No offense, but RC radio's have been using automatic frequency selection and frequency hopping for decades.  You will find it in $50 radio's.
But that doesnt solve the high bandwidth needed for digital video, that problem is inherent.
And if you have never gone out of range, I have to wonder what range you have been flying at. Here is someone testing it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGqdXEbtFVI

yeah, impressive tech 

OMG, who'd have thought?



thanks for reporting though.

You cant do 'tricks' at any distance. The combination of (very) high latency and self stabilizing doesnt let you do any high speed proximity or precision flying whatsoever, or any real acro flying.


Yes, like a steerable balloon. Thats not at all what I meant when I said  dynamic. Try flying with any precision at speed. The bebop is like a mars rover, its high tech, Im sure its accurate, great camera's, but it takes ages for your control input to show up on your not-so-live video and no one would claim it handles like a sports car, even if it could drive reasonably fast in straight line.


I suspect those range claims are as exaggerated as the normal flying range. I think you will agree with me that it doesnt really do 2KM without the skycontroller, or even anything close to it.

More over, its using the 2.4 GHz band. If it was bad where I was flying (in the middle of nowhere) I hate to think how it would perform in more urban environments stuffed with 2.4 GHz wifi equipment. I also hate the fact that its not only video thats affected, but control as well.  I can live with brief video glitches, but control glitches will make me crash. The way I fly, 'return to home' isnt going to save my drone, its gonna crash it or park it in a tree. My flight controller is perfectly capable of it, but its turned off as I have far more use for a radio controlled beeper to help me locate the quad

lastly I hate the fact that using wifi makes it all but impossible to fly with several drones. At one of my favorite flying places there is one person flying a DJI phantom with wifi 'fpv', and that pretty much grounds everyone else as his wide spectrum link kills everything in his neighborhood. Without him, we can fly an unlimited number of planes and quads line of sight and we've had up to 6 FPV quads and planes in the air simultaneously without trouble. Try flying just 2 bebops in formation.


I guess Im peeved because its such a missed opportunity. The camera tech really is nice,  but using wifi, its not an FPV experience. Unless the 'P' stands for passenger.

From what I know and understand:
1: Probably, but you will obviously need to provide some address where they can send the card. My card was sent with regular mail, not registered or signed for. And you wont be able to upgrade to verified if you started out with a fake name. Also be aware the name is printed on the card,  so to avoid issues at least provide a normal sounding dummy name.
2. See their faq or here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=917350.msg10085302#msg10085302
3. Who knows. They just started out and so far Im the only one who reported buying and receiving their card. Their visa provider does seem legitimate though
4. See 2.
5. Its working for me

For the oompth time, the gaw rating is for their cloudmining offer, and mostly SHA at that, as I dont give a satoshi about altcoins.
Yes their paycoin stinks to high heaven, but that doesnt mean Im going to pull numbers out of thin air to change the rating, no more than I change say KnC's rating for the stunts they have pulled off. The points they scored, they earned. And please note that their score is barely better then some confirmed/defunct ponzi's. How you can see that as an endorsement is beyond me.

bebop is fine if you want a flying camera, and I can appreciate many people want a flying camera, sometimes I want one too.
But its not what you want to fly, dynamically it just doesnt compare to 250 quads. I mean you cant even fly acro mode with it -and no, pressing a button to do a preprogrammed flip isnt flying acro. Did you see any of the video's I linked?

Also you can ignore the latency issue, but thats the only thing that makes 45mph scary (well, that and the fact you get out of range in seconds because that 2 Km range is a complete joke, at 0.2Km it became all but unflyable)  I estimate the latency of the bebop to be in the 3-500ms range at best and multiple seconds at worst. Even the best number is about the delay they use in drunk driving simulators and is completely unacceptable for any sort of precision flying. I can not even fly properly with the video lag of a mobius or gopro, which is "only" 120ms.

Then you mentioned lenses, you can of course put any camera and lens on a mini that you want. Most of us fly with 2 camera's, one wide angle CCD for lag free FPV, one mobius/gopro/.. for recording. I wouldnt mind mounting a bebop camera to record, but I sure as heck wouldnt want to fly with it (unless I want a flying camera).

Lastly, you want analog video for FPV. Not just for the latency, but when I get out of optimal range, I can still see where Im going without any real problem even when >50% of screen is static and noise, but I cant see where Im going if a poor connection results in multisecond pauzes and freezes.

To each his own I guess, but a bebop to me is more like a steerable hotair balloon that carries a nice camera,  than a racing quad. Flying balloons is nice too though .

