HoverAir X1: The Easiest Self-Flying Camera that REALLY WORKS!!!

[Music] what's going on everyone I got something super interesting to show you today it's probably the coolest little camera I've ever worked with and it's right here in my pocket this is the hover a X1 and it is a self-flying camera that takes off and lands from the palm of your hand and yeah it really is that simple to use I'm going to show you how to do it right now so first step is we got to turn it on I'm going to hit this power button on the top for 2 seconds or so you'll see the green light come on that way we know it's ready to go now right above that power button there's another little button which allows you to select one of the five or six pre-programmed flight passs current mode zoom out I'm in the zoom out mode right now it tells you by voice which one mode you're in I'm going to take it over to Dolly track custom Dolly track we're in the dolly track mode what that means is this thing is going to take off from the palm of my hand and it's going to hold position right in front of me and as I walk it's going to move and follow me recording both video and audio so we're set up and ready to go but I need some room to fly so let's go out front all right now all I got to do is hit the power button one more time and it'll take off and palm my hand continue Dolly [Music] track all right we are up and running and what you hear right now is the audio from the hover ax1 and you can see the video it's taken and wherever I move it's going to follow me now as a solo YouTuber it's really hard to try to get third person perspective like this all the time but as you can see today I'm able to capture it pretty flawlessly with the hover air X1 and when I'm done it'll fly right back over to me and it's going to land right in the palm of my hand all you got to do is stop moving for a few seconds and then hold out your hand how cool is that all right now I've got a little taste of what it can do before I show you more let me show you what it looks like up close all right so when you order the hover air X1 this is what you're going to get this s flying camera all Fold It Up In The Box you just unfold it and you can slide in the battery pack that comes with it goes right in the top like that snap it down you're ready to go and I actually got the combo pack so I got an extra battery pack in this little like charging station which doesn't charge the batteries you still have to plug it in there but I believe it charges it faster than if you just plug directly into the camera here so let's cover some Basics it's got a completely enclosed design it's all the propellers are in this cage which protects them from hitting things and I've actually had this bounce off of tree branches and my four-year-old four-year-old daughter that whacked it with her hand and it kept going so I like the enclosed design that's pretty cool it's really small it's really lightweight I mean I'll show you compared to my cell phone I mean that's pretty small it's actually smaller than the phone it weighs less it's 125 G my phone was like 203 so it's easy to fit in your pocket they do give you a little bag to carry it in um and I think they also sell a carrying case for it too if you want to keep it more secure but it's a pretty cool little folding design very lightweight very convenient on the top you've got your power button and then this other button above it just selects what mode you want it to be in it's got some pre-programmed flight passs and it's you just push of a button you select which which one you want on the underside you've got some more cameras down here and I think that is for its it's drive system it's Vio system what it uses to navigate it's reading the ground texture to navigate and follow you around so I think that's its Vision positioning system there this one on the front is the camera that's recording you and it's kind of on this uh like rotating gimbal so it can maintain a smooth video quality and it's quite nice I was very pleased with the video quality and also the sound quality out of too it records The Sound by using your cell phone through the app but we'll get to that later some other basic specs I believe it can go up in the air altitude of like 45 to 50 ft and it can fly at 15 M an hour or 25 km an hour now to get this thing up and running all I had to do was go to my cell phone download the app and it walked me all the way through my first flight and after that it just kind of opens everything up and you're free to try all the different flight paths yourself it is so easy to use I'm going to walk you through each one of of these different flight paths but let's turn this thing on really quick so I'm going hit the power button you can see the green light come on so I know it's powered on it'll probably tell me what mode it's in it's got this voice thing current mode custom Dolly track I'm in the dolly track mode so all you do is hit this next button here and it'll toggle all through these six different modes hold and it tells you you know voice command which one you're in for each press zoom out whatever you've select the one you want you just press this button the power button and hold your hand out and it's going to take off so let's go let's go try all those different functions so you can see what each one looks like all right now the first pre-programmed flight path is hover let's put it into hover hover we're in Hover mode now we're going to launch from our hand we just push the power button continue [Music] hover and it's going to hover right there in place it won't go up or down it will Spin and it'll track me but it won't move from its position it won't go higher lower left right back and forth none of that and then whenever I want to have it land all I gotta do is walk over and put my hand under it and it'll land on my hand and that's hover all right the next flight path is zoom out and it's just going to fly out and fly back to us so let's let's launch it here we go5 mom [Music] out all right so it records on its