Look at the DJI mini 4 over the 2SE; two main features are obstacle detection & 50% longer battery life
They do, but not open source, though. (Or am I wrong?) I wouldn’t be able to resist tinkering with the software and hardware.
They do have a SDK, and have some platforms that are modular and made for customization… I also almost never used the DJI software for flying (though it is perfectly serviceable), there were plenty of open-source options that worked great with them. There is some room for tinkering, I think, on the more popular models (mavic, phantom) but probably not a lot, being designed more for mass-market.
This one? What’s the difference? Camera resolution? Flight times are both 31 minutes.
No. The Mini 4, Here’s a random intertubez comparison page.
First, while it can be changed or even turned off, the default return-to-home is somewhere in the 25-30% battery left range. It is a smart idea to leave it on so that your drone doesn’t fall out of the sky when you’re taking that really cool shot looking back at the shoreline & turn it into unrecoverable fish food. Also remember that those battery life times are under ideal conditions, no wind, not zigging & zagging thru trees to get to your desired location, & even some of the features turned off. Finally, & this is a known issue of the batteries; you charge your drone & put it away in the case; you go to pull it out a week or two later to shoot something & the batteries are no longer at 100%. Couple all of those things together for an impromptu shoot & you may be only getting 15 mins of usable battery life from a 30 min battery.
The other thing it has is obstacle avoidance. I took a class the first time it was offered to anyone other than you rotorheads; it’s called Flying the Wires Environment. Part of it had a series of pictures - looking east/west, morning vs. afternoon, same view 10 mins apart (sun vs. clouds). at ground level & at elevation. The differing view/background meant that in one photo of each pair there was a wire clearly visible but it was invisible in the other photo. Now I won’t guarantee that you won’t catch a single wire with your drone but obstacle avoidance can help you to avoid backing up into or raising up into the canopy of a tree. Even if you’re flying within line of sight, if you’re on one side of the field & the drone is on the other, it may be difficult to judge how close to those trees or other obstacle you really are.
Yeah… $800 is a bit out of the budget. The Mini 4K I linked to is cheaper than the 2SE. Opinions between those?
This isn’t an “issue”, it’s the design. Leaving Li-on batteries at 100% charge long term is bad for their health, so the batteries are designed to self-discharge after a few days sitting at 100%. Batteries for drones are very sophisticated. Just gotta prepare for your usage.
The sub-250g drone thing is not really a big deal at all and I have no idea why people try to make it into a big deal. The only difference is that you have to register your drone, which costs $5 every 3 years. There’s no difference in terms of where or how you can fly it. I guess if you wanted your drone flying off the books / not subject to being identified with remoteID that might be an issue, but I think all the DJI drones are going to have remoteID built in anyway since they proactively want to avoid drawing more legislation. Though I suppose if it’s not registered, the remoteID isn’t tied to a person.
Speaking of which, there has been a bill that bans DJI drones floating around Congress for a while. I don’t think it’s seriously expected to pass and I wouldn’t worry about making it part of your decision for a $300 drone, but it’s worth mentioning. It’s Republican anti-China fearmongering probably pushed along by DJI’s competitors.
As far as what drone to buy - I haven’t kept up with DJI’s low cost line in a while (I have a mavic 3 pro and an air 2s) but it looks like the mini 4k is a mini-2 SE with the ability to record 4k video. It’s probably perfectly fine and impressive for such a cheap drone. It’ll definitely be a big step up from the toy drones you get in the sub $150 range.
The one Mrs. L.A. bought for herself and can’t get to fly was $39.
I’m jealous. I have the Mavic 2 Pro.
If I’m planning on using it I make sure the batteries are charged. I’d rather have to buy new batteries every so often than have them at only 75% when I pull it out of the bag & want to use it.
It must be pretty distracting to have drones floating around Congress. No wonder they want to ban that.
Hmm… well one issue I have seen with a super cheap toy helicopter thingy is, unless the battery, which has low capacity in the best case and they do wear out, has sufficient juice, you slowly increase the power for takeoff and it starts hovering but soon the voltage drops under load and you quickly lose control/it drops like a stone.
Those palm-sized toy drones are cute, just don’t expect too much from them (battery capacity, high-def VR, bomb racks…)
Teach her to fly that bird behind you in your avatar 
A nephew that works for an oil company bought a drone to explore possible sites for oil wells. Beats walking a mile and saying… “Not gonna work” I flew his once. not a clue what it was.
I got used to it fairly quickly. Even in my 10 minute flight.
I wish I could afford to fly them again! But Mrs. L.A. was a UH-60 Black Hawk pilot in Desert Storm. She said she’d never get into anything as small as a Robbo. (I doubt she’d get into a Hughes/Schweizer/Sikorsky 300, even though she flew TH-55s in training.)
Yikes. I bow to you and your wife’s abilities.
Was in a Robinson in Hawaii a ‘4 door’ (R 44 ?) I sat left front. Pilot wanted my wife to sit behind her. Sort balances things out I guess. I was more interested in watching the gauges than the views. Not that I was worried, I’m a data person though, and they grabbed my interest.
I’m bumping this thread to ask for advice with DJI drones.
Long story short: My workplace is in possession of several drones without the email account / login information from the previous owner. I’m working to get that information, but it may not be possible. Everything I’m reading on the DJI forums suggests these are now bricks without access to the accounts. Are we screwed or is there a way to “un-bind” the drones and hand controllers from their previous accounts?
I have a general email address for DJI support, but they seem to try to shunt such inquiries toward their chat system and I haven’t gotten any useful information from them yet. So far it’s been, “Log in with the old account, un-bind and set up new accounts.” Going back to factory settings supposedly won’t bypass this issue either.
Thoughts? These are DJI Mini 3 Pro drones. We also have a few new units which I will need to start using. Can we put them on one email account, or will each aircraft / controller need its own email account?
Thank you. Christmas is coming up. I had this one in my shopping cart, but it’s no longer available.
I hope you get your workplace drone issues sorted.
The DJI controllers with the built-in screens may have more limitations than most of the ones I’ve used in the past; the control software on those was in external tablets or phones that just required you to log in with an active account (and we did use the same login on multiple devices). We did have one with the built-in screen, and it was a lot more locked-down (they use a heavily-customized Android installation) but we still had access to being able to log in/out of the user account on the software.
There was also free software you could download from DJI that allowed you to hook up the drones/controllers to your PC via USB and factory reset the equipment fairly easily (also could be used for firmware upgrades and various other tweaks). I’ll see if I can find the name of that (if it is still available).
If there is some sort of “phone home” procedure that requires login to some previously-registered account based on hardware serial number or something, though, you might be SOL without that previous owner info or intervention from DJI; I can definitively tell you that NONE of ours worked that way.
The current version of that for the Mini 3 Pro is DJI Assistant 2 (downloadable here).
Yikes! That one looks like its four or five times the price of the one I had in my shopping cart!