XIRO Xplorer Mini. Your Personal Fan With a Camera

Introduction

Com­pact­ness — this is the qual­i­ty that a mod­ern self­ie drone should have in the first place. Zero UAV went fur­ther and offered their own view of how they see the drone, the pur­pose of which is pho­to and video shoot­ing in self­ie for­mat. This drone close­ly inter­twines com­pact­ness, style, sim­plic­i­ty and incom­pa­ra­ble shoot­ing qual­i­ty in the UAV niche. With­out exag­ger­a­tion, one of the best self­ie drones is the XIRO Xplor­er Mini.

Peculiarities

• Posi­tion­ing: GPS/GLONASS + ultra­son­ic and opti­cal sen­sors
• Fold­ing design
• brush­less motors
• 13MP FHD cam­era
• 3‑axis elec­tron­ic image sta­bi­liza­tion
• Low bat­tery pro­tec­tion
• Sig­nal loss pro­tec­tion
• Intel­li­gent Flight Modes
• RTH mode
• Max. flight time 15 min
• Max. flight range 100 m

Equipment

The man­u­fac­tur­er offers two kit options. Since they do not have an offi­cial name, we will call them both a small set and a large set. In a large set, one more bat­tery and the so-called “Trav­el Case” or trav­el case will be added, made in two col­ors — light gray and dark gray.

The small kit will include:

• Drone XIRO Xplor­er Mini
• Smart Bat­tery 3S 11.4V 1650mAh 18.81Wh LiPo
• 4 × rotors
• 4 × rotor pro­tec­tion
• Charg­er
• Pow­er sup­ply 220V for mem­o­ry
• USB cable
• Screw­driv­er
• Instruc­tions and illus­tra­tions for the first start

Specification

Brand:

XIRO

Mod­el:

Xplor­er Mini

Posi­tion­ing:

GPS/GLONASS

Height hold:

Ultra­son­ic sen­sor + pho­to­sen­sor

Auto take off / auto land­ing func­tion:

Yes

Intel­li­gent flight modes:

Yes

Cam­era:

13MP FHD

Video record­ing modes:

1920×1080p@30fps

Max­i­mum pho­to res­o­lu­tion:

4208×3120

Matrix

1/3.0 inch

FOV:

190° fish­eye

Image Sta­bi­liza­tion:

Elec­tron­ic (EIS)

Mem­o­ry:

Smart­phone resources

Motors:

Brush­less type

Drone bat­tery:

smart 3S 11.4V 1650mAh 18.81Wh LiPo

Return home func­tion:

Low battery/Loss of con­nec­tion

Back­light:

LED

Max flight time

15 min­utes

Max. flight alti­tude:

50m (adjustable)

Range of flight:

100m

Max. take­off speed:

11km/h

Max. sink rate:

7km/h

Max. hor­i­zon­tal flight speed:

29km/h

Frame:

225mm

Dimen­sions:

310×310×55mm

The weight:

431gr

Fly­ing envi­ron­ment:

Indoor/Outdoor

Age lim­it:

14+

About the product

The work­man­ship of the Xplor­er Mini is top notch. The con­struc­tion of the drone is sol­id, there is no hint of squeaky plas­tic and it seems that it takes a lot of effort to break its integri­ty. The fold­ing mech­a­nism of the beams, with­out any back­lash, is tight and in the flight posi­tion is fixed with a char­ac­ter­is­tic click.

Next, it is worth not­ing the design, here the devel­op­er tried. Spe­cial atten­tion is paid to the pan­el cov­er­ing the bat­tery of the drone. The yel­low mul­ti-struc­tured pat­tern notice­ably dis­tin­guish­es the quad from a num­ber of any oth­er UAVs. More­over, if you get bored with the col­or of the pan­el, the man­u­fac­tur­er will offer you oth­er options for per­son­al­iz­ing the drone to choose from, which is good news.

The design of the XIRO Xplor­er Mini became the best, for which it received an author­i­ta­tive design award — the Red Dot Design Award 2016. Award­ed by the Euro­pean Design Insti­tute in Essen (Ger­many).

Appearance

Motors

The Xplor­er Mini quad­copter is equipped with Zero UAV brush­less motors. The devel­op­er does not spec­i­fy infor­ma­tion about per­for­mance. Nev­er­the­less, the poten­tial of the pow­er plant is quite enough to com­plete the tasks.

Camera

The Xplor­er Mini has a 13MP fish­eye cam­era with a 190° field of view. The video qual­i­ty is in line with the 1920 × 1080p spec­i­fi­ca­tion at 30 fps and will sat­is­fy any self­ie. I would like to imme­di­ate­ly note the high-qual­i­ty work of elec­tron­ic image sta­bi­liza­tion (EIS), if the quad freezes, then some­times it seems that the pic­ture just froze. In flight, there is no hint of vibra­tion and jel­ly, the qual­i­ty of sta­bi­liza­tion can be com­pared with the Par­rot Bebop 2. The cam­era can shoot pho­to­graph­ic mate­r­i­al at a max­i­mum res­o­lu­tion of 4208 × 3120.

