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dragonlady7via http://bit.ly/2Ir0VWn
So the camera store I work for sometimes (half-time in the summer, full-time at Christmas) used to sell drones– you know, the annoying miniature quadcopters with a camera on a gimbal hanging off the base, that everyone was flying everywhere for a hot minute, sounding like leafblowers in the sky but taking kind of cool videos— and then we stopped selling drones because they’re a nightmare to sell and the manufacturer is a fucking pile of disaster and the customer relationships are *thumbs down*. (Think about it fundamentally: you take an expensive camera and then throw it into the sky and rely on some amateur’s video-game skills to keep from dropping it? How often does that go well? I mean, more often than it should, but there’s gonna be a high failure rate and then they’re gonna want to blame somebody for them having just literally thrown $1500 at the ground from a great height.)
But we were cleaning the store and found one.
It had been sold, and returned as defective, which is like the story of our entire experience as a drone dealer, and mostly they got returned because they’re hard to use, and also significantly it was because people just want to rent them, and Amazon forces you to take returns even if it is super clear that people are just buying and returning your shit to be free rentals. (We charged a lot of restocking fees but it was still not worth it. You know the profit margin on those things is like. Five dollars. It’s fucking ridiculous, it’s literally low-single-digit percentage points, and one bad return [if the customer pitches a fit, amazon usually just gives them back all their money even if they’re in the wrong, it’s super fucking tedious] can wipe out your profits on fifteen sales. PLUS those heavy-ass signature-confirmation-needing fuckers cost like $25+ to ship, and nobody ever wants to pay shipping. There’s a reason most of the independent electronics stores went out of business and it’s the *jazz hands* profit margins!!!!)
So we had this used “”””’defective”””””’ drone on the shelf for like. Two years. Because the pile of disaster manufacturer wouldn’t take bought-this-to-rent-it returns back as defectives. And we didn’t really have the means to test them anyway. So we’d say it was defective because the customer said it was, but then we couldn’t prove it really was, and a bunch of the time they just wouldn’t give us our money back and we were screwed.
Anyway this thing had a post-it on it that said “bad gimbal”. My coworker said, “Are you busy? Can you just… find out if it’s really a bad gimbal, or whatever? We’re going to have to sell the thing as-is on eBay or something and hope we can recoup some of the cost, because we can’t send it back and it’s old now, and knowing what’s actually wrong would let us sell it for a much more precise amount of money to someone who’s less likely to return it.”
(For us, who largely eke out our continued existence on a combo of in-store printing and services, and online sales of used equipment, because new electronics don’t turn a profit, “sell as-is on eBay” is a kind of purgatory. It’s a great way to get rid of junk, but it’s also a great way to have to sell something super-valuable-if-repaired for basically the cost of shipping and fees and if you’re lucky there’s some left over to pay you for the time you spent testing it, taking photos of it, and putting it into the box, which doesn’t really keep the lights on long-term, y’know? It’s also a great way to wind up having to pay return shipping on something worthless until you’re entirely underwater on the sale, if you can’t get the description just right. My coworker has been eBaying shit since 1999 so he’s got this down to a science.)
So… I got this drone out of the box. I screwed the propellors onto it. I checked the battery levels. Dead. So I charged the battery, and I charged the remote controller battery. I discovered that the remote control antenna was broken but could be reattached. I went through the enclosed papers and discovered that the manual was missing, as was part of the charging cable, though enough was there that I could cobble together spare parts.
I also discovered that whoever’d rented it had left a 32GB MicroSD card in it. Ehhhhh, not bad. It’s missing a prop blade, though it does come with spares so it’s usable as-is, and one of the existing blades is discolored and scratched, and there are some scratches on the chassis. It was clearly crashed, though not severely.
Ill-advisedly, not really understanding what was going on, I did try to make it take off indoors– it says it’ll go to 3.9 feet and hover, what’s the harm there? Fortunately for me it didn’t work, so I had to find the manual online and read it and not understand it and then watch some incredibly boring videos that did not explain anything very well at all and spent way too long with a guy acting like my 5yo niece with a front-facing camera, clearly looking at himself and enjoying talking. Eyeroll.
