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PowerUp FPV review, only a year later than expected!
#1
PowerUp Toys / Tailor Toys

PowerUp FPV 

Finally, the review of the product that got me intoFPV!
!!AND MY 500TH POST!!

[Image: T8t4zcl.jpg]

What is it!?

The Powerup FPV is a unit containing a flight controller, 2 motors and a camera which attach to an oversized paper aeroplane/airplane folded from an A3 sheet of paper to create a First Person View remote control paper plane. Control of the plane is through a smartphone app which connects to a WiFi hotspot created by the Powerup FPV unit, the WiFi connection also streams live video to the phone. The PowerUp FPV is provided with a branded and modified  'Google Cardboard' Virtual Reality headset which uses your smartphone screen to provide the full immersion of FPV, and the phones motion sensors to provide an almost 'fly-where-you-look' method of control. The plane can also be controlled via touch-screen 'Game Pad' style sliders for LOS (Line Of Sight) flight, while the onboard DVR (Digital Video Recorder) captures videos and stills from your flights.

This all sounds great (forgive the pun) on paper, but please read on to understand and overcome the frustrations experienced by many of the Kickstarter backers including myself...

Kickstarter Campaign

While no longer relevant, I need to give a bit of background to this tale... I still consider myself a noob in the hobby, so at the end of 2015 when I got excited about FPV I really knew nothing at all, and I pledged my support for 1 BETA unit and a further 6 'production' units, the plan is still to run fixed wing FPV drone racing, open for the public to try out FPV in a turn up and race 'go-kart' style... Anyway, after the Kickstarter campaign closed in early Jan 2016, with delivery of the limited 100 'BETA backer' units scheduled to arrive in March the same year, and full roll out of the product in June.  Delay after delay led to my BETA unit only being shipped in late August, and due to limited international delivery of the BETA units I had this delivered to my sister in London to forward on to me in South Africa. The delivery from my sister got lost, and ended up in Australia(!) before I gave up all hope of ever receiving it. Despite having no connection to, or responsibility for the lost delivery, after mentioning my tale of woe on the Kickstarter message board PowerUp Toys contacted me privately and were generous enough to offer a replacement, before finalising the replacement however, the BETA unit finally, if inexplicably, arrived in early December! Still facing production delays and firmware problems the full roll out of the product resulted in the 6 other units I pledged for arriving individually in late Jan and early Feb 2017, over a year after the campaign closed! The app is still yet to be updated to a final version with the all the features enabled!

[Image: cQCKYR0.jpg]

Un-Boxing

The PowerUp FPV comes quite sexily packaged with a glossy cardstock outer sleeve depicting in bright colour, a very cool looking product against a black background, inside the sleeve is a sleek matte black box with the PowerUp brand logo in gloss black. The unit is secured in place with nylon ties, to a secondary cardboard sheet which also houses the cardboard FPV viewer, and Parrot branded battery. 

[Image: 83Spn34.jpg]

Accessories
Underneath you will find some sheets of high quality black paper for making planes, a replacement foam nose-cone, 2 spare props (1xCW 1xCCW) and an elasticated strap (not to strap the headset to your head, but to better secure your phone in the viewer?!) Also provided is a micro-fibre cloth for cleaning the lenses of the camera and FPV viewer, a small screwdriver and a USB charging cable.

[Image: d9AUV31.jpg]

Hardware
There is a lot of hardware that seems to be unused at the moment, the barometer, and compass have no on-screen information and the 'black box' logs which were mentioned in the Kickstarter campaign have yet to be implemented.

Battery
PowerUp Toys have partnered with Parrot for their FPV and as such power is provided by a 3.7v 500mAh 15C Parrot branded battery which offers advertised flight times of up to 10 minutes under 'lab' conditions. I haven't actually completely discharged a battery in a single flight, but the longest flight I have recorded was just under 7 and a half mins, which is still pretty impressive. 

[Image: YS49459.jpg]

Motors and props
Thrust is generated by two 8520 (8.5mm x 20mm) brushed micro motors which swing 60mm 2-blade props (which have about 10mm clearance from one another,) one downside to the motors is that they are glued into the carbon fiber spars. Brushed motors on this scale are essentially a disposable part, as the motor brushes cannot be replaced, which limits their lifespan to no more than 10 hours flight time. Due to the design of the Powerup FPV, motors replacments are available only from PowerUp Toys.

[Image: igYpJ1z.jpg]

FPV & DVR
The 2 megapixel FPV camera can be manually rotated 180 degrees and has an option to select better quality video capture at the expense of streaming performance. The video captured at best quality, while not HD, is still pretty good and captures bright, vivid colour in most lighting conditions. The IR block sadly results in the 'Black Hole Sun' effect, on clear days and with  its limited 'dynamic range' the camera can struggle with stark contrast. The image in very low light looks nice and bright on the phone while static, but as soon as you take flight 'longer exposure' results in a quite blurry video stream and capture. The DVR is on board which is just as well, because the video stream can get quite choppy, at least on previous versions of the app and firmware...

[Image: DnT9NkJ.jpg]

Price for all this...
There is no easy way of putting this, I pledged $250.00 for my Beta Version with 3 batteries and a further $1050.00 for 3x 'FPV with friends' which each come with 2 Powerup units and 4 batteries. The price has since been reduced to $139.99 for 1 unit with a single battery, which is still pretty pricey for what you actually get.  I understand though that the costs of R&D for this project were high, the app development team are still working hard and I'm pretty sure that to partner with Parrot isn't free either. 

