Just getting my commercial drone license added to my ATP license, and wanted to see if there were any drone people here. I was into RC way back in the day, but haven’t been flying things I can’t get into since the late 90’s.
Looking at stepping into the drone realm but don’t have the cash or desire to drop $1.5K on a Mavic Pro. Would love to build something and have looked through the DMS QuadCopter Build Wiki, but wondering if there’s anything more up to date since the tech seems to be moving pretty quickly. Ideally, I’d start with a build kit that I could crash a few times, then scale it up. Would love to buy some used equipment from someone who tried it out and realized it wasn’t for them.
Hey, I too started recently on drones. A word of caution, don’t try to fly them near the trees the unless you are a pro. You know why? Because they get stuck in the trees. I lost $175 on first 10 mins of my flying a new racer drone.
I would suggest to buy off the shelf BNF drone from Gearbest or Banggood. It would be cheaper that way. Individually parts are bit on higher side. Warning: They tend to arrive really slow from China.
If you are looking for a remote control, I would suggest taranis x9d plus.
It’s pretty easy to DIY. A couple of years ago I built a DIY drone. I used a frame that’s a clone of a DJI F450, a PX4 flight controller and GPS from Hobbyking, motors and ESCs from amazon/ebay, Taranis Plus R/C gear. There’s tons of information on RC Groups and reddit’s /r/multicopter and /r/diydrones subs. DIYing is mostly assembling and soldering and making sure you plug the right things into the right ports on the FC.
It’s definitely big enough to carry a 3-axis GoPro gimbal that I have saved on Thingiverse if I ever get around to it.
I find it’s way more funner to fly micro quads around the house and torment the dogs and cats, though.
I was going to 3d print a frame, then hook up an arduino and a few sensors (gyro, maybe gps and voltage feedback). First goal would be to just have it stay relatively stationary - then I’d work on accepting some sort of RC input. I’m sure there’s already some flight controller software that does this - not sure if I’d want to DIY that or just use someone else’s.
Initially, it’d basically be a micro drone that just stays stable.
I also wanted to get some experience in sourcing parts, experimenting with different DC motors, etc.
Probably more interest/curiosity than realized.
Nor sure what happened to RC/Aerospace.
If there’s enough interest, I can see RC/Drones being a SIG under Digital Media and/or Electronics.
I would actually never buy from banggood, save for one or two things.
Though the one I have which I’ve been modding is a UDI U841 which is on amazon and microcenter. Of course this is because I need something that I can hack on including the firmware since my use case is something small, uses standard off the shelf props, I’m able to interchange between different batteries quickly and also able to install an esp8266.
So the real question comes to what your needs in a drone? Are you building a racing drone, something to fly for the fun of it, or a 3rd person flying camera?
Yes, trying to get into the Racing FPV. But it opened up lots of things regarding the utility of drones. I was quite fascinated to see Intel getting the drones to talk to each other. I am looking for some challenging work on it.
Also it gave me the some insights into how drone works.
I guess I’d like to start with something cheap and easy that I can bang up, fix, and fly while I learn the basics of controlling them (both visually and FPV). Then the idea is to eventually grow it to use it as a flying camera later on. I do enough international flying that having a good video drone might be interesting. While I can eventually see a Mavic Pro as something easy to travel with, I figure I’d like to get the hang of flying them before dropping $1500 on something I might not even like using.
But from the sound of it you’ll most likely be able to grow with something like a Parrot Mambo then once your comfortable graduate to something more “professional”
Then check out Mr Steele he has been in the top rankings for FPV racing ('ell he’s out flown a few IRL falcons that where attacking his drones in a few videos) and put together a video guide on all that is FPV
As for banggood, their just the UK branch of Alibaba so most of the products on there are more hit or miss than a pokemon card on ebay. For FPV one wants quality not quantity, this is something else that’s brougth up in the video linked above.
to fly micro quads around the house and torment the dogs and cats, though.