I did absorb a few things through sheer osmosis, and the number one thing I figured out was that it needed a firmware update before it would even deign to move the propellers. So I did that, and then it was time to go home, so I took it home to keep working on it, because at least I’d gotten the memo that making this thing take off indoors was a Bad Idea.
So I got it home, and figured out how to get the propellors back on, got it all configured, and then I was on my back porch which has a sloped ten-foot ceiling, and I figured, ok, I’ll get it to hover for a second.
BAD IDEA. It says it’ll go to 3.9 feet and then maintain position. It got to about eight before I leapt and grabbed it, not knowing what else to do; it was gonna go straight through the ceiling. Now, one of the things I’d read had even said, its margin of error is about twelve feet, so you can’t be anywhere that twelve feet matters, and I did not even think that would apply at a stationary hover, but oh boy does it.
So I panicked and threw it out the door, and it bobbled wildly around my backyard and I frantically stabbed the “LAND NOW” button on the app, and it did not, and did not, and did not, and I had to grab it again when it headed for the powerlines, but then it did settle into a landing configuration, drifted straight into a plant, I had to poke it, it landed and then freaked out at me because the grass was touching the camera gimbal.
Anyone who has ever used one of these things is surely laughing their ass off at me, but listen, I don’t think in vertical ways. I thought, “my porch has a ton of room”, and then I also thought, “my backyard super has room”, and then I looked up and there is a crisscross of powerlines covering my entire yard in a tight grid at about ten feet of height. And the “hover at 3.9 feet” function means ten feet at a wild bobble. These fuckers aren’t like. I mean. They’re precise but they’re flying, flying isn’t that precise, there’s wind.
I acquired a great little war wound in this process– my left forearm clearly contacted a propeller at some point, and it ripped out two chunks of skin and bruised me all the way down to the muscle. I had to put a gauze pad over it and then an icepack over that, it was very nostalgic; I’m no longer at a point in my life where I routinely bruise the absolute fuck out of myself on the regular anymore, but I was recently enough that I still have a fridge full of ice packs. (Ten years of roller derby, baby, and fencing before that, and as a kid it was horses. I absolutely know when to ice it and how many days until it turns black. I’m thinking this one is going to be max impressive about Wednesday. I’ll have to make a point to freak someone out with it.)
So. I brought it back to work and took it out into the vacant lot by the parking lot, with a freshly printed-out copy of the user’s manual that I’d done my best to read. (When I was twenty, I could’ve read this, but at thirty-nine I cannot comprehend a fucking paragraph, this is the sheer hell of undiagnosed female ADHD of the distraction subtype, I am unable to digest technical manuals at all anymore and it’s frustrating as fuck. I have to try to do it before I can begin to understand the instructions, and that works better when it’s not a flying death machine that will end us all.)
I got it to take off and hover at “three point nine” (10) feet, and I got it to turn around, I got it to move left and right and forward and backwards, I got it to take a video and several stills (I can’t get the video to transfer to my phone, but I did watch it, and it’s hilarious, I look enormously lumpy and confused and stare at the drone a lot as it gyrates in the parking lot, and someone drives by slow behind me that I didn’t notice and is clearly like “what is that woman’s problem and is that a flying leafblower?”). And then I got it to land, which is the part I was worried about, so. Clearly the controller works, the app works, the gimbal works, it reads a memory card. Whoever rented it had just dinged it up and was miffed and wanted to send it back. (Or, y’know, the event they wanted it for was over and so they were done with their fee-free rental, because they’re big fucking mooches. Eyeroll.)
So.
The one thing I can’t figure out how to do is to get it to change altitude. There’s got to be a control for that but I have no idea what it is. The only way I got it to go up or down is with the auto take off and auto land functions. So I’ll have to reread. (The one video showed how to do a manual takeoff but that was the most boring one and I cannot make myself watch that man stare at himself admiringly in the camera any more.)
I’m going to take it to the farm this week, to test it more, but we all know this is because I am going to buy it, and my coworker is going to sell it to me for as little as his conscience will let him. So we’ll see.
