By Kieran Schmidt-Das

Brief introduction

Hello everyone,

To pass my middle school, I am required to complete a project of my own choosing. I chose to buy a quadcopter and then carry out an experiment with it. This was the first quadcopter that I have bought and I had no previous experience of quadcopters. This forum has been immensely helpful about everything from, what quadcopter I should buy, how to fly a quadcopter and smaller things such as should I purchase a different battery. Because this forum has been really helpful, I thought I would try and give back to this community by sharing the results of my experiments with it. Without this community, I would definitely have failed my project.

What my experiment is

Oh yeah, before you look at my data let me quickly explain what the experiment actually was.

I attached weights to my quadcopter and measure how weight affects the battery life of a quadcopter. (the quadcopter I used was the Parrot AR Drone 2.0) The reason I did this, was because I wanted to see the effect that cameras have on the battery life of a quadcopter. The main factor that they affect is battery life, because they are heavy.

Here is my data

Weight added (g)

Battery life (s)




















As we can see, battery life is affected by weight, however not by that much. To give context to this experiment, and make it relevant to this community, a gopro (a favored camera by many on this site, from my experience) weighs in at 130 grams.

Two things to note, First, more weight could not be added without losing control of the quadcopter This was because all the tests were done at the lowest setting, so that clear trends in the data could be found, as well as to keep consistency throughout. The drone could probably carry more, however this would significantly reduce the battery life. Secondly, the Parrot Ar Drone 2.0 power edition only weighs 380g, which makes it a mid league quadcopter, not the best suited to carry a camera in the first place.

Source: DIY Drones
