Technical Reviews and Geek Toys

I saw a show on TV... don't remember which show... introducing this little indoor helicopter. I was intrigued as I have always had visions of being a chopper pilot. Bella and I took a weekend off and went to Albuquerque to get away. During this time off I found myself at the mall walking around a Brookstone Tools store and low-and-behold there was the object of my intrigue; the Micro Chopper by Excalibur Electronics. One of the salesmen saw me checking it out and walked up and told me that one of the other salesmen was demonstrating the Micro Chopper at the entrance to the store. I watched the young man trying to fly this tiny flying machine and .... well he was crashing it more than flying it. Pilot error? Well I had to find out.

I decided that if Brookstone Tools had one there must be a hobby store somewhere in the mall that would have it too. I started my quest and finally found a toy store that had a less expensive one that was made out of Styrofoam. It was $10 cheaper but the Micro Chopper was made out of plastic so I decided it was of better quality so I went back to Brookstone Tools and purchased it.

It wasn't that expensive, $30.00 maybe. The receipt is around here somewhere. No matter. It is available in several colors. I bought a red one and it was several days before I could play with my new toy. The helicopter itself has what must be a really small li-poly battery. The remote control takes 6 AA batteries and there is a small plug that is plugged into the helicopter which charges the helicopter. It took maybe 30 minutes to charge and when the charge light turned green I gave it a try.

The controller has a "go for it" lever as well as a direction lever. There are two buttons which are to be used to adjust the trim..... the annoying characteristic of the helicopter to just make little circles and not go anywhere. Ok, you may have noticed from previous posts that we live in a 30' RV trailer. There is not a whole lot of room to fly a little helicopter. But I tried anyway. There is no hover and after bouncing off of the walls and forcing Murphy the cat to find a safe refuge (Bella wasn't home at the time), I decided that this was not going to work. It was windy outside so it went back into the box for another day.

A calm day came and again I charged it up and took it outside. Well, it is controlled via infrared. The sun emanates all kinds of infrared light so I found I couldn't control the helicopter. So back in the box it went until the sun went down. I checked the charge and sit it down and pushed the go-for-it lever to the max and the little chopper took off. It took a number of tries to get the trim adjusted so it would sort of go in one direction. It usually was not the direction that I wanted it to go in however. And it seemed way under powered as I could hold it in my hand and sort of toss it in the air and start it up and it had enough power to sort of slowly go down instead of up. Bella tried it too with pretty much the same results. Pilot error.... I don't know. It certainly is not as easy as it looks and we didn't devote a whole lot of time practicing. I'm not giving up yet.

There are a number of videos on YouTube showing similar models. This one looked like the one I have until I noticed it has 2 main rotors which, I believe, would give it more lift and perhaps more stability. The one I have only has one main rotor and what might be described as a gyro above the main rotor that adjusts the pitch of the main rotor. The picture above looks identical to the one that I have.