Today we’re taking a look at a micro stunt drone, Air Hogs Hyper Stunt Drone, from a Canada based company SpinMaster. Review that you’re about to read will be a break from my usual review format. I had to change things up because this drone has a very niche market and a lot of features that you normally talk about when reviewing a drone aren’t available.
Hyper Stunt Drone is an extremely small drone aimed at kids 8 years and older. Due to its resilient build, and protective frame around the blades, this drone is perfect for young beginner drone pilots.
Air Hogs is a toy brand of SpinMaster. Most drones that I review are from China, so it’s nice seeing one coming from a Canada based company, a bit closer to home. SpinMaster is actually an international company, headquartered in Canada, but with offices all across the world. This should make after-sales support more accessible, but to be honest, people are reporting that it’s difficult to get their hands on spare parts from Air Hogs. Hopefully that’s just a few isolated cases.
Air Hogs Hyper Stunt Drone review :
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design, specs, pros, cons
Drone design
Now onto the star of the show, Hyper Stunt Drone. Up until Hyper Stunt Drone I thought that drones like Eachine E56 and E57 were very small and portable. Drone itself has a width/length of 4.5cm and height of 1.8cm. With the protective cage around the blades the width/length changes to 8cm, and height goes up to 7.5cm. Design is bulky, tough, with LEDs at the front and back.
Most notable feature of Hyper Stunt Drone is the protective cage which prevents the blades from being damaged during bumps and crashes. In fact, Air Hogs is encouraging drone pilots to bump into walls and ceilings because that’s how stunts are performed. This little drone can even be “driven” along the floor thanks to the protective cage. It does one-key tricks, but we’re talk more about thos a bit further down below. Let’s take a closer look at the specs first.
Quick specs
- Dimensions with cage: 8*8*7.5cm
- Dimensions without cage: 4.5*4.5*1.5cm
- Weight: 250g
- Battery type/size: 3.7 140 mAh lipo
- Battery replaceable: non-replaceable
- Charge time: 40 minutes
- Flight time: 4-5 minutes
- GPS positioning: N/A
- microSD support: N/a
- Camera: N/A
- Camera adjustable: N/A
- Transmitter: yes, physical controller
- Transmitter battery: 2x AAA batteries
- Distance: up to 50 meters
- Wifi technology: 2.4Ghz
- VR support: N/A
- Special features: gyro stabilization, protective cage, stunts
What makes interesting?
- Small size – extremely small size allows indoor use, makes it easy to carry around, store, etc
- Controller – drone has a small physical controller barely bigger than the drone itself
- Difficulty settings – choose between 3 channel without aileron and 4 channel with aileron
- Speed control – there are 3 speed settings, for adjusting how fast the drone goes
- Additional – gyro stabilization, flips and 3D rolls, stunts, protective cage
- Price – with a price tag of about $20, you can’t really expect much from this little guy
What could have been done better?
- Protective cage – protective cage is springy, so it bends and sometimes ends up in the blades
Air Hogs Hyper Stunt Drone review – In-depth view
Missing features
I know it’s weird to start a review by talking about what’s not there. I just think it’s important to know what you’re getting yourself into before you decide to buy Hyper Stunt Drone.
First, there is no camera. If there’s no camera, there’s also no FPV mode, or app control. Keep in mind that the drone is small. Some places actually market it as a nano drone, so it’s small.
Battery can’t be taken out of the drone. It is charged inside the drone via provided USB charger. Lastly there’s no headless mode, or even altitude hold, at least I wasn’t able to find where to active them.
Testing out the protective cage, doing stunts, flips, rolls
It’s difficult to describe with words what Hyper Stunt Drone is capable of, what kind of stunts it can do. In this part of the review I would normally include a FPV test footage. Since Hyper Stunt Drone doesn’t have a camera, I’ll just have to show you how the protective cage works and what kind of tricks the drone can do.
Flips and rolls are done by pressing and holding down the left front trigger and then moving the right joystick either up/down if you want to flip the drone forwards/backwards, or left/right if you want to roll it left/right.
The protective cage is supposed to allow you to fly the drone into and keep it snug along the surface of walls, ceilings and floors. Trouble is the cage is very springy, so the drone just bounces off of everything. It takes practice to get the drone to
Transmitter
Transmitter has a rectangular design, nothing special really. Single left front trigger is for adjusting the speed and initiating tricks. Quick press changes speed, and long press together with right joystick initiates flips or rolls, depending on what combo you’ve hit.
Smack dab in the middle is the power button. Around it are buttons for trim adjustments. The 1 and 2 buttons are there for choosing between beginner work mode (3 channels, without aileron) and advanced mode (4 channels, with aileron).
Transmitter is small, slightly bigger than the drone. It’s light, and does feel cheap, but works great. Distance is about 50 meters. It takes 2x AAA 1.5V batteries.
Battery
Hyper Stunt Drone has a built in, non-replaceable 140 mAh battery. You might think that the battery is small, but keep in mind that this drone is barely 5 cm across. It has enough power to give the drone up to 5 minutes of flight time.
Once the battery runs out, it will take you 40 minutes to charge it and get the drone up in the air again. My only gripe as far as battery goes is that it’s not replaceable, but micro drones rarely offer replaceable batteries.
Additional features
Due to its small size, and small price, Hyper Stunt drone offers little in way of additional features that drones usually have. As I already mentioned, some very useful features, like altitude hold and headless mode, are missing.
You do get gyro stabilization, for smoother rides. There’s also adjustable speed, 3 settings. Front and back of the drone have LEDs. That’s about it really. We’ve covered the protective cage, tricks and stunts. There’s nothing much to it, which is no surprise for a $20 drone.
Flying experience
Flying the drone with the protective cage can be a tad bit tiring at first. Air Hogs demo of the stunts on YouTube makes it look very easy to fly up the walls, ceilings, floors and whatnot. In reality you’ll need a lot of practice to get the drone to stick to the walls.
Remember that the cage is very springy. Another thing that’s important to know is that cage has the tendency to move out of place and end up in the blades, doing the exact thing it’s designed to prevent, damaging the propellers.
The whole cage concept sounds good on paper, but in practice it leaves plenty to be desired. Drone might feel a bit slow, especially yaw, even at the fastest speed setting, but otherwise it flies nice. As far as normal flying goes, drone is a lot of fun.
Summary
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Zoran is a hard-worker who never takes "no" for an answer, and thinks it's blasphemy when someone says something negative about Autel Robotics.
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