About midway through January my whoop started to failsafe intermittently. That means it would randomly lose connection to my transmitter and as a safety precaution shut off and drop to the ground. This is a safety feature, which isn’t as important for whoops like I’m flying as it is for large quads with say 5″ propellers on them, but even some ones like this can be scary if they were to start whizzing around out of control.
I tried taking it apart and seeing if there was anything obviously damaged but didn’t have any luck. So my next stop was to open a support ticket with NewBeeDrone. They got in touch with me the following day and after submitting some photos they asked me to send it back so they could confirm it was defective and then shipped me a replacement a few days later. The whole process was very painless and pretty speedy.
It also helped that I had a backup quad that I had been waiting to start flying. During the run up to the Christmas season, NewBeeDrone was offering a discount on pre-orders for their replacement to the BeeBrain V2 called the BeeBrain Lite. I felt a little bad placing an order when I already knew I had a V2 coming for Christmas, but only bad enough to leave it in the box until I needed it.
The Lite had a faster processor in the flight controller, integrated video transmitter (VTX) so there was no secondary board, and had LEDs. I also really liked the new canopy that it came with over the V2 version.
I improved a lot during my month between flying my original V2 and my Lite. My normal routine on a week night was to get all of the batteries charged, I’d bought more and was up to a dozen 1S 300mAh LiHV so I could fly for about thirty minutes using all of them, and then once everyone was in bed and I had the house to myself I’d turn on all of the lights on the main floor and go.
I got used to flying with acro mode so the quad wouldn’t automatically level out when I released the sticks. While not super important for what I was doing yet, it was helping me develop better habits with the sticks for when I started trying to do flips and rolls.
I also got much better at planning ahead so I was following a line that I had mapped out through the house. This made my flights smoother, although still restricted by the small space so there were some places where I was basically forced to stop and spin around. But I definitely got a lot of practice flying close to walls and furniture. I actually found it interesting to try to get as low as possible. Something about flying into the kitchen just off the floor and and seeing these huge cabinets come up on either side was quite fun and messed with my sense of scale a little bit. This practice also really helped me with throttle control since I couldn’t afford to lost any altitude on a turn which I was doing a lot when I first started flying.