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Readers in the UK will all remember bearded TV “celebrity” Noel Edmunds appearing fresh faced from behind the control stick of his helicopter gunship, gurning at cameras at whichever charity even he had decided to grace with his presence. Well, now us mere peons can pretend to be a celebrity in our own rights with what RadioShack are obviously hoping will be the toy of the Christmas season - the Micro Mosquito RC helicopter. Watch the Micro Mosquito buzz around after the jump!
Fitting, as is obvious from this photo (unless they chose a man with mammoth hands), in the palm, and using the ingenious BladeRunner double-propeller system which relies on a coaxial rotor to make piloting the ‘chopper as easy as stroking a tame chipmunk. A three-channel digital remote controls up & down motion, forward & reverse, turning left & right and even allows the Mosquito to hover.
With two frequencies available, you could feasibly buy a pair of them and have Airwolf style sky battles, though you’d have to rely on the glowing green “eyes” to scare your opponent out of the air.
The landing pad charging station introduces an element of challenge to wannabe pilots, being as it is not much greater in diameter than the stretch of the helicopter’s legs. If you can manage to get it hovering in front of your eyes, then you can even see the internals working thanks to the open bodywork.
Micro Mosquito was announced at the Pepcom Inc. Holiday Spectacular! technology showcase, which brings together over 30 of the leading computer software, consumer electronics, wireless, and services companies to hawk their lovely wares for journalists and store representatives prior to the festive season. We’re working on getting a review unit in, so that we can practise dive-bombing the FedEx guy whenever he comes into the office.
The Micro Mosquito retails for $69.99 or thereabouts, and should be available now.
More images of the Micro Mosquito in the gallery. Micro Mosquito at Interactive Toy
Nice - this article made it on Kevin Rose #1 story of the day!
it amaze me how toys gets more high tech each day
and it’s affordable!
I feel that your product is a great way to kill the boardum and restraint of turning on the video game in my livingroom. I can fly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I bought one for my brother today from Radio Shack.. It’s got to be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I even went and bought the extra pieces for him for 10 bucks!
These seem like the coolest things in the world.. both in theory and right out of the box. But once you get over your first jitters and get steady on the controls you may see that the thing is generally uncontrollable. It goes up and down and rotates just fine. Forwards and backwards, however, seems to be a pipe dream.
We bought 2 for our office a few days ago, visions of helicopter fights and co-worker harassment dancing in our heads. But even after mastering a stable hover, we cannot get the damb thing to move. It seems like the tail prop isn’t powerful enough to tilt the copter forward or backwards, and it appears that it (the tail prop) causes a powerful enough disruption of the air to destabilize the main rotors at times. We tried attaching the “kit” to increase forward speed (I say “kit” because it’s just a collection of rubber weights to attach near the front of the bird — I suppose a bit of rolled up tape would suffice equally well), and I tried augmenting the rear props with some tape (to increase surface area), but to no avail. Of course, the micro-sized rear motor is extremely weak as-is.
Further, when other people/the instructions/etc say that it’s for “indoor use”, that is a vast understatement. You really have to use it in a room where the air has not been disturbed for hours. In our office environment, wind from moving people and air vents (even may feet away) can hopelessly destabilize the ‘copter (at worst) or cause it to drift around randomly (at best).
While I’m not one to bemoan a product easily, especially one that requires some skill to use properly, we have 2 identical units and a number of both coordinated and intelligent testers, and no-one could move this thing in a satisfactory manner.
I am, however, impressed by the durability of the helicopter, despite its apparent flimsy construction. But I think one of its main selling points — its tiny size and low weight — is also its biggest downfall, making it unstable in even the tiniest breeze.
But that’s just my opinion. Maybe with more practice and/or some more tweaking I’ll be singing its praises.
hi hola alguien me entiend?
I fly my Micro mosquito in my living room and it is very controllable. I can take off from a bar stool, fly around the room, hover over my head and land in the palm of my hand. It is slow (maybe 1 mph) but it is very controllable.
There are a few tricks you can do to increase forward speed. Attaching more weight to the front is one thing. Tweaking the SW3 pot in the transmitter will give the tail rotor more power.
It really does not handle any kind of wind at all. Also, it gets drawn into walls or the ceiling if you get within a foot or so of them. Luckily it can survive some pretty wild crashes with no damage.
Just wanted to say that yes, this is a bit difficult to control. But I love it
Broke my heart. I couldn’t get mine off the ground. It just sat there clicking and sputtering. Bad unit I guess, but it left a bad taste in my mouth for the Canadian Interactive folks.
