I wanted to inspect the chimney on the roof with a drone and thus fell prey to the Drone-X Pro scam. I trusted a YouTube ad without doing research, and paid $100 for a $25 drone. Now that I have this Eachine E58 (the only thing missing is the brand name on the controller), could I make the best of it? Nope. Failure.
The camera is only 2 megapixels, can only be seen through an app, and flight time is given as 7 minutes. Reviews note that even the slightest breeze will take it out of range. On mine, I had a common problem of the wifi connecting to my phone, but I could not work the controller or see video. The E58 apparently does not work with all phones. Review: dronedeliver.uk.
wifi - piloting - video - app
These four are tied together because the drone controller has no video screen. Suppose I wanted to inspect my roof. As the drone passes from my direct line of sight, I can no longer see where the drone is going, and I lose the ability to pilot the aircraft. This is remedied by a complicated solution with several possible failure points
- the manufacturer inserted a wifi transceiver into the drone; it appears as a hotspot to wifi systems
- users connect their cellphone to the hotspot using whatever wifi functionality is present in the phone
- after connecting, users open a pre-downloaded app to view through the drone's video camera and pilot the craft
...and don't forget Google Play needs port 5228.
failure
My Droid Turbo connected to WiFi, but with a warning that I had no Internet connection, thus I think (just a guess) disabling the http transport necessary for viewing the video. The drone app noted that I needed to "connect" in spite of the phone showing I was wi-fi connected, as noted
Following my hunch, I went to this site and learned that I could potentially enable http transport on a phone which normally doesn't do so with non-internet LANS, however I would have to root my phone, which I didn't want to do.
sd video
Video is supposedly saved onto a micro SD, viewable after flight. However, the apps could never connect to the drone, and the hand controller had no function to start video recording. It appears that the video recording was never initialized in the drone -- there was no video on the SD card after the device was flown.
aftermath
I'll give the drone away to one of my friends who has a compatible cell phone, for $10 and a chimney inspection. It appears compatible means phones allowing HTTP transport on wifi connections, even when on a local LAN without DNS, eg mDNS.
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