GoPro Karma, the good the bad and the ugly

Karma is hitting the street (see what I did there) and videos are starting to be uploaded. So a few that caught my eye.

The first a tear down which will be monster useful for folks and perhaps become one of the most popular Karma videos around. Well done Nathan Shaw

Now from this, we deduce that a failure or a single component will perhaps result in the replacement of the entire board. I’m not sure that I am a big fan of the GPS being mounted as it is in between the speed controllers. I wonder where the compass is. Time in the field will tell us how well the GPS works, I would watch the K index closely with this drone. More on GPS-denied ability in the last video.

3DR tried onboard GPS with APM 2 but that didn’t stay around for long.

As long as the motherboard is reasonably cheap repairing Karma will be a breeze for vendors. That’s a good thing.

This user was unlucky with his crash, he should have thought about his take off point a little more. I liked your post flight honesty McC Alexander. It was a good choice for a first flight, nice open location.

The next video is a demonstration of how not to take your new drone out of the box and keep it in one piece. An awful first flight location and lack of manual reading. iJustine has 3,175,956 followers on YouTube so this as  a message will get out there. The Karma has no cameras pointing downwards to help keep position on a fixed point in areas of poor GPS signal.

Justine was flying in an almost GPS-denied location. Don’t do this at home kids. Pointing a camera down to aid position hold is nothing new. The Parrot AR Drone 1 had it in 2010.

Last one, should he really have flown as far?

The Karma autolanded so that was positive and the app helped him find it.