To be correct it does not have ‘full’ control, it doesn’t have left & right cyclic. I fly proper r/c helis so just thought you should know that.
The Micro Mosquito is an amazing little device. Although it lacks “precision flight,” It does however fly, hover, and change directions with little effort. With practice and tweaking, the copter is mostly controlable in all directions and, is stable for a good amount of time. Amazingly it takes only 25-30 minutes to charge with 7-10 minutes of flight with each charge.
My Mosquito was a bit tricky to get used to but once you tweak the rotors and fly it around a bit you’ll find it is quite controlable. I pretty mush just lean on the forward flight and concentrate on keeping the tail pointed in the right direction and it kind of swings towards where you want it to go. I still think the forward flight is too slow and I don’t realy want to add more weight as when the batteries are near low she only flies about 12″ off the ground using the ground effect to keep her up.
A co-worker thought it would be funny and shot the skeeter out of the air with a spring metal paper holder and tore one of the rotors. I used some clear packing tape (the scotch tape I used at first was too flimsy and wouldn’t last) and repaired it and it works perfect - no difference in flight controls
Hey Drew - I have my tramsmitter apart now where’s the SW3 pot and how do I tweak it to get more power out of the tail rotor?
Hey, Larry, mine didn’t work out of the box until we realized that the rotor cogwheels come off of the drive shaft very easily - you might just need to click the cogwheel back into contact with the teeth of the driveshaft.
I am going to try taking mine back - despite using the trim control and following the troubleshooting directions, bending every rotor blade, the helicopter will not stop spinning right. On top of that the plastic silver paint on the rotor chipped, and the antenna on the remote snapped off when I closed it at one point.
I never got more than about 4-5 minutes of flight, and now, after 12ish flights, it won’t raise higher than several inches. Obviously something’s broken but no idea what, and I have had it for about 12 hours.
Finally, the helicopter was basically uncontrollable, but I think that was largely due to having to compensate for the clockwise spin with the remote.
I think this is a good toy, but it really needs a little bit more work, maybe a microprocessor to automate some of the basic things, like trim.
Ca à l’air d’être un super gadget. Dommage qu’aucune enseigne en France ne le vende.
Il n’y a que sur Ebay qu’on puisse le trouver.
i havent even gotten the thing yet because they are all sold out but i have one on order. i was just trying to find more out about it but everyone seems to be putting it down. maybe i shouldnt get it and save for something better. but i still sort of want to get it just because some revews are good and some of the demo videos look awsome. please reply with a rating whoever has one and tell me why please and ill get back to you. im not too sure i should get it still. the new firefly looks cool though…
With statement quotes like these, is the author smoking crack?
quotes:
“Well, now us mere peons can pretend to be a celebrity in our own rights with what RadioShack are obviously hoping will be the toy of the Christmas season - the Micro Mosquito RC helicopter.”
What does being a celebrity have *anything* to do with this cool toy? It’s a toy! Celebrity status is irrelevant!
“Fitting, as is obvious from this photo (unless they chose a man with mammoth hands), in the palm, and using the ingenious BladeRunner double-propeller system which relies on a coaxial rotor to make piloting the ‘chopper as easy as stroking a tame chipmunk.”
Logically and sanely speaking, where does the author come up wiith a statement like this? I see the toy, a chipmunk, and mamoth in a run-on sentence. What substance(s) is he taking?
“…though you’d have to rely on the glowing green “eyes” to scare your opponent out of the air.”
Another nonsensical statement. What planet is he from? He gets paid for writing stuff like this?
Can sobody please tell me how sells the Micro Mosquito and ships it to Norway!
And is not sold out..
email please: dennis_oxaas@hotmail.com
-Dennis
I loved this thing when i got 1 but i have a problem…the thing spins uncontrolably. It wasn’t like when i first got it…i dont know whats wrong?
it barely even goes off the ground, and spinns about 5rotations/second counterclockwise. Cand anybody help me?
Matt, i think the gear might has been misaligned
I think it’s a great toy! Charges quickly, flies for 7 minutes and is easy to control. (compared to bigger 6 channel RC helicopters) You have to be gentle with the thing, but given it’s intricacies I think it is very durable. If you have never flown something like this before, then you have to be patient. I can fly the mosquito quite easily around my house and land it almost any ware. It has more controllability then any other mini RC helicopter I’ve ever flown.
