Hobby,

Building and Flying FPV Racing Drones

After my graduate studies, I had more free time to expend on several personal projects honing some of my skills such as HTML, CSS and PHP coding for web development or video editing with Premiere Pro. I also worked on my program coding skills and experiment with Arduino platforms like when I built one of those cool LED cubes and coded some new effects on to it.
But the area that really drew me in was building and flying quad copters. It all started by just learning to fly one of those simple toy quads (the good old Syma X5), but I soon wanted to build one from scratch. I had the basic knowledge to do it, so after watching some YouTube videos I went ahead and bought my first quad copter parts. I wanted to build a racing FPV drone but in Iran it was not easy at the time to find quality parts, so I ended up buying those that were available:

- QAV280 frame, old CC3d flight controller, T-motor air200 2000kv motors, old Hobbywing X20 Amp electronic speed controllers and a bad 3s 1800mAh battery without any FPV system.

It took me 2 weeks to assemble the quad because back then one-shot ESC protocol was the next big thing and I wanted to absolutely try it. Only that my ESCs were preloaded with a proprietary software from Hobbywing (the boot loader was also locked) and I had to load the BLhelli software on them to be able to use one-shot. But after some fiddling I’ve got it done and the quad was ready.

Then I added FPV equipment, started to use 4s batteries and fly in acro mode learning to coordinate my turns and doing acrobatic tricks.

I later added GPS, started to use iNav and fiddled with telemetry information which was nice but the quad was lacking general speed and agility and after some hard crashes it started to have serious noise and vibration problems. So I built my next drone:

- QAC-X 210 frame, AirBot F4 flight controller, Cicada V2 Dshot600 ESCs, Emax 2205S 2600kv motors, FPV equipment and some good 4s 1300mAh batteries

Let’s see some flying action:

Recently I built a small 2 inch quad as a fun park flyer. It’s a tiny 2s, 80mm drone with 1103 motors weighing only 45gr (without battery) with micro swift camera and full OSD. I first had a bad noise problem with it causing ESC desyncs. The flight controller was already soft mounted so I added a low ESR capacitor and increased the minimum motor speed which completely solved the problem. I also had to tune the PID controller significantly to make it fly as I wanted but after these tweaks the quad flies just like a 5 inch quad : in absolute control.