I hope you step on legos or a nail today. LOL

I had ordered a spare Pavo Pro II to add to my fleet as a backup. Someone swapped the drone for just frame pieces.

I don’t know if it’s just me… I’ve had a string of incidents that when I’ve order something from Amazon, I receive a used item instead of new. So now any high valued orders, I record as I’m opening. Good thing! Right away, I noticed that the box was not wrapped in plastic. The top of the box also had sticker residue, most likely a return sticker or something. Box was kind of crushed too.

Contacted Amazon and sent them the video of the unboxing/opening. Gave me a full refund, but now I have to wait for another drone. Just going to order direct from BetaFPV. I think the meteor 75 II might slip into the cart…

The basis for this plane, which I’m calling Spectre, was the TWIST_DT platform I worked on back in May.

I originally designed TWIST_DT as a small experimental testbed for exploring different wing geometries, particularly around bell-shaped spanload concepts. It also ended up becoming a really useful aircraft for developing my understanding of fixed-wing PID tuning.

The final stage of that development was adding the two small vertical stabilisers. For me, that pretty much closed out the original TWIST_DT concept: a very small, stable and forgiving flying-wing platform that I could use to experiment with geometry, control and tuning.

Then someone who had built TWIST_DT made their own FPV version. I thought it was such a cool direction for the platform that I wanted to develop a properly integrated FPV version of my own.

So rather than just sticking a camera onto TWIST_DT, I ended up redesigning a fair amount of the aircraft around FPV. This first version of Spectre is built around the DJI O4 Wide, with support for more camera and video systems coming shortly. The wings are now removable so replacing parts in the event of crashes will be super easy which is something I'm looking forwards to the most as I push the limits of these little planes so I end up crashing a lot!

The complete aircraft is 215g AUW with the DJI video system and a 2S LiHV 1000mAh battery. It also flies happily on a 2S 750mAh, and the battery bay is deliberately fairly generous, so I expect quite a few different packs will fit. For the moment the wiring is a bit of a mess, ok for a first round of testing.

Right now I’m getting around 6 minutes on the 750mAh pack, flying it pretty dynamically through trees with loops, rolls and plenty of time on power. I haven’t actually done a proper cruise flight yet because it’s just far too tempting to keep throwing it through tree gaps.

One thing I’m really enjoying is how little ceremony there is between flights. Landing, swapping a pack and launching again takes about as much effort as it does with a quad. With some short grass, landings are extremely easy too. The aircraft can fly ridiculously slowly, and the propwash over the wing gives it a huge amount of low-speed authority, so approaches can be very slow with a lot of recovery margin available if you need to add power.

Handling-wise it's honestly verging on the divine. The original wing geometry has carried across really well, and one of the more interesting parts of the aircraft is how nicely it works together with differential thrust for yaw control. It makes for a surprisingly composed little FPV platform.

Still testing and refining it at the moment, but I’ll get some flight footage up soon!

Hello wonderful people of reddit.

I posted the CAD to this planned drone a few months ago and have finally gotten around to beginning to fabricate it. I plan to build it with just the pusher motor initially, to give myself some practice on wiring and drone avionics. The 3D-printed fuselage is coming along nicely.

I have updated the CAD to include some more details (like the skids). I also upsized all my carbon fiber tubes as I was worried about wing and tail boom flexing.

I still have no idea if my electronics will be sufficient, does anyone have any good guides to drone/RC plane electronics and wiring? This is my current setup:

• T-M F100 2810 KV1100 Motor (Quad)
• 7x4x3 Props
• MicroAir 4IN1 55A ESC AM32
• 6S 22.2V 3000 mAh 100C LiPo Battery
• Corewing F405 WING APP V2 FC
• QX-Motor QAA2814, 900KV, 3-6S
• 10x6L Prop
• ES08MAII 12g Metal Gear Servo
• Tekko32 F4 45A ESC AM32
• Panasonic Low-ESR Capacitor 1000uF 35V Leaded
• M10Q-120 GPS Module
• RP1 2.4GHz Receiver For ELRS Protocol
• RadioMaster Controller ExpressLRS (ELRS 2.4GHz)

Any and all advice would be much appreciated (I am very much a beginner).

