I’d like to add something a little more “middle of the road here”. I’m not a drone pro, but I am an engineering pro. I can make most things work.
I have a large amount of sympathy for those who have had difficulty getting the H520 to work without a camera. I’ve had the drone for about a month now and bought it with an E90. The path to working without a camera is really non-obvious in many ways. It seems very much like a hidden mode of operation. Nothing in the easy setup. My first attempt to follow the easy setup on day one had me confused as to why the ST16 could not find the drone. Only after installing the E90 did everything spring to life. My first impression was “geez, this thing doesn’t even operate without a >$1000 camera?”
I spent a bunch of time, as did a professional (computer science/engineering) colleague, trying to work out whether it was even possible to fly without a camera and found posts that said “yes it is and I am” but not what the magic was. Only this weekend did I take a further shot at googling it and finally found a link to the video of basic operations that showed turning the drone upside down. I’m not sure why I had not stumbled onto the manual bind setting in the vehicle menu.
When I told my colleague about the link showing how, his response was “wow, how come this was so hard to find?”
Then trying to put this into practice it took me about 20 minutes to finally get it to fly. Little or no feedback that the drone was bound, still showing not connected on the ST16, still no battery status on the ST16, no telemetry. Very confusing.
Now I’m excited about developing a custom payload.
However I think it is unfair to bash “dumb people” like me, for not being able to make it work. It is a user experience black hole trying to get camera free flight working, with the lack of feedback in the app and from the drone, plus the lack of telemetry or any indication of binding.
My final successful recipe was: on ST16, set landing gear to UP. Remove battery from drone. Insert battery and power on drone.
In ST16 3-bar menu, choose vehicle, then manual bind. It will tell you to turn over the drone. Turn it over and leave it there, props down. If all the lights go yellow flashing, press bind on the ST16. If it pairs, the landing gear will go up. Flip the landing gear down on the ST16. Should return to down.
Flip over the drone back to normal. Now WAIT. Pressing the red ARM button will give only audio tones from the drone if it does not have GPS lock. Or if the return to land switch is down (RTL). All the cool audio prompts you would normally get from the controller DO NOT HAPPEN. You are left with beeps from the drone as the only information. Nothing on the controller. It will still show Not Connected in the title bar. Nothing for GPS lock or for vehicle battery status. The right connection menu will show Nothing connected. So as a user you are basically guessing that the drone is connected. After a while you can press arm and the drone props start to spin. YAY! Angle and Manual flight modes should now work.
So far from intuitive it is not even funny. And don’t give me RTFM. I didn’t have to get to page 46 of my iPhone manual, nor of my car’s manual.
User Experience design and User Interface design should remove the need for getting to page 46 of the manual before you can even get the props to spin without a camera.
Call me dumb, I don’t care. I just think this piece of the experience was very poorly implemented.
And the wait times for customer service at Yuneec are “give up and live with it” long. My $1300 camera lense cover glass was broken on arrival. Attempting to get that addressed under warranty got me to “just throw it away and live without it”.
and I went to work for a large Jet manufacturer and designed for them. I lived and breathed RC, then I just lost interest until I could marry my two favorites things; video and flight! Like you I am waiting to see a little more from the camera, but it looks like it is just a matter of time till I get a 520.
