I acquired this Parrot Spider quad copter recently, and I like the mini drone for several reasons.
First it does not require a special controller which makes it a lot easier to use as a casual flyer, although using your phone as a controller is much more difficult for fine tuned controls. I also like its small size because it is almost the same size as the open source quad copter I plan on building soon. I figured it can be an intermediary stage between building an open source micro quad copter.
Before building a flyer on my 3D Printer though, I figure I will install a camera on this proprietary quad copter to experiment with flying in fpv mode. Then once I get that figured out I can replace the frame and flight computer with something a little more advanced.
Before installing the camera though, I wanted to experiment with replacing the stock battery pack (500ma) with the largest sized battery I can fit into the battery compartment.
I measured and found that the 850ma lipo batteries are absolutely the largest batteries that can fit on deck without modifying the shape of the frame.
Also as an added benefit I can get a 6 pack of these battery on Amazon for roughly the same price as one of the stock batteries from Parrot.
One of the main things I’d like to do is extend the flight time of this drone. With the stock battery stating 8 minutes of flight time without the rolling wheels attached, that’s just not enough.
Perhaps with a battery that contains 350mah additional power I could get an additional 1 or 2 minutes of flight.
I tested to see how long it flies with the new bigger battery and found that I was getting only about 8 minutes and 30 seconds. Quite a bit lower than I had hoped. To be fair, I never tested out the stock battery when it was working right, so who knows – maybe it didn’t really ever get 8 minutes of fly time.
Perhaps its a little bit less like 7 minutes and 30? I’ll never know because those batteries are tremendously over priced for what you’re getting, but assuming a little under 7 minutes realistically it looks like these larger batteries only achieve close to a minute extra flying time. Keeping in mind that the flight time in total is under 9 minutes, this is still a nice increase.
In the next article, I’ll be installing an fpv front facing camera on this quad copter drone.
Micro Quad Copter Drone: First Stage – Bigger Battery I acquired this Parrot Spider quad copter recently, and I like the mini drone for several reasons.