Confession: My DJI Drone Defeated Me
I am not a real geek; I can pretend geek pretty well. But I usually end up feeling lost and confused if I try something technical. Buying…
I am not a real geek; I can pretend geek pretty well. But I usually end up feeling lost and confused if I try something technical. Buying and flying a drone is definitely “something technical”.
My partner, who is a geek (see below), told me to buy a cheap drone first to see how it worked. I bought a SYMA X5C-W 4CH 2.4G Quadcopter with Camera for $50.45 from Amazon. I flew it around my living room in San Francisco. Got it to hover, go left and right, land. Couldn’t figure out how to turn it around and fly backwards (which is what my brain was thinking). But I figured I was ready for prime time!
I took my DJI Phantom 3 Professional ($1,395 with an extra battery) for a two week stay in New Mexico, where I figured there was more room to fly around without bumping into people or things. Two weeks later, I still haven’t successfully launched the thing in my backyard. I lost the war with my drone.
I was doing pretty well, all things considered. I watched all three pre-flight videos (Todd is very handsome and re-assuring) and, just before my first attempt to fly, the “How To Fly” video. But the very first thing that happened when I got everything set up was to be told the firmware needed to be upgraded! There are three firmwares in a DJI Phantom: the aircraft (as it is called), the battery, and the remote controller.
See all the parts for the drone? You have to bring your own tablet to act as the controller! And the coffee helps a lot.
I’ve been trying “something technical” since I set up my first Apple II+ in my dining room in 1980. When I finally figured out how to update the firmwares in the aircraft and the battery, I recognized the same stuff I had to learn 35 years ago! You need to download a file, put it on an SD card (which is part of the aircraft’s camera!), and then do some mumbo jumbo and hope to Geek God that it works. In the case of the DJI, there is nothing automatic or intuitive about the experience.
But I was proud of myself! I persisted and got the battery and aircraft updated. Updating the remote control (the thing with the joysticks that lets you pilot the drone) was a different process. When I initiated the update, the remote control started beeping wildly; I panicked and turned it off. THAT was The Wrong Thing To Do. I quote from the instructions: “d. Power on the remote controller and wait 60 seconds until the upgrade begins. Do not power off the remote controller during the update.”
I missed that part of the instructions, since I was instinctively reacting to a loud beeping sound as a warning or problem sound. Question: What company would use an audio signal of a loud, rapid beeping sound as confirmation that the update process is going well? Answer: A Chinese drone company.
I’ve spent the last two hours trying to figure out if there is a way to get my remote controller to (as the geeks say) re-initiate the update process. But it just stares at me quietly, with a solid blue status light. I think I’ve done what is called “bricking the rc”; in other words, my remote controller is now useless (a brick) and I must somehow communicate with DJI to repair it or replace it.
DJI is a company that is happy to sell you stuff (in an interesting logical twist, the app that flies the drone actually dedicates a lot of its function to helping you buy another drone), but really doesn’t want to hear from you after the sale, particularly if it’s a Saturday in New Mexico. So I am defeated. I am packing the DJI Phantom 3 Professional back up and will lug it back to San Francisco to see if my partner can do better with it… Of course, he already figured out how to fly his Parrot drone while wearing his cinema glasses so he could take a photo of himself flying the drone from the drone. Life is tough when your partner is a real geek.