Mikrokopter Hexa2 Hexacopter

I've actually had my Hexa2 for quite some time now, just never got around to writing about it in here. However, if you look at the Aerial Photography section you will see lots of examples of the videos I have made with it.

Mikrokopter is a German company that manufactures kits and ready to fly machines, quadcopters, hexacopter and octocopters, of different sizes - mostly standard and XL. The XLs are slightly larger with more powerful motors and can lift heavier SLR cameras. However, the standard size machines, such as my Hexa2, can easily lift camcorders and bridge cameras (i.e. cameras that are half way between compact cameras and SLR cameras).

Mikrokopter are generally considered amongst the best drones one can buy and, once you set them up correctly, I have to agree that they do pretty much exactly what you want them to do and what they are supposed to do. The Height Hold works as it should, the GPS and Position Hold works as it should as does the Come Home function. Furthermore, the software that you upload into the Mikrokopter is regularly updated with fixes and tweaks to fine tune your machine and to add extra functions.

Furthermore there are options you can utilize that I have yet to try, such as automatic Waypoint Navigation which involved using a wireless bluetooth connection between your Mikrokopter and your laptop to plot points and heights on an image from Google Earth and making your Mikrokopter fly autonomously between these points then come back and land. Other innovations include plotting Points of Interest, which your camera will automatically point at as you fly around them. There is also a Follow Me Patch that you can attach to a person, dog, car or whatever you like and have the Mikrokopter follow while pointing the camera at the subject the whole time.

As you might imagine, all of this does not come cheap. A fully kitted out and ready to fly Mikrokopter Hexacopter, for example, can cost three or four thousand pounds, so buying one is not a decision to be taken lightly for most people.

Building Your Own Mikrokopter

You can save a lot of money by buying your mikrokopter in kit form. The downsides to doing this are that the kit does not come with any instructions, absolutely none at all, and there are only some vague how-to pages, badly translated from German, with out-of-date images on the Mikrokopter.de website. Plus there is quite a bit of soldering to do, including attaching some capacitors and a very fiddly little molex connector. However, there is a great deal of help out there from other people who have already built their own Mikrokopter, including myself, who have all gone through the same headache of deciphering the obscure instructions and will be only too happy to help you out. Mikrokpter.us has a helpful little forum, there is also a large community of MK users on rcgroups.com (though they do tend to bicker quite a bit at times and there are some Mikrokopter dissenters). If you prefer somewhere more intimate and, some might say, more productive and helpful you should also give the multirotorforums.com a try. If you're in the UK I can highly recommend buying from quadcopters.co.uk above anyone else. It is run by a guy called Geoff and he is incredibly helpful with all aspects of Mikrokopter ownership, from building them to setting up your radio to best suit your flying needs.

I love Mikrokopter

My Mikrokopter Hexa2 is the most complex drone, and the most expensive one, I ever bought. There are far simpler ways to get in the air, look out for the new DJI Wookong M (which I now have and will be attaching to an MK frame), but I do not regret anything about my Mikrokopter. It flies the best, lives up to what it proclaims much better than any other machine I've tried. The only times anything has gone wrong with my MK Hexa2 so far it has been my fault, unlike my other machine which have performed random crashes and flips on their own or, in the case of two xAircraft 650s I had, simply flown off to God knows where, never to be seen again. My Mikrokopter ascends and descends smoothly, moves when I tell it to and goes where I tell it to - for aerial photography you can't really ask for much more than that.