I actually bought one of these Best Buy refurbs, along with a new gimbal to go with it.
When they arrived, the new gimbal was missing parts, but the drone was 100 percent perfect in appearance. It really looked like it had never been unboxed.
I set the gimbal aside, and decided to fly the drone. I've got a friend who has a Solo, so we went through the full checklist and set everything up right.
I hit the button, and the motors spun up...everything looked great until I hit "fly". It launched and basically went nuts. it was like it couldn't keep a GPS lock, and it refused to come to home. I finally got it to the ground, and then it wouldn't shut off. Before it could take off again, we managed to get the power switched off.
We ran through the entire setup again, and tried again. This time, the front props spun up, and the back ones stayed at idle speed, so the drone basically did a backflip and landed upside down on the pavement. With the front props still trying to launch it, it was tough to catch-it was skittering all over the parking lot. Once we did, we realized it had more problems than we could deal with.
I started by contacting 3DR. Unlike what some folks have posted, they said that they would be happy to take a look at the flight logs, and that they actually had seen pretty good results from the Geek Squad refurbs-at least that's what I was told in the email I received. However they noted that it would be a good 3 weeks before they could look at the flight logs, so I decided to just return the drone.
I took it back to my local store, showed them the video we'd shot of what it did, and they took the whole thing back.
Looking today, I see the drone and gimbal with the backpack are on sale for 199 for both pieces, so I may have to try again.
