Hardware Showcase: Tello

The Tello is a very small (80g), very cheap (80CHF) camera drone.

Backstory

I’ve had drones for a long time—maybe ten years.

Along with VR and 3D printing, drones fall for me into the “living in the future” category—they’re tech that was fun to imagine, and now you can actually buy it.

So I did: I had a few Nano QX drones from Horizon. They were cheap even back then, around 120CHF if I remember correctly, and they now seem to sell for about 80CHF. They were fun: reasonably easy to control, very nimble, a lot of fun to fly. I used to take them into the office and we’d take turns to fly them in a basement corridor adjacent to the underground parking lot.

Nano QX

Much later my kids got to have a go, which was also fun; but the drones are a bit delicate, it’s easy to damage the propellors if they snag on something, so we didn’t do it a lot.

Recently my son started asking for a camera drone; to which my response was: no, they’re too expensive and delicate, you would need to be much better at flying the drone we have first.

Update

So, we did get the drones out and have a go; and I discovered that most of the batteries have in the meantime given up the ghost. And, the drones were more damaged than I remembered.

Well, I thought, maybe the march of technology and consumerism has lowered prices a bit, let’s take a look.

And to my surprise, 80CHF now buys a camera drone, the Tello, and it has pretty good reviews. So, we got one.

Experience

Actually I spent a little more than 80CHF and got the bundle with two spare batteries; one battery lasts ten minutes which I predicted would be too little with three of us—my daughter, too—interested in flying it.

Here it is:

Tello

By weight it’s nearly four times as big as the QX Nano, which is only 22 grams. It shows; and the battery it carries is much bigger.

Controls

The Tello is controlled via smartphone; when the drone is switched on it sets up a wifi network that you join, and then the purpose-made app connects to the drone via that and starts receiving video.

Smartphone control is a step down from what I was used to with the Nano QX. The Nano uses standard model plane/drone radio control, which means you can use it with a high quality (not bundled) controller—and I did, I used the Spektrum DX6i. It works very well and gives very fine control, finer that I ever actually learned to use. The Tello smartphone app is clumsy in comparison, with dual control sticks modelled on screen like in a game. You can also use a bluetooth gamepad—but that would not be as good, either, unless the controller is made for realistic flight sims.

Spektrum DX6i

What saves the Tello is that is is smarter.

The Nano self-calibrates when you switch it on, so it can stay level and approximately stay still; but it has no sensory capability whatsoever, so it’s entirely up to you to balance the inputs to keep it level and still. It requires actual work to pilot.

The Tello has a downward facing sensor—some kind of camera, although not one that takes useful pictures—that can track its actual movement relative to the ground. Using this, the Tello can do what you want a drone to do while idling: it can hover without moving.

As a result the Tello is easier to fly and quite a lot more kid-friendly than the Nano.

Camera

The camera does the job; the video is not stored on the drone, it’s directly streamed, which makes sense but does mean the quality can be impaired if the connection is unreliable. The quality is not great but it’s good enough.

Drone Shot

This is downscaled a bit; the camera claims to be 5 megapixels and I suppose it technically is, but they are not especially well used megapixels. Anyway, it’s plenty for fun shots, I look forward to seeing what we can see from way up above our next hikes.

Other

The app has a few flight tricks: the drone can “bounce” between two fixed heights about the ground; it can do flips; it can take a “360 degree” video by rotating slowly while otherwise stationary; and a few others. These work well.

There are a few third party apps: one that claims to be a better version of the official app, and one that causes the drone to follow you as you walk. And, apparently the drone is programmable in various ways.

The manufacturers claim 13 minutes of flight time on one charge; various sources suggest “actual flight time” of 8-10 minutes, and that you could increase that by a few minutes by removing the propellor guards. With two spare batteries, this is a pretty good chunk of flight time. The batteries charger needs a USB micro connector, so you could take a larger USB battery to recharge the spares on the go.

Follow Mode

We tried the third party app, “TelloMe”, and it was great fun: the videos taken while the drone is following you look super cool, and the experience of being followed by a drone is ... interesting? It’s something I sorely hope stays optional.

Wrapup

As just a drone, the Tello is fair for the price; the fact that it’s also a camera drone and that it’s easy enough for the kids to fly makes it a pretty sweet deal.

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