When it comes to trusting anyone with your money, of course you should assume 'guilty' unless proof of the contrary (ie legitimacy) is offered. Do you send money to any random nigerian prince emailing you offers of high returns, just because no one has proven, or even is able to prove he is a fraud?

Aim your question of "definite proof" to the operators, and if they refuse to provide any, you can safely bet its yet another ponzi scam.

Flew a bebop last week and wasnt impressed. Now Im more used to fast and agile 250 class FPV 'mini' quads (pretty big and heavy compared to a bepop)  based around multiwii/naze32/etc flight controllers, and to be fair, thats a different product and market than what ardrone is going for. Yes, the digital video stabilization is impressive, if they ever sell the camera standalone, I will buy a few in a heartbeat. But the bebop flies like a turd and FPV flying through wifi just doesnt compare to traditional FPV equipment.  Range is a big issue (I can easily fly 1Km with my mini's, 10+Km with my fixed wings), but latency a far bigger one.

So if you like your bebop, consider buying a 'real' mini quad, some blackout mini H knock off and a decent pair of FPV goggles preferably from Skyzone. You will never look back. I may change my opinion if anyone posts a bebop video that looks anything remoltely like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDP28sOkSe0
or this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXxsofy1z7g
(and has not been sped up )

Greed and stupidity.

Another question: is the charging of the card limited to office/banking hours, or can it be done 24/7 ?

Im surprised they can see an invalid attempt.
But.. yep, it works now.
I probably did mistype. Sorry

edit: just made my first purchase: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.coffeestainstudios.goatsimulator

 

BTW, kudo's to the fastest support ever.

Yeah, title is nonsensical and sensationalist. If you created the cold wallet on a compromised PC, of course its not going to be secure and there are 100x easier ways to steal the coins from such wallet.

I have no need for large sums, I just like to buy day to day stuff "with bitcoin" this way for as long as there are still relatively few places to spend btc directly.
Im also not keen on providing such information to anyone, no offense, but  much less a new service that I seem to be the very first customer of . The risk of abuse and hacking/ ID theft is not imaginary

That said, I dont have a reputation for endorsing any products or services on this forum, so that Im liking this so far does say something. If anyone else was interested in this service, but fearful, I suggest you do as I did, try it out with small amounts.

I got no text, but I probably didnt provide my actual phone number. I dont see the need anyway, dont we all have email on our phones?
So you may want to make the phone number updatable in the account page, and allow users to turn on/off notifications.

Gotta say, assuming the card works, Im pretty impressed by this service.
Im not gonna vouch for the long term viability (I fear Mychoice may not like what you're doing) or even for the question you will or wont one day run off, but if you can improve your trustworthiness, you have a very good product here.

I realize this is pretty much beta, so Im gonna post every minor issue I encounter.

First of all, it seems you require 3 confirmations ? It might be a good idea to show unconfirmed transactions, just not allow selling/transferring them. I would also suggest you make the number of requires confirmations dependent on the amount. Id accept zero or 1 confirmations for tiny amounts, and require more for larger transactions.

Secondly, very minor issue, but when the account page loads, it shows zero balance. After a second or two it updates to the correct amount, but I can imagine some people getting a shock if they expected to see a significant amount and get shown zero.

Next, I tried withdrawing my BTC to my card, I put the entire balance as amount (all of 0.1 BTC, taking a huge leap of faith here ), but it failed because I didnt have enough funds. Thats because you deduct the fees after the transaction/conversion. That makes it almost impossible to withdraw the entire balance. Just deduct the fees before the conversion, so I end up with less $ on the card, but with the entire amount of BTC I intended to withdraw.

So I tried again with a smaller amount (0.095 btc), and then I got an error when I clicked to confirm: "Object reference not set to an instance of an object.". Clicking "confirm" a second time made it accept.

I instantly got an email stating the loading was completed. Is it really that fast? If I where doing this in front of an ATM, would I be able to withdraw the money literally seconds after withdrawing my btc on your site?

Anyway, now off to search something to spend my $20 on to see if the card actually works

I didnt know hashnest resumed. Ill check and update that in a second
cryptx dissolved their mine, and I moved gaw to obsolete as they are no longer in (PoW) cloud mining business

Activation on your site was a doddle (assuming it actually worked).
trying to send some btc to my account now, first 0.001 BTC seems to have arrived.
Havent called mychoice yet for a pin, is the card usable for online transactions if I dont?

Spotted this on the faq: "We also require 5 block chain confirmations to deposit bitcoins to your account, on average it might take up to 10 minutes."
10 minutes for 5 confirmations seems a bit optimistic

Thanks, added.
Also moved obsolete services to their own list