~Chris
I previously owned a clever dragonfly with 3 ch, although forward and reverse were useless, was very stable and easy to fly. The mosquito is far superior but a little more difficult to control. Practise makes perfect. The forward and backward motions actually work but a little slow. I discovered that I could deliver more forward power to the tail rotor and increase motor speed from inside the transmitter.
Remove the 5 retaining screws and black plastic ring to the base of the aerial to split the receiver. Locate the internal servo for the forward direction. This is secured by a small nut. With a micro spanner loosen this nut and rotate the servo in a clockwise direction only about 1mm is available but this is enough to allow the joystick full travel to deliver max power to the tail. This dowside is that this reduces the amount of max power in the reverse position but you can’t have it both ways. Don’t forget to retighten the securing nut.
adjust the **** on the controller to stop the spinning!
There are a few spinning probelms reported in this thread. Especially Matt’s.
I bought one of these for a friend. Out of the box it was controllable, after initial trimming to stop the spin. We flew it a while and then, after a number of knocks, we could not stop it spinning using the trim control. When we looked very closely at the rotor blades, one of the tiny metal hinge pins (there is one on each blade) had come out and was lost. We wouldn’t have noticed except by close inspection as the rotor parts were still connected despite the absent pin. The rotor did have a looseness about it though.
We used a very short piece of fuse wire to fix it. It took some time to poke the wire into the hole where the hinge pin had been, and it has to be a tight fit. But then it was fine again. So just a tip; if you can’t stop it spinning, check whether the rotor hinge pins are OK.
I’m hoping my wife has taken the hint for my birthday!
Phil
thanks Phil!
I just got a Firefly a few days ago. (Just like the Mosquito minus the tail prop). It is a LOT of fun to fly. Like any heli, it takes time to learn how to fly it. The instructions explain what to do in case of a hard landing (like making sure the rotors gears align with the motor gears). I find that it is controllable in my house. But, stay away from walls, doorways and ceilings as the vacuum effect from the rotors tends to pull the heli toward them if you get within a couple of feet and destabilizes it.
For a heli, it takes quite a bit of abuse without significant damage. For $1000, you can buy a full size RC heli and crash it hard the first flight and game over!
Obviously this thing isn’t going to manuever like the larger RC heli’s. But, it’s a lot of fun for a beginner. Also, it teaches you some of the characteristics of flying a helicopter. So for short money, you learn some basic flying skills and can decide if you want continue in the hobby with more complex (and expensive) helicopters. I was speaking with Interactive Toy today and they were quite high on another model, the Bladerunner 2. I am enjoying this so much I may get one of these. http://www.interactivetoy.com/main.htm
i just got one a few days ago, had to take it back and exchange it for another, i had the same problem of it spinning one direction, in my case it was to the left (counter clockwise) the thing about that is that no two electric motors are exactly alike and all have a small difference in rpm, so in dual motor electronics such as these it can cause a few problems, how ever they added a trim dial to adjust this, very good, wish my old stelth i got from them had the same, as far as control ability, i have noticed a patern with mine, with hight about 5 to 12 inches off the ground it is very controlable with not much problem, however the higher you get the harder it gets, at about 4-5 feet off the ground is what i would call its ceiling, you can still control it at that hight, although will require practice, any higher than that it seems to become VERY unstable, but since most places have a ceiling not much higher than 8 feet its not much of a problem. charg time is long but most electronic RC’s do, 30 mins is about the average short for any rc worth the time and money, i leave those mini rc cars out cus they only cost about 5-10 bucks and last about that long in minuts before ether breaking or becomeing boring, however if you want super good quality/control youll have to pay more than 65 bucks, and trust me the real out door ones arnt much easyer to control at first and usally arnt as durable as this one.
Check out this little beauty. Obviously more pricey but blows the mosquito out of the water:
http://www.buzzflyer.co.uk/Sub...../p-97-313/
Looks like a lot of fun - have to get one… BTW are our schools really this deficient??
JassieK - ‘amazes’; jerry - ‘boredom’; Matthew - ‘it wasn’t like when I first got it’ (duh…) ’spins’; ChrisK - ‘anywhere’;
Great reviews guys.
It’s always handy to get a customer point of view, still undecided as to which indoor model to get
Good going Ron - Always good to see someone who is more interested in spell-Checking everyone else’s posts than providing any real information. Don’t bother in future.
hahahaha our school system failed us, they need more funding!