ALSO I swear I will be better about responding to comments, I apologize for not responding to a few last time.

This is my Flywoo Firefly Mini 25 that I converted to analog with the Skystar Jupiter AIO, with HGLRC Zeus Nano and HGLRC Nano ELRS, running on 3s 850mah lipo. I've made sure all firmware on the board and ESCs are up to date, and I even did a board alignment calibration and accelerometer calibration. Then I'm pretty sure that I put the props on properly and the motor direction is correct, according to Flywoo. What should I do????

tbs source one v6 wis no 3d prints parts
My first welds aren't very pretty, but everything works.

Hello,

I recently started planning a small drone to be built using an old mints box and 4 small electric motors, with a pill battery for power. The software-holding parts are still en route, so for now I wanted to verify the motors' thrust. However the rotor blades are not holding on well: I tried glue but it resulted in uneven position and was a mess to clean off.

What are options for temporary attatchement of blades to the shaft? For reference the shaft is about 0.8 mm thick (couldn't measure it exactly, but this was vendor's specification) and the blades with smallest shaft hole have the hole diameter of 1-1.5 mm. I could not find clamps small enough, adding a wire caused vibrations. Image of motors included.

To be clear these engines might turn out too small/weak for the project which is why I don't want to attatch blades permanently; this question however is only for a testing issue resolution. Thank you in advance

This is Smuklik... a Sub250 gram drone, and yes while there are a lot of those- I have not seen too many Sub250 gram X8 (octomotor) drones. This is a work in progress and everything on the scale including prop screws and other fasteners for the top plate (which I have not machined yet) are there. Its not clearly visible, but a sheet of carbon fiber plate scrap that is more than double the thickness of what I plan on machining out is also on the scale to act as dummy weight.

Pictured are two battery options- a "heavy" pack which I plan on running all the time, a Gaoneng 1000mAH 4S but also allows me to comfortably make weight, and a smaller lightweight 850mAH 4S that lets me go way under the 249 gram point even more. So by flying the 1000mAH pack, the point is to have a fully functional drone and not one that barely makes weight and needs to fly on a "vanity" pack just to prove it can make weight.

I am not too sure I can maiden fly this weekend or not as I have a pretty busy week. But we will see. A lot of people I know said that this build simply could not have been done.

Some specs:

• Motors - eight 1103 8500KV motors. I would have preferred 5000kV but I will give these a try with throttle limiting. They have served well in 2" quads on 4S so with these there is more headroom and I have the flexibility to try other props that will make them run better.
• Battery - The two options, previously mentioned of 850mAH 4S and 1000mAH 4S Gaoneng packs.
• ESC - Dual JHEMCU EM40-A 20x20
• FC - Sequre H743 V2 20x20
• VTX - Walksnail Avatar Lite
• Props - Pictured are 3" biblades but I will be trying a variety of other props like 2.5" biblade, and 2.5" triblade, but even the 2" triblades that I had been running with these motors previously.

Thanks for reading!

So I've got an O4 pro mazgul Evoque F5 V3 on the right that's great for cinematic ignore that it's missing a camera and I'm in the middle of building an O4 pro freestyle drone. I also have an O4 meteor 75 pro but it's given me a lot of trouble. Christmas is coming up and what drones are worth investing in now? Would need to be O4 Elrs.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

I built a Pulsar 9 frame with 2812 900kv motors and I’m trying to tune it, but as you can see from the pre-filtered gyro spectral analyzer on Pidtoolbox from above, there’s a lot of high frequency noise that I can’t seem to figure out. On top of it, the motors get hot very quickly, which I assume is related.

I’m running a T-hobby V70A ESC & F7 FC SE 6-8S 4IN1 Stack. It’s soft mounted with a 2200 uF 50V capacitor. Admittedly the cap leads on it were kind of long, so I threw a 1000 uF 35V capacitor with really short leads on the battery terminals (in parallel) to see if it would do a better job of filtering the high frequency noise, but it didn’t make a difference. I also made sure that no wires are rubbing against the gyro. At this point, I’m wondering if the motors I got are just wonky. They’re unbranded from Ali Express, but seem to have hundreds of positive reviews, so I didn’t think they’d be a problem.

