Greetings all.... Please forgive my ignorance, I just retired from my "day job" and am starting a new hobby. I have some flight experience with RC sailplanes when I was much younger, but since these have no "lift", they are a bit of a different animal. However, my problem is not with flying the thing, its with the camera. This is my second drone in the period of a month. The first one (UDI U818A) I made the mistake of flying it out over the river.......it doesn't float BTW. The current one (UDI Falcon U842) I have had no suck mishap with....yet. I few it the other day.....got about 10 minutes out of the battery and shot video the whole time and it transferred to my computer just fine (with the exception of a little jello). I flew it again this morning and when I got home I noticed the file size was about half of what it was yesterday even with the same amount of air time. The video was fine...but it ended abruptly about halfway through. I did some testing and it will take photos just fine, but no video. There are four wires that go from the camera to the circuit board inside the housing of the quad. My guess is there is a bad connection in that connector or inside the camera?? Just shooting in the dark here. I am going to disassemble it, but I thought I would look here first and see if maybe it was a common problem?? Maybe someone has already experienced it? Most of you folks are probably a bit younger then I am so just caulk it up to senility. : ) Thanks for any help!! Chris
These toy grade quadcopters are built fairly cheaply - and just about anything can go wrong (easily). First order of business might be to try another SD card. Try to match the type of formatting for the card....not sure what it is, but there are different formats for the cards (MS-DOS FAT is used on a lot of them). Some models make poor video when flown hard - the battery gets drawn down lots and it makes the video misbehave. To confirm whether this is the case, try it with a fully charge battery and see if it takes video without flying (so the camera has access to full power).
Webman......Thanks for taking the time and effort to respond. I hear ya on the cheaply built toy copters......wanted to make sure it was something I wanted to actually get into, hence the Falcon. I did charge the battery and test the camera with nothing else on.....that's how I found out that it still takes pictures, but no video. Could be the card I suppose, but I am not sure it would store the photos if the card was hosed...idk. However...now that you mention it, my computer said there was a problem with it and scanned it when I put it in, but then said no problems were found. Perhaps that does bare a little more looking into......again, thank you for the response!! : )
