MJX Bugs 12 Drone Review
It has optical flow positioning and has plenty of automated features such as waypoints. Follow me circle me, return to home, auto takeoff, auto land and plenty of others, so let’s check it out. Now the drone comes in this compact gray case and it is a portable easy to carry case with a handle here at the top and a strap. So a very easy convenient case and it is made out of pretty good material. There aren’t any external pockets, but it is very easy to access with these two zippers here in the front and so we’ll open it up, and there is a styrofoam there that protects. The drone. There’S is one internal pocket here, with some netting and in there you’ll find all the accessories and goodies such as the instruction manuals with these typical bugs stickers, and then we also have some little pouches here and bags with the charge. Cable, the usbc type c charge. Cable and then we have the spare propellers two sets of them with a small screwdriver. So those are the uh extra accessories there and then here’s everything on the inside all nice and neatly packed away in different compartments. And this is the three battery set and you can get this in one two or three batteries, either with a box or a case. But now looking at the battery it’s a 7.6 volt 3400 milliamp lipo battery and it is somewhat of a smart battery as you can always look at the charge on it by just double tapping the power button here and seeing this has a full charge.
And then you can simply turn it off by double tapping it again. It does charge here on the side through a usb type c cable, and it does have a little latch to clip into the drone now taking a closer look here at the drone. This is a very sleek compact drone here here you could see it’s a remote, tilting 4k camera with eis electronic image stabilization and it does tilt 90 degrees downwards. Looking down below, we have our two landing lights and our optical flow camera. Right here, and as mentioned, this is a folding drone and it’s very easy to fold and unfold. You simply start with the front legs followed by the rear ones, and here it is all expanded and it looks very cool. It highly resembles a dji mavic with a dark gray tone, and you could see it says eis there on the arms, so really neat. Looking quadcopter now taking a closer look here at the controller it too folds out, starting with the antennas, they are foldable antennas and, as you can see, this left one has some wiring behind it, so it is valid and then the arm grips here also fold out. So very neat and then of course we have the fold out mobile device mount here at the top and it does stretch quite a bit to hold a pretty large cell phone. But not a tablet. And here we have its lcd display to show all sorts of telemetry and in the back it takes two double a batteries, so nice cool transmitter there and so now, let’s take a closer look at the drone.
Now, taking a closer look at the drone, this is a very sleek looking drone that highly resembles a dji mavic or something of that sort, and it does have a dark gray tone to it. And here in the front, you could see its 4k remote tilting camera that tilts using a servo motor, not a brushless motor, and it does tilt 90 degrees and has electronic image stabilization and here on the arm. You could see it says: 4k, eis, 30 frames per second 130 degree field of view, and it is a brushless motor drone with 1306 2750 kv motors. Here is its optical flow sensor or camera, and there are two bright led landing lights right there below as well. Here you could see its sd card slot and i believe it takes up to 128 gigs of sd card, and here you could see the battery that has its uh usb type c charge slot and it does remove using a little latch there on the side and It is foldable and it’s quite easy to fold and unfold here, we’re folding it away by starting with the rear legs and then folding over the front ones, and you have to make sure that the folding propellers align and, as you can see, it’s all compact and Portable ready to store away and looks very sleek and then the process to fold it back out is equally easy. Just start out with the front legs followed by the rear and as you can see, it’s all expanded out here and looks very sleek.
Taking a look here at the battery, we just unlatch it, and this is a 7.6 volt, 3400 milliamp lipo battery that charges through this usb type c port, and it is a smart battery, as it shows an indication of the level of charge in this case it’s Fully charged and then we double tap the power button to turn it off or to turn it on, and it does take around four hours to fully charge and provides the quadcopter with around the 22 minute flight time. Here you could see the inner bay that houses the battery and overall uh it’s, a very sleek looking drone here and it’s very compact and easy to use, and so now let’s take a closer look at its transmitter. Now, taking a closer look at the transmitter, this is a very comfortable and compact dji, like controller and here in the back. It does take two double a batteries in this compartment held in place with a cover and down below it. Has these two foldable arms or grips so you could have a good, firm, secure grip while holding the controller here at the top. We have foldable antennas and this left one does have some wiring, so it is a valid antenna and it also has this fold out mobile device mount or clip and it’s built in and can hold a pretty large cell phone, but not quite a tablet. So it stretches out quite a bit there and then, of course everything can be folded back into place and put back into a position where the controller’s all compact.