Any thoughts on what could be causing the issue? Should I spend the $$ on more premium motors, or are there other things I should try before assuming it’s a hardware issue?

TIA!

Wanted to compare an ultralight variant with a heavier variant

2s Lightweight Build:
- HDZero AIO15
- Lux cam
- 1202.5 11500kv RCinPower motors
- 450mah 2s LiHV
- 2540 Gemfan Flash props

3s Heavy Build:
- Happymodel Super f405 25A AIO (3s-4s only)
- DJI o4 lite
- 1303 6000kv RCinPower motors
- 450mah 3s LiHV
- 2540 Gemfan Flash Props

Obviously the 3s will be heavier, but I want to see how much that can be overcome with the higher voltage battery and beefier motors. I still need to solder up and tune the 3s build. But the 2s build has been really fun in my initial flights!

My first Ardupilot build is ready for a maiden flight!....after many struggles understanding how to get dshot working and the motor test to work on the bench, she's finally ready for a hover. I have autotune on a switch on the Skydroid g20. Would this be good a next step if it shakes out ok in the hover test?

Hi everyone I'm new around drones and building one in general.

I attempting to build my first ever mini drone that can fly like a fpv drone on a huge low budget.

For the frame, I made a design based on a hybrid x drone frame made from a 1cm wide popsicle sticks.

For the FC, I'm using an ESP32 s3 zero by waveshare and stacked with MPU 6050 running with ESPFC firmware by rtlopez on github.

Motors, I'll be using a 8520 coreless motor for my mini fpv drone ("reasons:a brushless for me is not reachable by my budget right now + drivers are expensive too") props are 30-31mm 3-4 blade

To drive the Coreless motors I'll be making a Custom MOSFET driver based on Max imagination's brushed drivers design but mines is a little bit beef up by replacing the mosfet original used to a AO3400A N-channel mosfet and a SS14 flyback diode and lastly a 10k ohm pull down resistor.

​Finnaly for video, I'll be using a AIO analog fpv camera to make building it the drone a lot simpler.

I'm still building this bit by bit and I would really appreciate you guys recommendations.

This is the defend40 by DefendTex. It’s a recon drone meant to be deployed from a 40mm launcher. I have a few 37mm’s for signaling purposes, and I was wondering if there’s any open source projects floating around that you guys have seen before that work in a similar fashion.

Hey everyone,

So I've been messing around with something for the past few weeks and finally got it working, so I thought I'd share it here.

Basically, I wanted to get the RC 2 screen onto a bigger LCD screen. Why? Honestly, watching the flight on that tiny controller screen gets old fast, especially when friends are around and everyone's trying to squeeze in to see it. A big screen just makes the whole thing way more fun.

I tried two ways and both actually worked:

1. USB-C to HDMI cable

The simple option. Just make sure the cable supports DP Alt Mode, because not every USB-C cable does this, even if it looks the same. I used one that's also compatible with Android phones (works fine with a Samsung Galaxy S22, for example). Plug it in and boom, the RC 2 screen shows up on the TV.

2. Wireless 5GHz transmitter (Renkchip USB-C to HDMI)

This is the one I'm actually excited about. No cables at all. Got the transmitter pack, hooked it up to the RC 2, and it just sends the video wirelessly to a receiver plugged into the screen. Worked better than I expected, and now I can move around without being tied to a cable while everyone still sees the feed.

Quick tip that took me a bit to figure out:

Connect the cable/transmitter BEFORE turning on the RC 2. Not after. Once you power it on, wait about 5-10 seconds and the video will just start streaming through the USB-C port on its own. If you plug it in after the controller's already on, it just won't pick it up. Took me a couple of tries to realize this lol.

Where this could actually be useful:

• Flying with friends/family and everyone actually gets to see what's going on
• Teaching someone to fly — you can watch their screen live and coach them
• Real estate stuff, showing clients the view during a property/roof inspection
• Search and rescue setups, where more than one person needs eyes on the feed
• Weddings/events, big screen with the aerial footage running
• Recording clean footage for YouTube or tutorials
• Farmers/land surveys, showing the area to a group in real time
• Drone shops doing demos without handing the controller around

Anyway, curious if anyone else has tried something similar or found other setups that work. Let me know 🙌