I went down to Gaithersburg last night to pick up a used drone from a nice man who spoke very little English. Thankfully the concepts of photography are pretty universal, so we were able to communicate well enough for me to feel comfortable with the purchase. It’s a DJI Mini 3, which is a small consumer level drone released in 2022. For the money, I got the drone, a controller, a battery, and a three-slot charger. The drone is in good shape and connected to my phone easily after he unpaired it from his account; I had it working with mine in less than five minutes. A quick test with an SD card confirmed the camera was working and recording, and a test flight in his living room proved it was working.

It’s good enough at this point for what I’ll be doing: stabilized 4K drone shots of projects and events, which is something I’ve been wanting to practice. I plugged my old iPhone SE2 into it and was pleased to find that DJI offers an older version of their Fly software that will run on it, which means I’ve got a dedicated video screen to work with.

Tomorrow I’ll take it out and do some test runs in the sunshine, and we’ll see how the whole package works.