It also means that the company can sell various bundles that include different mixes of parts. For one, they can keep making more smart block accessories, so owners of this drone can get more and more mileage out of it. Thanks to this modular mount point, Parrot have given themselves two marketing options for the Mambo. One accessory let’s the Mambo fire soft projectiles, another gives it a (bottom-mounted) grabber claw so that it can transport small objections. These are mostly just fun and not really useful. You can buy various accessories that give the drone extra abilities. Parrot have given the Mambo a quick connection mount on the hull. Which brings us to the Mambo’s most interesting feature: smart blocks . Still the hundred-ish dollars that you spend on the Mambo Fly just needs half-again as much to turn it into a precision traditional quadcopter.įor a beginner multirotor it’s very modular. The base model does not come with a dedicated controller, but rather is meant for smartphone control from the get go. Possibly saving your drone from serious damage. It also has other intelligent features, such as a crash-detection system that will cut our the motors.
You can take full manual control, but it has an ever-vigilant autopilot system that ensures that as soon as you let go of the sticks the drone stays put . The Mambo is a minidrone that’s built around the idea of flight ease. The Mambo FPV drone is based on the standard Mambo Fly drone. Which is why I’m happy to discover that their latest off-beat drone may actually be of interest to FPV enthusiasts and people who have a more casual interest in it. So although they aren’t a mainstream drone darling, I have a real appreciation for the company’s products and philosophy. Drones like the Rolling Spider and Jumping Sumo are unique, well-made and loads of fun.
The company has however released a series of affordable and creative drones. Since then I can’t honestly say that Parrot have set the world of drones one fire.
It’s actually pretty mind-blowing that Parrot put out a machine that not only flew via smartphone WiFi and had elements of augmented reality.Ĭompared to the typical camera drone from the like of DJI these days, the original Parrot AR drone seems woefully primitive.
Parrot entered the drone business seven years ago, with the launch of the original Parrot AR Drone. That is, perhaps, until now with the release of the Parrot Mambo FPV. There’s really been a quality choice of FPV drone that straddles the line between toy and more serious photographic models. You have the high-end FPV flight experiences and then these low-end, grainy, “just for fun” products. There hasn’t been a lot of middle ground though. This makes it cheap and easy to get into FPV without spending additional money on specialist FPB gear. The ubiquity of smartphones and cheap VR headsets has certainly had something to do with it. Even having an onboard camera was a massive (and expensive) luxury, but having one that transmits video in real time to a screen or headset was by far the coolest thing I’d seen.įast forward to the present day and even cheap $50 drones come equipped with WiFi FPV abilities.
When I first started flying RC helicopters, I was always jealous of the guys with FPV setups.