5 ms·

That is nice, but there is still intentionally misleading marketing fluff like this: >Each rechargeable battery allows you to capture content for 5-8 flights,

by slg 5y ago

That is nice, but there is still intentionally misleading marketing fluff like this: >Each rechargeable battery allows you to capture content for 5-8 flights, depending on the flight mode(s) selected. Rechargeable batteries can be swapped for easy use... Why phrase it like that? That gives zero impression of what the actual battery life is because I have no idea what a "flight" means as a unit of measurement. Just tell us how much time it lasts.

natural219 5y ago
I don’t fault them for this specifically. IIRC the 30 minute airtime standard is some kind of FAA regulation; it’s not a differentiator one way or another between drone products.
- jhugo 5y ago
  This drone will definitely get nowhere near 30 minutes.
bushbaba 5y ago
I have no idea on how many minutes it takes to get a photo. I personally like their metric choice.
- slg 5y ago
  I'm not sure that I follow what you are saying. Are you suggesting the expectation is that each flight yields one photo? It takes milliseconds not minutes to take a photo. I would expect this thing to be taking photos nearly continuously during flight which would make flight time the most informative metric.
  - MegaButts 5y ago
    I don't think you're their target demographic.
    - slg 5y ago
      Asking for clarification on battery life means I'm not their target demo? That is rather condescending to their customers. Battery life seems like a basic thing someone might want to know before spending a few hundred bucks on something like this.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - serf 5y ago
        >Asking for clarification on battery life means I'm not their target demo? I agree that it's condescending, but it's also obvious to me that there is a growing market trend to sell to a class of people that simply buy the Next Big Thing without ever learning about it, using it, or questioning the motivations behind it. In a way that's a great group to capitalize on, they may lack the education or desire to ask the tough questions, they don't actually use the product so you don't really need to support them well, and they tend to buy oriented strongly with advertisement. When I see a technical product marketed this way -- bright colors, flashy every-person advertisement, zero-training-required, no real technical specs -- I always imagine that it's in that class of product. Sort of the opposite of 'prosumer' classed product. A titch bit more useful than a Funko Pop doll until The Next Next Big Thing is released by BigCo , the firmware gets dated, the batteries die and remain unreplacable due to a lack of support for The Old Big Thing, and then BigCo drops software support due to trying to shove people into the new model, and then it becomes under-bed trash with a dangerous LiPo in it.
      - delabay 5y ago
        > Asking for clarification on battery life means I'm not their target demo? Precisely
    - mitchdoogle 5y ago
      What is this supposed to mean? "Flights" is a bad metric if they don't define it. Whatever your age, gender, income, it doesn't change that it's meaningless.
  - qq66 5y ago
    Their target market measures the value of this thing in number of Snapchat Stories it can create so really the flights does make more sense. Their target market isn't going to want to divide 3 minutes by 20 seconds.
maaaaattttt 5y ago
They're probably too ashamed of the actual value in minutes... Reminds me of some internal corporate presentations: when the numbers are good they show percentage increase and when they're bad the show absolute values, and when they're really bad they "forget" to give the time range of that absolute value...
laptop-man 5y ago
I fly FPV drones, I have one very similar to that size. running a 1s 300mah lihv I get about 3 to 5 minutes. 5 minutes damages the battery. but the tiny lihv never liv long enough anyways. I'd expect it to get close to that time, but it has so much more plastic around it. but then again it's not transmitting video.
- slg 5y ago
  That matches with the estimate in another comment chain[1]. That is low enough that listing it will likely be off-putting to many potential customers. It is why I think it is misleading to try to hide that number with a more opaque metric. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31195956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31195956
- mrfusion 5y ago
  Can you recommend a good starter FPV drone?
  - saidinesh5 5y ago
    The standard advice is: Buy a transmitter and practise for like 5-10 hours in the simulator before pulling the trigger on a real one. Radiomaster Zorro, Jumper T-Pro, TBS Mambo are some good ones. Go directly for ExpressLRS/TBS Tracer long range protocols so you wont have to worry about your quad falling out of sky because of range issues. If you want something that is more "ready to fly" (goggles, quadcopter, transmitter combo) You do have more choices these days: 1) On the more expensive end - You have DJI FPV combo [1]. Is supposedly very beginner friendly. https://store.dji.com/product/dji-fpv?vid=101601 https://store.dji.com/product/dji-fpv?vid=101601 2) On the low end - Something like this https://www.getfpv.com/emax-tinyhawk-ii-freestyle-micro-brushless-fpv-drone-rtf-bundle.html https://www.getfpv.com/emax-tinyhawk-ii-freestyle-micro-brus... The problem with these ready to fly combos - especially on the low end (analog video) is that, you end up getting very toy like transmitter and goggles, that wont be of much use for you once you want to buy/build more quadcopters. So I highly recommend getting the transmitter and goggles separately.
qq66 5y ago
The default flight is 30 seconds.
bastawhiz 5y ago
If you're using this for Snap, one "flight" is actually a pretty reasonable time unit. Snapchat videos can be a maximum of one minute.
bigiain 5y ago
So far as I can tell there are no real spec numbers anywhere. No video size/framerate/resolultion specs I could find (admittedly I only spent 1 or 2 mins clicking around looking for them). Which kinda indicates the target market they're gonna aim this at. This is for people who want to know "Can I upload the video to Snapchat?" not for people who are wondering "Is this 1080p? Or 720? Surely it can't be 4k?"
- newaccount74 5y ago
  I prefer sample videos to specs, because specs are pretty much worthless. The 2021 Macbook Pro has a 1080p camera, but the actual quality is worse than the 720p camera in the 2015 Macbook Pro. The website has some sample videos, and you can tell the quality is very poor compared to pro drones, but definitely good enough to share with friends and family.
- pavlus 5y ago
  There are if you follow "Pixie Support" link in the footer, here are the specs you were looking for: Images Standard: 4000 x 3000 (12MP) Video Default: 2.7k Frame rate: Up to 30 FPS https://support.pixy.com/hc/en-us/articles/5039928089236-Pixy-Tech-Specs https://support.pixy.com/hc/en-us/articles/5039928089236-Pix...