flight out and then it stops and then it also record on the flight back in and of course lands in the palm of my hand all right the next one is follow this baby's going to follow me wherever I [Music] go all right we're on the move whenever I'm done just got to hold out your hand and I'll come land all right the next flight path is orbit where it does a 360 all the way around [Music] me waiting for that red light there red light's on we're recording oh we going to bump our camera Oh no just missed okay she's all done coming back into me here and lands all right next is the bird's eyee View bird eye now I've got it set to about 5 m I think you can set it to go as high as 15 M I think like 45 ft so it'll give you a pretty good bird's eye view and you can also set it to spin on the way down or you can just have it do a straight shot only one to go which is the same one we did on the opener which is the dolly track now in the beginning of this video I had that Dolly track set up to film from far I've now set it to film from up close so let's see what that looks [Music] like all right we're up and running that was quick but I don't know how they could make this really any easier I mean it flies itself everywhere and it's just like reading the ground texture to fly I mean you don't have to Pilot it at all wherever I go this thing is going to go it'll follow me if I turn the walk away and if I walk straight at it it's going to back up and fly blind because there's no cameras behind it so this is one thing you got to kind of watch where you're driving it and steering it too but it'll take as much video as you want and we'll bring it over stop moving and we'll let it land in our hand I like that one a lot that is slick all right well as you saw all these predetermined flight paths are available to you at the push of this button but you can also access some of the settings by long pressing that button give you an example so let's move it over to the zoom out mode zoom out so we're in zoom out now if I long press it it's going to allow me to adjust the distance that it zooms out so let's long press 3 m out now it's going out 3 m if I hit it again long press 6 M and it'll keep going out further away until it gets to 15 M and then it'll start cycling back through so you can adjust that setting right here from the camera you don't need to use the app to do it now there's a lot of other settings you can adjust in the app so that's where the app comes in if you really want to fine-tune all the different settings so let's go in there and take a look at that all right so this is what the main screen of the app looks like if we go into hover settings you can see all that different predetermined flight paths and you can make fine-tune adjustments from here on what you want this camera to actually do so let's go into hover and you can see you can change the duration if you want it going 30 seconds 60 seconds 5 minutes we'll leave it on whatever it was on I think it on continuous so just shoot endlessly um Target tracking I have oned I found that really useful for when I was trying to record myself doing an acceleration on one of the ebikes I could put the tracking on and it would follow me as I accelerated away which is pretty cool so we'll leave that on but each one of these flight paths you can um change different settings so the zoom out you can set the distance here you want it to zoom out you can also change if you want it to be a flat shot or a rise which is pretty cool that they allow you to adjust things like that this is a really cool cool thing I'm I'm digging this camera if you can't tell but there's all kinds of different things inside the app that you can switch that you can't do from the camera itself it only allows you to adjust like one of the settings by using that button but you come here in the app you can adjust all kinds of stuff now the custom is your last option there and you can pick I have in Dolly track that's one where it's facing you and following you they also have snapshot and I believe I read online that they come in here and they change and put new options in here all the time that's just why it's called custom mode because they're kind of I think constantly switching it up but let's go back here next setting down here sound recording on I turned that on that's how I was getting audio from the hover air while I was taking all those clips I have the sound recording on and what it does is you have to have the app open and it's using your camera microphone to record the audio that's how it's getting its a audio and it's the app is automatically cancelling out that propeller noise it's really cool how well it works but let's go back to the main screen here and then when you take a recording it's all here under the hover album and it'll show you everything in here that you've uh recorded and it's storing it on the camera until you download it into your phone so it'll show you kind of a preview low grade preview and then you just hit the download button and it'll automatically download it to your cell phone gallery so the app is easy to use the camera is easy to use I just hit download you can see how fast it downloads that was like two seconds and it's done but let's go back to the main screen and that's pretty much it to show you in here there's a lot of options to change but it's been a lot of fun to play around with let me go show you a quick demonstration on how the audio works all right now I got the app open and running so it'll record audio I'm going to put it right in my pocket here so it can hear me we're going to launch this in Hover mode continue [Music] hover all right and we're recording this is the audio that the hover air is taking this is the audio from my lapel mic and this is the audio from my action K you can hear that the hover air I mean it completely cancels out all that propeller wine noise it takes I mean it's not absolutely amazing audio but it's pretty good audio all right now let's answer some questions you might have first one's probably going to