I found the forward flight very weak although otherwise a great little chopper. I tried approx. doubling the tail rotor blade area while keeping the same diameter, using a single thickness of scotch tape stuck on one side of each blade and scissor-trimmed to a tapered planform with size roughly twice the original chord (blade width). Took five minutes. Test flight shows very positive forward flight capability and I now can fly figure eights square patterns, etc. As to be expected, it does make it a bit more “twitchy” in yaw (left/right rotation) but not too bad. As a retired full-scale rotor blade/propeller engineer, I find this an amazingly durable and well-engineered product and a barrel of fun.
yea, im getting a new one off ebay… i hope i like it im a first time flyer.
it seems fun and i got it for 35 bucks! =]
Just keep practicing!!!. These little bugs DO fly very well once you get the hang of it ! :-)
Mario
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I got one of these gizmos through eBay and I spent the whole week-end doing nothing else but flying it… and tweaking it. The first tweak was to attach some weights to the front, to make it balanced. If your mosquito seems to fly backwards when it should be stationary, this is a recommended tweak. I experimented by sticking different pieces of metal to the mosquito’s front with tape, until I found the ideal weights, which I epoxied permanently.
The second tweak was to make sure the tail rotor was horizontal. Mine was rotated a bit, and although the effect was probably negligible, I could easily correct it by heating the tail boom under a lamp and applying some torque.
The third tweak was increasing the tail rotor surface by sticking a few layers of scotch tape to the blades, and cutting them into a nice symmetrical ‘rotor’ shape. However, the increase in forward speed wasn’t spectacular. I believe the main problem with the design is that the helicopter is too damn good at stabilizing itself. The main rotor hinges are so flexible that they will counter any attempt at tilting them. So I used a third tweak which I haven’t encountered yet on any forum.
The third tweak was tilting the tail rotor so it leans forward (by about 15 degrees). The effect is that you get some actual forward thrust from the rotor itself. It’s quite tricky to do, because you have to apply the right amount of heat to be able to bend the little plastic part in which the tail motor is embedded, without completely melting it. I removed the main and tail rotors and held the tail end under a 60W spotlight. Then, using a piece of cloth (hot plastic!), I could bend the motor forward. Don’t even think about bending the carbon fiber boom. Although it can be twisted, the carbon fibers will laugh at attempts to bend it. Mind that this tweak will make flying backwards even more unstable than it already is, because even more air will be blown into the main rotor. But forward flight will improve noticeably.
A last tweak isn’t for the faint of heart and is only useful to slightly increase the battery life. I completely disassembled the mosquito down to the circuit board, and located the two microscopic SMD resistors that limit the current to the LED eyes, and replaced them with larger values (from 100Ohm to 700Ohm). This makes the LEDs draw less than 1/4th of their original power, which is hardly noticeable but probably gets me about a minute of extra flight time.
Of course, all these tweaks will completely vaporize any warranty. I deny every responsibility if they damage your helicopter. Perform them at your own risk.
There’s one thing left that bothers me: if the remote is not near to the mosquito (or the antenna isn’t fully extended), it will momentarily lose RC contact when the tail motor spins. The drop-out only lasts a fraction of a second, but makes the whole helicopter fall by about an inch. When continually pushing the ‘forward’ stick, the drop-outs will occur every second. Having seen the internals of the mosquito, I believe this is caused by interference from the tail motor. Its tiny power wires run right next to the antenna and aren’t shielded or twisted. The motor probably produces lots of high-frequency harmonics which interfere with the RC signal. Fixing this (if possible at all), will require a second complete disassembly.
Wow, awesome in so many ways. Its so hard to belive that sumthing so small can do so much… it has its ups and downs… im on my third one right now all the others broke… even this one is still broke one of the legs broke off and i had to use the hot glue gun to get it back on =( im not really the heli kind of person i like planes but still the micro mosquito i would put to the top of my list. i have done some tweaking to it so it could fly a bit better, im just too scared to mod it because last time i tried to mod it it broke. i like to bring it to work just for fun in my cubicle and fly it around the office and bug people haha… i have not got cought yet but maybe i will some day… enough about my ways of useing it, THE MICRO MOSQUITO ROCKS!!!
Mine just spins like crazy. It has been doing that since I got it. I hope it wasnt damaged by the subsequent crashes it got. I think it’s going take some twaeaking.
I had alot of fun with the mosquito, but not even 2 days after I had it, It broke. I call the company. They had me ship it back to them which cost me alot since it was international. Two weeks later I get it back. I opened it and it was more broke than when I shipped it to them. I called them and told them they sent me a firefly to replace the broken mosquito. I don’t think that was fair.