[Image: x2EjiLX.jpg]

The PowerUp FPV App and Firmware

Firstly 
I must say, the most recent versions have broken the FPV mode on the Android version of the app (at least on the 2 android devices I have tried so far) resulting in seeing double while using the VR headset, the iOS version FPV mode is working, but I don't have an iPhone so haven't had a chance to test it. I have been in contact with their friendly and active customer service, I hope to have some news this coming week, but as yet no updates have been made. 

[Image: kPm6ojv.jpg]

UI
The app looks nice, the welcome screen shows a similarly sleek look to the box and product, but the full functionality is not yet available, even now over 6 months after I received my production units! The user interface is simple to follow, menu's are easy to access but the FPV mode button sometimes fails to respond, as does the button to deactivate the buzzer which sounds on every 'landing,' resulting in you poking your phone like an old typewriter! If you 'get ready to fly' when this happens, the buzzer will stop. There are a few nice touches to the app with an automated voice which confirms when you are 'ready to fly' and also warns of low battery, the phone also vibrates when the app reads low battery on the plane.

Issues
The app could do with some further development, aside from the broken FPV mode it shows some strange behavior in other areas, becoming more unstable the longer it is running, finally getting to the stage that the phone needs to be restarted before the app will continue running without errors. The DVR also shows some problems that, after some thought, might actually be linked to the apps instability. Some of my best flights have had the recording cut off 10 seconds in, despite my 64Gb, class 10, SD card being freshly formatted, the fact that they were my best flights leads me to think I had 'warmed up' and that the app had been running for some time, and may have become unstable? Also the failsafe, seems to retain the last good signal input  on loss of connection, making 'fly-aways' a distinct possibility. 

The Invader Paper Plane

The Invader plane is not very difficult to fold, especially when following the video instructions on youtube and the printed lines on the paper help, but it is more complicated than the standard 'Jet' that we all learn at the age of 5! Be aware that the paper provided comes with the 1st fold already made, and it is not always perfect, considering that this fold is critical to make any paper plane fly well, I would have expected tighter quality control over this.

                                       

Invader 1st Flight Experience

It was actually extremely frustrating, My wife and I spent an hour crashing, over and over again, at our feet with the longest flight, still being measured in distance rather than time, at literally about 5 meters! To be fair conditions were probably windier than ideal but we went home feeling thoroughly dejected. After a day or 2 some and some calmer weather I almost managed to complete a circuit around my house, a few friends had a go and the longest flight was recorded at about 45 seconds! The paper plane flies fast, flaps need to be adjusted for the ideal rate of climb, and the wings have to have the correct di-hedral angle, then when you inevitably crash it needs to be set up all over again, unless you have crashed hard in which case you need to make a whole new plane! 

Better Options

I came across a design for a foam-board airframe for the PowerUp FPV called the 'Infoamer' with a 500mm winspan cut from 2mm depron foam, which is much slower, has a tighter turning circle and is much easier to fly. Foam-board is not readily available where I stay in South Africa, so it has taken a while for me to find a supplier, but I have now got some sheets of 3mm and 5mm foam-board. Copying, and then modifying the Infoamer design has been giving me great success with making more stable and easier to fly planes than the frustrating paper 'Invader.' 

This is my own design 'Inptero' airframe cut from 5mm foamboard.
[Image: uutaY7J.jpg?1]

Flight Characteristics

Obviously the behaviour of the plane in the air changes dramatically depending on the design of airframe you attach the PowerUp module to, but there are characteristics which remain regardless of this.  
The Gyro seems to be a bit sensitive to me, where there were video's showing the powerup performing a loop prior to product release, this is now impossible as the gyro restricts pitch to alleviate stall, if the plane is incorrectly trimmed, this can result in the nose rising and dropping with the motors sounding like a siren.
The Powerup module has no active rudder and relies solely on differential thrust to turn, the increase in airflow over one side of the plane, in addition to the increase in torque of 1 motor, causes roll. In hard maneuvers however, the yaw that is produced by the extra thrust can cause a loss of altitude, which is where the addition of a rudder would have helped. 
Due to the Wi-Fi connection providing control as well as the FPV feed, there is some noticeable lag in the control input, some of my friends have found this easy to overcome, literally within their 1st flight, others... not so much! While the current version of the app won't allow me to fly in FPV mode I have concerns... The lag in control input, coupled with the lag in video feed, may well lead to such a delay that, if flying a fast plane such as the Invader paper plane, it becomes un-flyable in FPV mode even after making the choice of 'best performance.' 

Summary
despite a very frustrating start, I am now having great fun with my PowerUp FPV, at least since starting to cut airframes from foamboard. It's disappointing that the app is still unfinished and that the PowerUp FPV can't actually fly FPV  and that the 'paper plane drone' it claims to be, is actually really hard to fly when fitted to a paper plane! Aside from failing in many areas the PowerUp FPV provides a great test bed for wing design and the videos it captures can look really nice, it is very sturdy and has survived some pretty serious crashes.

Pro's
  • Looks cool.  Cool 
  • Resilient.
  • Upwards of 7-8 mins flight time per battery.
  • Many different possible design and creations, the limit is your imagination!
Con's
  • Price is too high!
  • App is unfinished.
  • FPV not working.
  • Not great at being the 'FPV Paper Plane Drone' it was supposed to be!
Windless fields and smokeless builds
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