[bsamuels]

Soon the FAA is going to require a knowledge test for recreational flyers to fly UAS heavier than 250g.

The part 107 commercial UAS exam that already exists requires a lot of studying and costs $150 to take, and this falls on the easy end of your typical FAA exam.

DJI is hedging that the recreational flyer test is going to be a massive barrier for recreational pilots, which is why they're pushing a <250g UAS into the market.

[dogma1138]

Just to make a note it seems that this one has two types of batteries one that weights 50g and one that weights 100g.

If you use the heavy battery you go over 249g I’m also not sure if their flight stats were measured with the heavy one or the light one I’ll bet that they are with the 100g battery.

This means that under most conditions you’ll likely have 8-10min of flight time with the light battery since the advertised max flight time is often 30-50% over real world scenarios with these drones.

[bilbo0s]

Also, I imagine flight characteristics will change dramatically with a 100g battery. Heavier payload, same motors, doesn't bode well. May as well get a real drone rather than use the 100g battery.

But for toy drones, the 50g battery is fine. Especially since that pack lets you carry 3 of them. Plus I'm sure the next generation will be lighter still with still greater flight time. And the generation after that. Etc.

Future seems pretty bright for these "family pictures" type drones. But they aren't competitive with the big boys for certain use cases right now.

[dogma1138]

Eh I’m not sure they’ll be lighter look at mobile phones they aren’t getting lighter...

Battery technology is maxed out currently, plastics and composites aren’t going to change much...

Not much weight shedding to be done here my bet is that they’ll add more collision sensors as they become cheaper but not much else they can do.

They shouldn’t add any weight and you’ll offset their weight with the removal of the material from the chassis.

As for the flight characteristics I’m pretty sure they did everything with the heavier battery you go from 18W to 8W in exchange for losing 50g which is only 16% reduction in weight form 299 to 249.

If anything the loophole battery would perform considerably worse given the power output of the cell compared to the full one.

It also looks like the S mode isn’t available for the smaller battery I have a feeling that once reviews will start popping out the FAA approved config will be called gimp mode.