I have been flying model aircraft, fixed wing, helicopters, multirotors etc. for a long time and over the years I have also done various experiments with FPV (first person view) from balloons, kites and aircraft.
Recently I discovered the world of 250 size (5 inch) race/freestyle drones. I watched some YouTube videos of people doing absolutely crazy stuff flying these with video transmitters and goggles. I was immediately hooked and now I am determined to be at least reasonably good at flying these drones.
It turned out that I had all the stuff I needed to build a couple of 250 class freestyle drones. Here is one of the first I build.:
The parts are a couple of generations old and in no way state-of-the-art but I will upgrade as I get better at flying.
I also experimented with a couple of other sizes. This is a 120 size:
The video used to fly the drones are crappy analog and low resolution. To get nice birds eye high quality video you strap a HD action camera to the drones in addition to the analog video link:
I use a cheap Ebay action camera until i stop crashing so much 🙂 The camera strap is 3D printed in TPU. On later models I have gotten better at the TPU printing so it doesn’t look like a turd.
There are many many online resources about every aspect of drone racing, building and flying so I will not go into too many details about the drones themselves. I will however post about some of the project I make to support my drone flying ecosystem.