Now going over the controls, we have the left, throttle, stick followed by the right rudder stick and then we have the motor lock and unlock button right. Here we have the power switch on this side. Then we have the photo and video button where short presses for photos. Long press for video here is the return to home button. Here we have the auto, take off and land button, and then we have on this side the speed adjustment and led landing light button. Where you can activate the lights, underneath the drone and on each side we have what appear to be these roller wheels, but only one of them works this one here on the right and that’s where you would adjust the camera angle up to 90 degrees, and then Here on the right, we have the gps switch, so we can turn on and off gps mode and now going over the lcd display. We have the number of satellites, the mode then also the height and distance, and the signal strength of the drone and also the battery levels of both the drone and transmitter and whether gps is enabled or not so, a lot of good telemetry and indicators. Here on this display and then that’s in addition to whatever shown on the phone display as well, so a very good transmitter that provides the drone with around an 800 meter to kilometer range of control. So now let’s take a look at setting this up.
For a first time flight and the app now setting up for a first time, flight is very straightforward. Once you have a fully charged battery inserted into the drone along with an sd card and have a fresh set of batteries inserted into the transmitter along with the mobile device mounted, you would proceed to activate the drone by double pressing the battery at the top of The drone, until it activates once it’s activated, you would bind to the transmitter by pressing the red unlock button and switching on the controller, and it should bind automatically out of the factory and once it’s bound. You would wait a few seconds until prompted to do the gyro calibration for the gps, and so you should see an icon on the transmitter screen and then you would rotate the drone about three or four spins clockwise on its flat horizontal axis. Until you see the lights change once you see the light, color and pattern change, then you would face the camera upwards and then rotate the drone, another three or four spins clockwise on its vertical axis, until the lights change once again, now that you see the different Pattern, you would set it down and then wait for it to connect the satellites. All the lights should turn green. But while we wait for the satellites to connect, we will connect to the drone’s wi fi, using the app so let’s go ahead and do that now. Now, once in your mobile devices, wi fi settings, you want to find an entry that says drone 4e underscore and the serial number and you’d want to connect to that, and there is no default wi fi password or anything like that.
So you can go ahead and just connect to that entry and once connected you’d want to go ahead and launch this app right here, which is mrc pro, and it has a little drone, icon and it’s in both the ios and android app stores. So you’d launch that and you’ll be greeted with this screen right here and in this screen. You do have some basic settings like the language that you can change and some tutorial videos, but primarily you’d, want to click this start option here. You will see help pages showing you what all the icons mean, such as this one showing how to set waypoints on the map, and then you will have a connection to the live, fpv feed of the drone and, as you can see, we’re connected to the drone’s 5G wi fi fpv feed and it is very clear, there’s very little latency and, as you can see, it’s somewhat stabilized there, so very clear, fpv feed with the drone and the range of this fpv feed is around five to six hundred meters. So a pretty good video range with uh, clear, reliable feed that has very little lag or latency, and so now taking a closer look at the app. The app has a lot of telemetry at the bottom, such as distance, height, vertical and horizontal speeds, and then we have our map view on the lower corner, and then we have this digital zoom here, which is not optical, but it is a digital zoom.
Up to 50 times, and then we have our camera settings here and video settings we can set to 4k or 1080p and then we have settings here for saturation exposure, hue contrast, brightness color levels so on and so forth. And then here we have some frame rate options right over here for the video modes, so a lot of different uh and camera settings and options in this area and then right on this side. We have our special modes of flight, such as follow me headless mode orbit mode, so on and so forth, and then we have our auto takeoff and land options there return to home up here we have certain functions, such as fpv view mode or the option to Remove all the icons from the screen and then we have some additional drone settings right up here, where you can set the maximum distance or height or speed or perform gyro and gps calibrations. And then you have some additional settings here to either enable or disable, and then you also have some flight logs and things of that nature. So a lot of different settings in there. You got your photo and video gallery and the battery levels of the drone and transmitter so a lot of good telemetry and indicators on the drone also for gps connectivity, so a very feature, rich app. That provides a lot of information and telemetry while in use. So, overall, a very good drone, especially for the price.
The electronic image. Stabilization works very well. The footage and video comes out very smooth, and the drone itself is a smooth flyer, although it could have been a little faster and sportier in the higher rates of speed. But it flies very well, given that it is a camera drone. It also would have been nice if the remote tilting camera would run off of a brushless motor instead of a servo motor.
