Learning to Fly the Chubory F-89 Drone. Louis Shalako.

Not exactly as pictured.

Louis Shalako

Learning to Fly a Drone.

 

Well, isn't that something.

All right, ladies and gentlemen. I bought a drone for $134.00 Cdn. The battery has a small charge. I couldn't get the thing to light up, and if you can't light up, you can't calibrate. Without lighting up or calibration, it ain't gonna fly for nobody. 

Thinking that maybe the battery simply wasn't making contact, I discovered that it was actually upside down. Now, she lights up. So, you turn on the drone, set it on a level surface, in this case the living room rug. Turn on the transmitter. Push the throttle (left-hand) stick all the way forward, and then pull it all the way back. The lights will stop flashing and you are calibrated. You can take off with the push of a button, and it will adopt a hover at about 1.5 metres. You can push a button and it will land itself. 

Other than that, as I begin to write this story, I have about one minute of flight time on this machine. Previously, I had achieved about six hours of flight/crash training on the ESC 2680, which my mother on some mad impulse gave me for Christmas last year...in order to take pictures or video, I would really need the app, on a high-end phone, in which case you can record on your phone's hard-drive or memory card, and you can even fly the thing with your touch screen. My big goal here is to get more than six hours of flying time, and maybe even keep the thing around for a while. Either way, it was a big breakthrough for me, in the sense that I spent a little mad money on what is basically a toy. I have taken to practicing a slow, measured, but constant rate of descent. To try to make a nice landing, without just dumping throttle and smacking her into the carpet. 

..might want to read that manual again.

Interestingly, the machine isn’t much better than I am at landing. It still seems to come down with a bump. There is a ‘stop’ button. I did push that in flight, and it shuts her down and she is a falling object, nothing more at that point…

Pro Tip: empty the ashtray before flying.

***

I picked this up at my mother’s house Thursday morning, (I live in an apartment and it’s just easier), it’s now Saturday morning. I’m up to about 21 minutes of flying time at this point. I have hit the leg of the coffee table and a desk exactly twice. So, it’s best to take that learning curve nice and slow…that way, we can keep our toy a little bit longer.

There are five major forces acting on an aircraft in flight. These are lift, thrust, mass, drag and money. It is wise to bear this in mind. We are trading dollars for air time. The more air time you achieve, the cheaper it is, and we are paying by the minute with these things. My first drone, the ESC 2680, lasted long enough so that I got about six hours of flying. I also got to crash the thing about a hundred and fifty to two hundred times as well. This results in chipped blades, cut blades, nicked blades, not to mention a few nicks and scratches on myself as well. It will also, eventually result in a broken gearbox, which is what killed it in the end.

These little nicks and scratches included several on the outside of the forearms, literally a defense injury, in that the thing was coming at me, and I blocked it like a freaking ninja, ladies and gentlemen. I have to admit, that thing got me three or four times, and I have no doubt it would take out an eye pretty easily and no one needs that now, do they.

With that drone, there was provision for a micro SD card and even that would have taken an account activation and an app on a cell phone in order to make that work. All I really care about is flying the thing. I suppose I can afford to indulge the impulse, but also, loading up your learning curve a little too ambitiously just increases the workload and the likelihood of mistakes, crashes and damage.

That particular (ESC) drone cost $89.99 at Costco, and the big weakness was the fact that the motors were long skinny things embedded in the arms, and the rotor was driven by a pinion and a larger white plastic gear. The gears were shit plastic, never mind how bad the pilot is. The Chubory F-89 is direct drive, which at least eliminates one major weakness of design.

The ESC came with one battery, and it lasted up to fifteen minutes. The F-89 comes with two batteries. This is actually a bit of a sore point, as the manual and the online materials state that it should take anything up to three hours to charge, and the battery is good for twenty minutes. 

This is bullshit. The batteries take about an hour and ten minutes to charge, you’re lucky to get seven to ten minutes out of it, and with my own brand of training and confidence building, that means a lot of hovering and gentle control movements. All of which burns power, but perhaps at a slightly lower rate than driving it all over the sky at full throttle. A minor point, a hover is a hover, no matter the altitude, although it does take more power to get higher—

The thing is so small, you don’t want to take it too far away in any case.

In terms of comparison, the ESC machine held the hover with a certain precision, the F-89 will tend to drift back and forth. If in flying, one mistake compounds on another, (and the one before it, and the one before that), then this seems to be evident when the machine is hovering with no inputs from the pilot. It will drift around to a certain extent, and then it will try to correct itself, to the extent the thing appears to be a little bit confused.

When you just wanted to rotate in position, the ESC machine would do a tighter circle, although not exactly head-of-a-pin stuff. The F-89 has a larger circle, I use this effect to sort of drive it around the living room using rotational inputs on the left-hand stick only. If it gets too close, I can shove it forward with the right-hand stick, or pull it back. I'm still flying the back-end view sort of thing, when it is pointed at you all directional inputs are of course reversed. (Up and down are still up and down, the throttle remains the same.) I can always land if I'm a bit confused and getting a little too close to a bookcase or whatever. As for the alleged trim button, it would appear to be useless, although I could have another look at that manual. Basically, you can push on that thing all day long, nothing is going to happen.

In other observations, the F-89 has a switch on the top in all the major pictures online, at the store and on the manufacturer’s website. The switch on my machine is on the bottom. Clearly this is not exactly the same product as advertised, and which seemed all right to this uninitiated fledgling pilot…this is not exactly a recommendation, not for either machine.

 

END

 

Please check out The Handbag’s Tale on Google Play, the original novella that inspired The Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series. Click on the audiobook and you will see that it is free.

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Here I am on Bluesky Social.

4.5 Hours On the ESC 2680. (Youtube)

Testing the ESC 2680. (Youtube)

 

Thank you for reading, and watching.