Food

The Xplor­er Mini comes with a 1650mAh intel­li­gent 3‑cell Lithi­um Poly­mer bat­tery. I would like to imme­di­ate­ly attribute the pres­ence of an indi­ca­tion of the cur­rent bat­tery charge to the plus­es. We were also pleased with the flight time, accord­ing to the man­u­fac­tur­er’s spec­i­fi­ca­tion, it is 15 min­utes. In prac­tice, the time spent in flight did not decrease much and aver­aged about 13 min­utes, which is com­mend­able for a self­ie drone.

Thanks to the feed­back between the con­troller and the bat­tery, the pilot does not have to wor­ry about the bat­tery charge at all. Elec­tron­ics will warn him in advance of a dis­charged bat­tery. But, if this warn­ing is ignored for some rea­son, the drone will auto­mat­i­cal­ly switch to the return home mode and return to the take-off place on its own.

Control

Com­plete with XIRO Xplor­er Mini you will not find clas­si­cal equip­ment, its role will be played by a smart­phone / tablet run­ning on IOS or Android. After installing the Xiro Xplor­er app, the pilot will need to pair the drone with the device, which takes only a few min­utes and the quad is ready to go. In such a tan­dem, the drone con­fi­dent­ly moves away to a dis­tance of up to 100 meters, which is an indica­tive dis­tance for a drone self­ie.

The flight con­troller is based on the Qual­comm APC2878 proces­sor. The live image from the cam­era will be dis­played in 720p res­o­lu­tion.

Intelligent Flight Modes

The pilot has 2 modes of autonomous flight at his dis­pos­al:

1. fol­low me – the drone clas­si­cal­ly fol­lows the smart­phone.
2. fol­low snap — the drone fol­lows the object that was point­ed to it.

Test Drive

In the XIRO Xplor­er Mini test, it showed itself exclu­sive­ly on the pos­i­tive side. Due to dual posi­tion­ing, the drone has out­stand­ing accu­ra­cy and sta­bil­i­ty even in notice­able wind.

Man­age­ment is intu­itive. It reacts calm­ly and accu­rate­ly to move­ment with vir­tu­al sticks. Three con­trol options are avail­able: Safe con­trol mode (sim­i­lar to but­ton con­trol) / Free con­trol mode (sim­i­lar to clas­sic stick con­trol) / Motion con­trol modes (smart­phone tilt con­trol).

He worked with­out remarks in the intel­li­gent modes “Fol­low me” and “Fol­low snap”. In “Fol­low me” mode, the “Self-Cir­cling” func­tion is avail­able. By acti­vat­ing this func­tion, the drone will duti­ful­ly fly around the paired mobile device, no remarks were found in the work.

I liked the IOS mode or sim­ply the mod­i­fied “Head­less” mode. When it is acti­vat­ed, the green LEDs begin to blink with a more fre­quent ampli­tude. I liked the “Save mode/Fast mode” drone activ­i­ty modes. They are rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from each oth­er and will be very use­ful for dif­fer­ent lev­els of pilots.

Reli­ably per­forms auto return with sub­se­quent land­ing when the bat­tery lev­el is low, as well as when the sig­nal is lost. Car­ries out land­ing with amaz­ing accu­ra­cy and with­out remarks. In the flight time declared by the man­u­fac­tur­er (15 min­utes), the Xplor­er Mini prac­ti­cal­ly met, it was 13 min­utes, which is very good.

As for the qual­i­ty of shoot­ing, we can say the fol­low­ing: excel­lent work of elec­tron­ic sta­bi­liza­tion, no vibra­tion and jel­ly. Video qual­i­ty cor­re­sponds to the declared 1080p. The qual­i­ty of the pho­to­graph­ic mate­r­i­al will sat­is­fy any self­ie.

If dur­ing the flight an incom­ing call is received on the smart­phone, the user will be able to answer it with­out any fear that some­thing will hap­pen to the drone, the quad will sim­ply freeze wait­ing for com­mands.

Price

The XIRO Xplor­er Mini self­ie drone is sold both through offi­cial net­work resources and devel­op­er stores, and through Inter­net trad­ing plat­forms at a price of 100$—135$.

Conclusion

Xiro Mini from $100

Func­tion­al­i­ty

7/10

Flight time

6/10

Flight qual­i­ties

8/10

com­pact­ness

8/10

Equip­ment

9/10

Reli­a­bil­i­ty

8/10

Price qual­i­ty

10/10

pros

• Design
• Qual­i­ty
• GPS/GLONASS posi­tion­ing + ultra­son­ic and opti­cal sen­sors
• stack­able beams
• brush­less motors
• 13MP FHD cam­era
• EIS work
• Intel­li­gent Flight Modes
• Flight time
• Social media sup­port

Minuses

• Does­n’t shoot in 4K
• No ana­log con­trol equip­ment (even with option­al acces­sories)

One of the best self­ie drones right now. In the test, it showed the exact cor­re­spon­dence of the para­me­ters declared in the man­u­fac­tur­er’s spec­i­fi­ca­tion. Styl­ish, com­pact, easy to use, one of the best self­ie drone cam­eras avail­able with expo­nen­tial image sta­bi­liza­tion, ready to fly out of the box. If you are look­ing for a self­ie drone, then this mod­el is worth pay­ing atten­tion to. Age lim­it 14+.

A photo

Pho­to of XIRO Xplor­er Mini self­ie drone.

Video

Video with self­ie drone XIRO Xplor­er Mini.