be how long does the battery pack last well everything I recorded here today I Did It On One battery pack and you can see there's one little light remaining so it's still got some juice left on it and I still have a whole second battery pack to go I was out the other day taking Clips with this thing for over 2 hours and I didn't never ran out of battery pack what I did was I just took this you know Power Station thing with me and plugged it into a portable battery bank and anytime I wasn't flying this and using it I just had the batteries here on charge and it I mean I never ran out of battery so they last pretty long it's just probably going to depend upon your use if you're just taking 20 second Clips like I am it's going to last you quite a while if you're putting this in follow mode and asking it to follow you for 10 minutes straight recording video you're probably going to burn through this battery pack pretty pretty quick so that's what I got to tell you about batteries all right next question might be do I have to use the app to fly this and the answer is no you don't you can you know do everything right here from the buttons on this camera and fly it and take your video and then when you open up the app the video will be there for you to download it's saving it onto this camera here I think it's 32 GB of space so you don't have to use the app to fly this and to record video now you do have to use the app if you want to get audio because the camera has got to be Bluetooth to your phone in your pocket and it's using your phone microphone to get the audio so if you're going to just take Boll footage and just want video no audio you don't need the app at all the only time the app comes into play is if you want to take audio or if you want to get into the details of changing the settings all right next question does it have obstacle avoidance no it does not and I don't think they say that anywhere on their website and I have seen it bump into some things I had it in Dolly track mode where I'm facing it and kind of walking towards it pushing it along and as it's backing up there's no cameras or sensors or anything here in the back so I've seen it bump into low hanging leaves and tree branches and things but you know it's got the cage around it so it just kind of bumped off it and repositioned itself and kept going so know it doesn't have obstacle avoidance you're going to have to kind of watch where you're navigating it by your movement As you move it's it's adjusting to you so you're going to want to try not to run it into anything but the cage does help but I never saw this thing run into anything that was facing the front cameras it never ran directly into anything so I think it does a pretty good job of avoiding obstacles that it can see coming right on the front side all right another thing you might be wondering is can you actually fly this yourself and pilot it and the answer is yes I didn't do it but you can use the app as your you know controller and pilot this thing and fly it manually like a drone so that is possible uh I didn't try that feature out because the whole point point of this thing is that it flies itself I love that I don't want to have to Pilot it but yes you can do that okay can you crash it yeah I crashed it just once though I had it in the follow feature and I was riding an ebike and it was following me and I went too fast it can only fly about 15 M hour I went faster than that and I wasn't sure what was going to happen if it would just stop and hover or if it would land well I think it tried to land itself but it was just going so fast it came down like kind of skidding on the pavement and thankfully there's these little plastic Nubs right here over top of these cameras so the cameras weren't damaged on the bottom it just kind of scraped up the bottom a little but yeah I got it to crash once by exceeding the limitations of its speed all right some other limitations of the hover ax1 obviously don't fly it anywhere you're not supposed to fly it no restricted zones right next is it uses a downward Vision positioning system it's reading the ground surface in order to fly and navigate it needs a texture surface so you can't fly this on really smooth surfaces you can't fly it over water you don't want to put this thing above water it's not going to like that you want to fly in any severe weather right lightning dense Fog rain snow not good for it they also say don't use it at below 0° C or above 40° C they also say to avoid places where there's fine particles in the air maybe the beach where there's sand or the desert that wouldn't be good for it and then it also says don't fly it above 2,000 m in elev ation not quite sure why on that but they did say that on their website but I think that's a pretty obvious list of restrictions still plenty of ways to have fun with this thing it's going to be a very helpful tool in my toolkit as I do ebike videos all right so I'll put a link to this X1 below so you can find it easily if you're someone that's considering going out to get a drone for this type of footage or maybe you already bought one like like I did I got two drones in my office that I never use because it's such a pain in the butt getting that thing up and running you got to connect to your phone and your phone is the controller and then you got to like wait for the lights to flash and spin and orientate the and it's I never use it I never use it because it's paining the butt and this is like a thousand times easier so this is my go-to from now on but I'll link it below if they give me any discount codes or anything I'll put that there for you as well and as always I hope you found this helpful informative maybe at least entertaining if you did consider hitting subscribe and com back for more thanks

Channel: CitizenCycle

Views: 4,721

Keywords: HoverAir X1, Self-flying Camera, selfflyingcamera, easiest drone, ebike, electric bikes, youtube camera

Id: w8DCvCOn2bk

Length: 19min 30sec (1170 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 07 2024