FQA's

Drones are unmanned aerial vehicles (typically configured as quadcopters). To keep drones stable, they have on-board flight controllers capable of measuring movement, and giving feedback to the motor controllers (ESCs). Controlling the speed of each motor is what allows drones to fly in virtually any direction. For example, to move up, all the rotors spin faster creating more lift, but to move right, the left rotors spin faster and the right rotors spin slower causing the drone to tilt to the right. Once the drone is tilted to the right, some of the downward thrust is directed to the left. When a drone is hovering at an angle, it will drift in the direction that tilts in. To rotate a drone, half of the rotors spin faster and the other half spin slower. This only works because half of the rotors are spinning clockwise and the other half are spinning counterclockwise to create a torque force.

Drones have many uses, but most people use them as flying cameras. You can capture amazing videos and photos thanks to the advances in camera quality and the invention of brushless camera gimbals. Drones are also used for many industrial applications such as: search and rescue missions, fire fighting, police operations, wildlife monitoring, crop surveying, crop dusting, structure inspections, 3D map generation, professional video production, controllable lighting, signal repeating, and communication.

Every few weeks someone finds a new use for drones. In the future Amazon and others plan on using drones for delivering small packages. Unfortunately, drone delivery is still many years away, but as the drone industry grows, so will the advancements in drone technology.

Every drone has a different control range. Most toy drones can go about 40 feet  to 300 feet. Camera drones are able to reach distances of over 4 miles, and airplane drones can fly even further. The biggest limitation for a drone with a quadcopter like design is battery life. Even with a consumer drone like the Phantom 4, if there’s no interference, you will run out of battery long before the drone loses its connection. We’ve flown Phantom 4 as far as 4 miles away before needing to return home.

Toy drones are limited by radio signal strength and therefore can’t go higher than around 300 feet or less. Camera drones (specifically drones from DJI) are capable of flying up to 1500 feet above the takeoff point, however the legal height limit for drones in the USA is 400 feet. If you are in a county where you can go higher, some drones (mainly drones with wings can reach heights of 10,000 feet and higher.

There are many different kinds of drones available today. The typical cost for a toy drone ranges from about $20 to $250. Camera Drones start at around $300 and go up from there. The DJI Mavic Pro (the best drone we’ve tested) retails for just under $1,000. Professional drone users will spend tens of thousands of dollars to get the best image quality and flight time.

Right now, you can get a toy drone for less than $15. The cheapest toy drone that we recommend is the EACHINE E010 Mini UFO for $21.99 or less. This is the cheapest drone you can comfortably buy without having too many reliability issues. It also has the best reviews out of all the products in the $20 price range.

For kids 8 and under, we recommend the EACHINE E010 Mini. It’s small, the propellers are protected for added safety, and it’s only $21.99 which is almost disposable! For kids over 8 years old, there are many different toy drones to choose from, but we think the Parrot Mambo and Mambo FPV are the best choice, especially for education. With the Mambo, you get a versatile, easy to fly, Lego compatible, wifi controlled drone that you can learn to program on using Parrot’s SDK, Apple’s Swift programming language, or Tynker, a programming environment made for kids.

Unfortunately, a good drone is going to cost you good money. Drones with cameras have a lot of expensive technology inside of them which drives the manufacturing cost up. The Phantom 4 Pro is a drone with 7 individual cameras, two IR sensors, two compasses, two gyros, two accelerometers, Barometric Pressure Sensor, GPS/GLONASS receiver, 2.4Ghz and 5.8Ghz two way transceivers. Every component has some kind of computer attached to it. The motor controllers, power distribution board, flight controller, and even the battery have built in micro controllers that run low level tasks, like controlling the speed of a motor, or monitoring battery voltage.

On top of all this, there’s also a quad core 1.5Ghz Cortex A7 processor with 1GB of RAM and an MA2100A Vision Processor for running machine learning algorithms. Usually, you will find more technology packed into the average camera drone than most smartphones.

There are 8 different factors that determine how each drone is rated. We rate each drone based on product quality, camera quality (for the drones with cameras), ease-of-use, flight time, speed, range, flight autonomy, and portability. Once each category is rated, the main number is generated from the average of all the individual categories.

These ratings are not something you should overlook. They are all based on real factors and can be used to help you decide which drone is right for your needs. Just because a drone is high or low on the list, the categories that are most important to you are ultimately what will determine the drone you decide on.

Product quality is how well the product was built. We take into account things like how hard it was to manufacture each drone, how well the software works, and if there are any cheaply made components.

Camera quality is hard to rate, but we think we’ve come up with a good number based on the look of the image each drone is able to produce, the sensor size, the shooting resolutions, and whether or not the drone has additional features like changeable lenses or ND filters. This is a very important rating to look at. With all of the factors we take into consideration in this category, you can be sure that the drone with the best rating will indeed have the best camera onboard.

Ease of use is another complicated thing to rate. Things like software, initial setup, safety features, and how long it takes to get it flying are the main factors we look at here.

Flight time is simply how long the drone can stay in the air compared to the others on the list. These numbers are based on the maximum flight time each drone can achieve.

Speed is how fast each drone can go, but also how agile it is in the air.

Range is how far each drone can go in a low interference environment. We don’t take into account if the battery of each drone is capable of reaching these distances, because that will depend on each individual situation.

Flight Autonomy is more than just obstacle avoidance. We look at the basics first. Things like whether or not the drone has self leveling capabilities, GPS, or return-to-home features are obvious on the camera drones, but for the toy and racing drones, you will see that they get lower ratings for not having these features. We also look at things like obstacle avoidance, visual tracking, sensor redundancy and more.

Portability may not be important to you, or it could be one of the only things you care about, so that’s why we included it. Drones like the Inspire 2 will get a lower overall rating because of how large they are.