by slg 5y ago

natural219 5y ago

I don’t fault them for this specifically. IIRC the 30 minute airtime standard is some kind of FAA regulation; it’s not a differentiator one way or another between drone products.

jhugo 5y ago
This drone will definitely get nowhere near 30 minutes.

bushbaba 5y ago

I have no idea on how many minutes it takes to get a photo. I personally like their metric choice.

slg 5y ago
I'm not sure that I follow what you are saying. Are you suggesting the expectation is that each flight yields one photo? It takes milliseconds not minutes to take a photo. I would expect this thing to be taking photos nearly continuously during flight which would make flight time the most informative metric.
- MegaButts 5y ago
  I don't think you're their target demographic.
  - slg 5y ago
    Asking for clarification on battery life means I'm not their target demo? That is rather condescending to their customers. Battery life seems like a basic thing someone might want to know before spending a few hundred bucks on something like this.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - serf 5y ago
      >Asking for clarification on battery life means I'm not their target demo? I agree that it's condescending, but it's also obvious to me that there is a growing market trend to sell to a class of people that simply buy the Next Big Thing without ever learning about it, using it, or questioning the motivations behind it. In a way that's a great group to capitalize on, they may lack the education or desire to ask the tough questions, they don't actually use the product so you don't really need to support them well, and they tend to buy oriented strongly with advertisement. When I see a technical product marketed this way -- bright colors, flashy every-person advertisement, zero-training-required, no real technical specs -- I always imagine that it's in that class of product. Sort of the opposite of 'prosumer' classed product. A titch bit more useful than a Funko Pop doll until The Next Next Big Thing is released by BigCo , the firmware gets dated, the batteries die and remain unreplacable due to a lack of support for The Old Big Thing, and then BigCo drops software support due to trying to shove people into the new model, and then it becomes under-bed trash with a dangerous LiPo in it.
    - delabay 5y ago
      > Asking for clarification on battery life means I'm not their target demo? Precisely
  - mitchdoogle 5y ago
    What is this supposed to mean? "Flights" is a bad metric if they don't define it. Whatever your age, gender, income, it doesn't change that it's meaningless.
- qq66 5y ago
  Their target market measures the value of this thing in number of Snapchat Stories it can create so really the flights does make more sense. Their target market isn't going to want to divide 3 minutes by 20 seconds.

