Welcome to the Robolink Community forum!
Bluetooth Range Issues
-
We are seeing the Bluetooth range of CoDrones perform well under the advertised specifications of 65 feet(19 meters).
The Drones seem to disconnect from the supplied bluetooth control boards at 33 feet or (10 meters), only 50% of what is printed on the packaging.Based on some experimentation the included bluetooth control boards seem to be performing like class 2 hardware "Class 2, most commonly found in mobile devices, 10 metres (33 ft)"
Rather than the advertised range of a class 1 board "Class 1 range is in most cases 20–30 metres (66–98 ft)".I believe what is happening here is one of the blue tooth transceivers either in the Drone or on the board is class 2 hardware, cutting the range by half.
Please let me know what can be done to improve this range so the Drone will perform as expected?
Was the wrong hardware included with our drones? Possibly is there a higher end bluetooth control board available? -
@mercerdrones We apologize for the misinformation. These are the maximum range specifications we received from the drone manufacturer but the environment can affect the range as well. If you need larger and more reliable range for your case, one option would be using the drone with Blockly. It may produce better results because it uses the computer's internal BLE instead of the board. Another option would be using CoDrone Mini, which uses radio frequency as opposed to Bluetooth. Again, thank you for bringing this to our attention and I will have our team look into it and update our documentation!
-
This test was done with a single drone and was repeatable every time.
I had a single student in person today, unfortunately due to the pandemic, so this issue was very noticeable.
After noticing it was tried several drones and they all dropped off at the same distance.
I will be more than happy to post this video of this to youtube so it is publicly accessible to your entire support staff.I am so far not very happy with the excuses this user account has supplied to all our issues on your forums.
Not good customer service. -
@mercerdrones We have found that sometimes in big classroom situations the Bluetooth performance will drop if you have more than 10 drones in the air. If you are experiencing multiple drops, reducing the number of drones flying in the air may help alleviate the issue!
