I have thought this through a few times and its been about 4 years since I bought the AR Drone 2.0.
Back then it was out just before DJI lanched it’s Phantom 1.
So in 2012 the AR Drone caught my eye and I bought one.
It was rather clever how it could hover on the spot and record video and for the time the video was pretty good.
Controlling via the iPad or iPhone was a pain in the butt, very hard to control in a precise way. Also it could not handle any kind of wind without normally flipping over and crashing and nearly always breaking parts.
Although still pretty neat in perfect no wind conditions and had a good flight time with a after market extended battery of around almost 20 mins.
My biggest gripe was the cost of parts, more so once DJI came along with the Phantom 1 and other similar quads started to appear which were stronger and also much cheaper parts.
Anyway, then I came across the WiFi-less mod for AR.Drone v1.0 and v2.0 by miru
Which added a way of using a standard 2.4 RC radio with the drone.
Now once I had built one of these it totally changed how one controlled the AR Drone and made such a better experince!
Anyway after a lot of good flights I decided to mod around with the quad and bit by bit it broke to the stage where it was not worth spending any more on it.
These days I have a DJI FC40 and a Scratch bult Walkera QR X350 Pro and a Naze32 quad and they all work so much better than the ole Parrot Drone.
But sometimes I miss the ole AR Drone and seeing its sad state in its box I thought I will get it running again and probaly regret it! LOL
So no good reason to get it working again apart from just the urge to fix it really.
Quadcopters have come so far in a few short years and even Parrot have its bebop drone with wifi controller out thesedays, but oh my the price of that and its controller are so expensive.
The Parrot Bebop and its controller do look intresting and maybe one day I will get one to try.
And also you see the latest DJI quads holding position and using sonar and a camera for position hold etc and to be fair the AR Drone had all this way back when.
Okay it was not as precise as what is around now and needed ideal conditions to work, but it was also a lot cheaper than the cost of the latest and greatest DJI and other quads around today.
Anyway happy flying and fly safe…