maaaaattttt 5y ago

They're probably too ashamed of the actual value in minutes... Reminds me of some internal corporate presentations: when the numbers are good they show percentage increase and when they're bad the show absolute values, and when they're really bad they "forget" to give the time range of that absolute value...

laptop-man 5y ago

I fly FPV drones, I have one very similar to that size. running a 1s 300mah lihv I get about 3 to 5 minutes. 5 minutes damages the battery. but the tiny lihv never liv long enough anyways. I'd expect it to get close to that time, but it has so much more plastic around it. but then again it's not transmitting video.

slg 5y ago
That matches with the estimate in another comment chain[1]. That is low enough that listing it will likely be off-putting to many potential customers. It is why I think it is misleading to try to hide that number with a more opaque metric. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31195956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31195956
mrfusion 5y ago
Can you recommend a good starter FPV drone?
- saidinesh5 5y ago
  The standard advice is: Buy a transmitter and practise for like 5-10 hours in the simulator before pulling the trigger on a real one. Radiomaster Zorro, Jumper T-Pro, TBS Mambo are some good ones. Go directly for ExpressLRS/TBS Tracer long range protocols so you wont have to worry about your quad falling out of sky because of range issues. If you want something that is more "ready to fly" (goggles, quadcopter, transmitter combo) You do have more choices these days: 1) On the more expensive end - You have DJI FPV combo [1]. Is supposedly very beginner friendly. https://store.dji.com/product/dji-fpv?vid=101601 https://store.dji.com/product/dji-fpv?vid=101601 2) On the low end - Something like this https://www.getfpv.com/emax-tinyhawk-ii-freestyle-micro-brushless-fpv-drone-rtf-bundle.html https://www.getfpv.com/emax-tinyhawk-ii-freestyle-micro-brus... The problem with these ready to fly combos - especially on the low end (analog video) is that, you end up getting very toy like transmitter and goggles, that wont be of much use for you once you want to buy/build more quadcopters. So I highly recommend getting the transmitter and goggles separately.

qq66 5y ago

The default flight is 30 seconds.

bastawhiz 5y ago

If you're using this for Snap, one "flight" is actually a pretty reasonable time unit. Snapchat videos can be a maximum of one minute.

bigiain 5y ago

So far as I can tell there are no real spec numbers anywhere. No video size/framerate/resolultion specs I could find (admittedly I only spent 1 or 2 mins clicking around looking for them). Which kinda indicates the target market they're gonna aim this at. This is for people who want to know "Can I upload the video to Snapchat?" not for people who are wondering "Is this 1080p? Or 720? Surely it can't be 4k?"

newaccount74 5y ago
I prefer sample videos to specs, because specs are pretty much worthless. The 2021 Macbook Pro has a 1080p camera, but the actual quality is worse than the 720p camera in the 2015 Macbook Pro. The website has some sample videos, and you can tell the quality is very poor compared to pro drones, but definitely good enough to share with friends and family.
pavlus 5y ago
There are if you follow "Pixie Support" link in the footer, here are the specs you were looking for: Images Standard: 4000 x 3000 (12MP) Video Default: 2.7k Frame rate: Up to 30 FPS https://support.pixy.com/hc/en-us/articles/5039928089236-Pixy-Tech-Specs https://support.pixy.com/hc/en-us/articles/5039928089236-Pix...