Dec 16

Dec 16 My First Time Flying a Drone With the Chroma 4k

Chroma 4k Drone My grandfather designed, built and flew model airplanes. These were not from kits or out of a box.

I remember the first time he handed me the controls and asked if I wanted to land one for him. What little kid would say no? Of course, I ended up crashing it.

Fast forward to this morning when I found myself standing by second base on the baseball field and flying my first drone.

The team at Horizon Hobby sent me a Chroma 4k Drone to try out and review.

Drone photography and video is something I've always been eager to try and having this arrive just before my birthday was a perfect surprise.

I'll be posting a full review once I've used it more, but I wanted to provide some initial thoughts immediately after using it.

Thanks to a "safe" mode, I was able to take off and start flying almost immediately.

Flying in this mode puts a protective barrier around the controller so you don't have to worry about hurting yourself and it limits the controls to the most basic of directions so you don't do any flips and crashes.

There is also a switch to instantly put it into "home" mode which brings it right back to where it took off from. All of my tests with this worked perfectly.

My only complaint so far is that there isn't a manual of any sort to walk you through everything I needed to know. There is no audio in the videos that follow because the default setting is for no audio. This makes sense, but I wish I had known.

Here is a video of my first flight. I went to a wide open field where I wouldn't have to worry about people, trees or buildings.

It comes with a built in stabilizer for the camera and I wanted to see how steady it would keep it and you can see it performed very well as I jerked it around.

Finally, the FAA has set regulations of 400 feet as the maximum height drones can be flown. I discovered that I could program a maximum height into the software, so being a good citizen I set it at 390 feet and sent it up to see how high that was. Definitely high enough for me.

All of these videos are straight off the memory card and uploaded to YouTube. They are compressed by the site, but I'm blown away with how great the quality is for someone that doesn't even know what they are doing yet.

The ST-10+ Controller has a built in Android touch screen so you can see what the drone sees at any time, plus giving you tons of real time data. Here is my proof to the FAA that I was flying legally. :)