Friday, November 25, 2011

Budget holiday gifts -- the Parrot AR Drone

Hot babes will drape themselves over you as you fly your Parrot AR Drone
Image from Brookstone's AP Drone catalog page

Continuing my series on budget holiday gift ideas for these trying economic times today I recommend the Parrot AR Drone. Sure, at nearly $300 there will be some killjoys -- like the sort that complained that the price of an airplane ticket to Australia knocked the Big Avocado out of the category as a budget vacation -- who will say this is a bit pricey to be a budget gift. My response to their Scroogery: flying video cameras! 

The Parrot AR Drone is a quadcopter with both forward and downward looking cameras that is controlled via Wifi from an iPhone, iPad or Android device. It can be flown indoors and outdoors.

Below are a couple of videos about the Parrot AR Drone. In the first one a fellow unboxes the Parrot AR Drone and steps through a pretty good discussion of its features, sensors and means of control before taking a brief test flight with it.

The second video explains how to modify it to accommodate cheaper and longer lasting batteries (out of the box a fully charged battery only gives about 15 minutes of flight). They then also take it for a brief test flight.


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks

Unknown said...

The AR drone is definitely a great gift idea and who ever receives it, will not be dissapointed :) But, if you think that the person you want to gift a great gadget, is not that flying oriented, you can opt for a different type of drone ;) Here is a suggestion you might find interesting, namely, the Parrot Mini Jumping Drone, and here is a great review of it: http://mydronelab.com/reviews/the-parrot-mini-drone-jumping-sumo.html