copters. Well, first­ly, for some rea­son, man­u­fac­tur­ers are very, well, incred­i­bly fond of fix­ing every­thing with screws. The latch of the bat­tery com­part­ment in the remote con­trol is fixed on them. And that’s what a screw­driv­er is for! Hon­est­ly, I didn’t spin this thing at all, why? And so every­thing is going well.

The max­i­mum flight time of the quad is 3–5 min­utes, depend­ing on the attached body kit, and whether the cam­era is turned on or not. At first I thought — fu, what non­sense, and then I saw that even devices for $ 200–300 fly for 5–7 min­utes, and to stay in the air for 15 min­utes you need to spend quite an impres­sive amount.

Of course, the fea­ture is sad, but it would not hurt me so much if the man­u­fac­tur­er
a) put a sec­ond bat­tery in the kit, which is obvi­ous­ly cheap­er than a 4 GB microSD and a card read­er (I already ordered a sec­ond one for 300 rubles, but when will it arrive?).
b) at least some­how thought out a sys­tem for chang­ing these damned bat­ter­ies.

The last point deserves a spe­cial men­tion. The fact is that if you have nev­er been fond of mod­el­ing and quadrics, and you think that every­thing is at least some­what sim­ple with chang­ing bat­ter­ies, then you should not think like that. The bat­tery is con­nect­ed to the quad­copter motor with a minia­ture con­nec­tor, like a cool­er to the moth­er­board, only 2–3 times small­er. In order to open it, you need to press it in a very cun­ning way, and it began to work out for me only after about a week. If you want to charge the bat­tery, then — BINGO — you need to pull out this con­nec­tor, plug it into the charg­ing cord, and then, after every­thing is charged, plug the con­nec­tor back into the copter. For dessert, it is worth men­tion­ing that there is no charg­ing indi­ca­tor in the stan­dard wire.

The above things, of course, are capa­ble of bring­ing to white heat, they stopped annoy­ing me only after a week. I just hum­bled myself and began to enjoy it. After all, all this time I … Tried to fly.

I must say that I spent most of the flight time in the kitchen. I rarely went out­side, only to shoot a video, and all this because I had only one bat­tery.

I watched a lot of videos with quad­copters, and often they had some com­pli­cat­ed syn­chro­niza­tion pro­ce­dures with the remotes. Here, every­thing turned out to be just ele­men­tary — you need to turn on the fly­er and then the remote con­trol, they both beep, and you can “start”.

The quad­copter inside is very sim­ple, it sup­ports only two con­trol modes — man­u­al, and the so-called head­less. Head­less is a “semi-auto­mat­ic”, that is, no mat­ter which side the quadric is turned towards you, if you push the stick to the left, it will fly to the left, focus­ing on the remote. In man­u­al mode, if you press “left”, and the quad­copter is turned towards you not with its tail, but with its “face”, then it will fly to the right. Basi­cal­ly I’ve been learn­ing the “man­u­al” mode all the time.

The remote con­trol lies com­fort­ably in the hands and its func­tion­al­i­ty is good. There is a dia­gram in the kit that explains every­thing.

The “gas but­ton” has only one mode at all, appar­ent­ly, it is respon­si­ble for the cur­rent that is sup­plied to the motor. The copter does not know how to main­tain alti­tude.

Keep­ing the quad­copter in man­u­al mode at a giv­en height, and even dur­ing the wind, is anoth­er test. And, you know… That’s the fun part. I’ve had my quadric for almost two weeks now, and any­way, at any free moment, I run to run it in the kitchen. 5 min­utes. And then charge again, half an hour. Some­times I go out­side with it, but with­out a sec­ond bat­tery it’s pret­ty drea­ry.

I took video and pho­tos from the quad­copter, but I real­ized that it is very dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate with it. With­out real-time image trans­mis­sion, it’s com­plete­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble where the lens is turned and what will be in the frame at one time or anoth­er.

I’m think­ing about some oth­er quad­copter. This time, prob­a­bly, dol­lars for 200–250. It is nec­es­sary to fly, until it is com­plete­ly for­bid­den.

Per:

• Cheap
• I have a cam­era
• There are screw pro­tec­tion, land­ing legs
• Con­ve­nient remote con­trol

Vs:

• Flight time is only 5 min­utes
• Incon­ve­nient to charge and change the bat­tery
• It is real­ly dif­fi­cult to con­trol a quadro­copter, they say it is much eas­i­er for nor­mal mod­els

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6Do0NcWG9E

Despite such a prim­i­tive device, I am very pleased with the acqui­si­tion. For $36, it turned out to be a real step into the world of quad­copters. Prob­a­bly, for this mon­ey, if you dig around, you can find some­thing bet­ter, but there is not so much infor­ma­tion — all pro­fes­sion­al copter YouTube chan­nels are con­de­scend­ing to such lit­tle ones. Be that as it may, here is a link where you can look at the copter and find out its cur­rent price.