Blogs

3D Robotics

AR.Drone nominated for "Makey Award" for ease of repair

Posted by Chris Anderson on July 18, 2011 at 10:33am

3689381229?profile=original

From Makezine:

The Parrot.AR drone is manifold awesome. And on top of it all, the December Parrot.AR drone teardown on iFixIt saw one of the highest repairability scores that our pals over there have ever awarded. They cite the Parrot.AR’s repair-friendly design, the use of easily demountable fasteners, connectors, and subassemblies, and great repair support from Parrot itself, including readily available replacement parts and a series of how-to-fix it videos on the Parrot.AR site. And while a certain amount of repair-friendly design is just common sense in any R/C aircraft, common sense is not always so common, and even in the R/C market Parrot’s repairability still goes above and beyond the norm.

So congratulations, Parrot! Welcome to the running for the 2011 Makeys.


I hadn't realized that Parrot offered so many spare parts. I've got two dead AR.Drones, so maybe this is my chance to fix them.
E-mail me when people leave their comments –
Follow

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Comments

  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson July 30, 2011 at 10:53am

    Update: I got a new motor for the AR.Drone (at a cost of $40), which fixed my problem just long enough for it to fly three times for a few seconds, crash and now it has another fatal hardware problem ("motors emergency"). This thing is incredibly fragile and although you can repair it, you need to do so constantly and it's very expensive. I've now got two dead AR.Drones and I'm through with them. No more toys for me.

  • Dinos July 19, 2011 at 1:23pm

    @Hai Tran

    i agree with you!

  • Moderator
    Hai Tran July 19, 2011 at 2:25am
    Would be nice if I could use the stablise program and optical flow from the AR.Drone on my AC2.
  • liululu July 18, 2011 at 9:35pm

    AR.Drone axis will be in the end diy

     

    http://bbs.5imx.com/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=415063&extra=page%3D...

  • Dimitar Kolev July 18, 2011 at 1:26pm

    Standard spare parts and even instruments are great idea, but... sometimes order a new drone or working second hand one is much cheaper than spare parts.

    have 4 ar.drones.

    First serious crash after quite some time - splited camera nose and de-glued lens, but no-problem to fly it again, with shorter camera nose :-) Broken motor magnet - new replacement motor was fast, relatively cheap and good solution.

    Second serious crash - crushed central cross, and cross brake motherboard in very nasty way (nothing visible, but seems like internal layers or BGA contacting here and there). In result - a lot of spare parts for the other three drones.

  • Distributor
    Dany Thivierge July 18, 2011 at 10:55am

    or send me one ;) 

     

    nice to see a such modular approach from a "non-DIY" product

    I can imagine how it become after a year of beating.. full of duct tape, epoxy glue, zip tie.. hehe then replaced by a proper DIYdrone frame and all  :) 

     

    still a nice entry product. 

This reply was deleted.