So the camera store I work for sometimes (half-time in the summer, full-time at Christmas) used to sell drones– you know, the annoying miniature quadcopters with a camera on a gimbal hanging off the base, that everyone was flying everywhere for a hot minute, sounding like leafblowers in the sky but taking kind of cool videos— and then we stopped selling drones because they’re a nightmare to sell and the manufacturer is a fucking pile of disaster and the customer relationships are *thumbs down*. (Think about it fundamentally: you take an expensive camera and then throw it into the sky and rely on some amateur’s video-game skills to keep from dropping it? How often does that go well? I mean, more often than it should, but there’s gonna be a high failure rate and then they’re gonna want to blame somebody for them having just literally thrown $1500 at the ground from a great height.)
But we were cleaning the store and found one.
It had been sold, and returned as defective, which is like the story of our entire experience as a drone dealer, and mostly they got returned because they’re hard to use, and also significantly it was because people just want to rent them, and Amazon forces you to take returns even if it is super clear that people are just buying and returning your shit to be free rentals. (We charged a lot of restocking fees but it was still not worth it. You know the profit margin on those things is like. Five dollars. It’s fucking ridiculous, it’s literally low-single-digit percentage points, and one bad return [if the customer pitches a fit, amazon usually just gives them back all their money even if they’re in the wrong, it’s super fucking tedious] can wipe out your profits on fifteen sales. PLUS those heavy-ass signature-confirmation-needing fuckers cost like $25+ to ship, and nobody ever wants to pay shipping. There’s a reason most of the independent electronics stores went out of business and it’s the *jazz hands* profit margins!!!!)
So we had this used “”””’defective”””””’ drone on the shelf for like. Two years. Because the pile of disaster manufacturer wouldn’t take bought-this-to-rent-it returns back as defectives. And we didn’t really have the means to test them anyway. So we’d say it was defective because the customer said it was, but then we couldn’t prove it really was, and a bunch of the time they just wouldn’t give us our money back and we were screwed.
Anyway this thing had a post-it on it that said “bad gimbal”. My coworker said, “Are you busy? Can you just… find out if it’s really a bad gimbal, or whatever? We’re going to have to sell the thing as-is on eBay or something and hope we can recoup some of the cost, because we can’t send it back and it’s old now, and knowing what’s actually wrong would let us sell it for a much more precise amount of money to someone who’s less likely to return it.”
(For us, who largely eke out our continued existence on a combo of in-store printing and services, and online sales of used equipment, because new electronics don’t turn a profit, “sell as-is on eBay” is a kind of purgatory. It’s a great way to get rid of junk, but it’s also a great way to have to sell something super-valuable-if-repaired for basically the cost of shipping and fees and if you’re lucky there’s some left over to pay you for the time you spent testing it, taking photos of it, and putting it into the box, which doesn’t really keep the lights on long-term, y’know? It’s also a great way to wind up having to pay return shipping on something worthless until you’re entirely underwater on the sale, if you can’t get the description just right. My coworker has been eBaying shit since 1999 so he’s got this down to a science.)
So… I got this drone out of the box. I screwed the propellors onto it. I checked the battery levels. Dead. So I charged the battery, and I charged the remote controller battery. I discovered that the remote control antenna was broken but could be reattached. I went through the enclosed papers and discovered that the manual was missing, as was part of the charging cable, though enough was there that I could cobble together spare parts.
I also discovered that whoever’d rented it had left a 32GB MicroSD card in it. Ehhhhh, not bad. It’s missing a prop blade, though it does come with spares so it’s usable as-is, and one of the existing blades is discolored and scratched, and there are some scratches on the chassis. It was clearly crashed, though not severely.
Ill-advisedly, not really understanding what was going on, I did try to make it take off indoors– it says it’ll go to 3.9 feet and hover, what’s the harm there? Fortunately for me it didn’t work, so I had to find the manual online and read it and not understand it and then watch some incredibly boring videos that did not explain anything very well at all and spent way too long with a guy acting like my 5yo niece with a front-facing camera, clearly looking at himself and enjoying talking. Eyeroll.
I did absorb a few things through sheer osmosis, and the number one thing I figured out was that it needed a firmware update before it would even deign to move the propellers. So I did that, and then it was time to go home, so I took it home to keep working on it, because at least I’d gotten the memo that making this thing take off indoors was a Bad Idea.
