New Toy

I got a new toy the other day. A Drone! I got the DJI Mavic Pro. It's a flying camera.

This is my first flight. It took about 8 hours of study to get it to fly. After unpacking it and charging up all the batteries and controller; which took about 2 hours, and after reloading the software twice; I called tech support and that's when I found out it won't work with my Droid phone. So then I made a trip to one of my favorite stores, Best Buy, to buy an IPad Mini 4. After I got that mastered (I hate Apple stuff) and loaded with the DJI App, I was in hour number 5 and it was getting dark outside. The next day I powered up to find out it has to load new firmware. That took an hour to do. This thing is awesome, it's so smart.

 Peggy and I took it out into a nice open area in the park for our first flight. It was awesome! I had it in Beginner mode so you can only fly 98 feet away. It's a good start. My last drone experience of about 5 years ago, took 2 minutes to fly it into a tree and about an hour to get it out of the tree. So in comparison, this flight went good. We tested the "Fly To Home" button a couple of times and it worked great. It came right back and landed on the landing pad just inches away from where it took off. It has GPS to tell where it took off from and land right back on that same place.

The camera on it can record in 4K. I had to order a mount for the IPad. It will be here tomorrow. Until then, Peggy has to hold on to it when I'm flying. We'll call her a flight attendant. 

It will fly 98 feet away and stop and ask you if you want to take it out of beginner mode. But I think I'll fly in Beginner mode for a little while. They say it can fly up to 4 miles away and still come back on one charge. I'm not ready to try that yet either. You have to register with the FAA to get a permit to fly this drone. I did that for $5.  The drone has software in it and it knows when it's in a "No Fly Zone." Now that's smart. Those Chinese think of everything. This thing is a quality machine. I tried to load a video on the blog, but it took too long. So no videos on the blog.

But I had to add a Drone Picture. This is from 98 feet in the air.

A Drone shot from down low. A Drone selfie.

Oh and Peggy got some good shots of some birds.

Live Happy and Always Go Big.