So I got it home, and figured out how to get the propellors back on, got it all configured, and then I was on my back porch which has a sloped ten-foot ceiling, and I figured, ok, I’ll get it to hover for a second.
BAD IDEA. It says it’ll go to 3.9 feet and then maintain position. It got to about eight before I leapt and grabbed it, not knowing what else to do; it was gonna go straight through the ceiling. Now, one of the things I’d read had even said, its margin of error is about twelve feet, so you can’t be anywhere that twelve feet matters, and I did not even think that would apply at a stationary hover, but oh boy does it.
So I panicked and threw it out the door, and it bobbled wildly around my backyard and I frantically stabbed the “LAND NOW” button on the app, and it did not, and did not, and did not, and I had to grab it again when it headed for the powerlines, but then it did settle into a landing configuration, drifted straight into a plant, I had to poke it, it landed and then freaked out at me because the grass was touching the camera gimbal.
Anyone who has ever used one of these things is surely laughing their ass off at me, but listen, I don’t think in vertical ways. I thought, “my porch has a ton of room”, and then I also thought, “my backyard super has room”, and then I looked up and there is a crisscross of powerlines covering my entire yard in a tight grid at about ten feet of height. And the “hover at 3.9 feet” function means ten feet at a wild bobble. These fuckers aren’t like. I mean. They’re precise but they’re flying, flying isn’t that precise, there’s wind.
I acquired a great little war wound in this process– my left forearm clearly contacted a propeller at some point, and it ripped out two chunks of skin and bruised me all the way down to the muscle. I had to put a gauze pad over it and then an icepack over that, it was very nostalgic; I’m no longer at a point in my life where I routinely bruise the absolute fuck out of myself on the regular anymore, but I was recently enough that I still have a fridge full of ice packs. (Ten years of roller derby, baby, and fencing before that, and as a kid it was horses. I absolutely know when to ice it and how many days until it turns black. I’m thinking this one is going to be max impressive about Wednesday. I’ll have to make a point to freak someone out with it.)
So. I brought it back to work and took it out into the vacant lot by the parking lot, with a freshly printed-out copy of the user’s manual that I’d done my best to read. (When I was twenty, I could’ve read this, but at thirty-nine I cannot comprehend a fucking paragraph, this is the sheer hell of undiagnosed female ADHD of the distraction subtype, I am unable to digest technical manuals at all anymore and it’s frustrating as fuck. I have to try to do it before I can begin to understand the instructions, and that works better when it’s not a flying death machine that will end us all.)
I got it to take off and hover at “three point nine” (10) feet, and I got it to turn around, I got it to move left and right and forward and backwards, I got it to take a video and several stills (I can’t get the video to transfer to my phone, but I did watch it, and it’s hilarious, I look enormously lumpy and confused and stare at the drone a lot as it gyrates in the parking lot, and someone drives by slow behind me that I didn’t notice and is clearly like “what is that woman’s problem and is that a flying leafblower?”). And then I got it to land, which is the part I was worried about, so. Clearly the controller works, the app works, the gimbal works, it reads a memory card. Whoever rented it had just dinged it up and was miffed and wanted to send it back. (Or, y’know, the event they wanted it for was over and so they were done with their fee-free rental, because they’re big fucking mooches. Eyeroll.)
So.
The one thing I can’t figure out how to do is to get it to change altitude. There’s got to be a control for that but I have no idea what it is. The only way I got it to go up or down is with the auto take off and auto land functions. So I’ll have to reread. (The one video showed how to do a manual takeoff but that was the most boring one and I cannot make myself watch that man stare at himself admiringly in the camera any more.)
I’m going to take it to the farm this week, to test it more, but we all know this is because I am going to buy it, and my coworker is going to sell it to me for as little as his conscience will let him. So we’ll see.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-08 03:10 pm (UTC)He did eventually master the art of having it go straight up and then hover at a decent height, and got some interesting pictures that way. But directional flying- no.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-08 05:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-08 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-09 02:21 am (UTC)Also I wish I could see the reactions of your family/friends/coworkers when you show them your battle scars and explain they're from being savaged by a rogue drone. :D