Getting started with FPV Drones
Posted by Jim Morris on 2026-01-09 22:22:00 +0000
Ok so I got a new obsession (not bad for my age), Drones or Quad copters to be more precise. It fits in well with my 3d Printing obsession and my Robotics obsession.
It started with me looking for a way to use the brushless motor and ESC I got off Amazon to play with. I stumbled upon an interesting design of a Monocopter, as it turns out a very advanced concept project of a Drone that uses a single motor and 4 servo controlled flaps.
I 3D printed the required parts, modified to accommodate the larger propeller I had that came with the brushless motor, and some servos I had left over from my Hexapod project.
It turns out you just can't use any old motor and propeller size :) that is how I ended up going down this deep rabbit hole and ended up getting a bunch of Quadcopters, Cameras, Remote controls and a plethora of other drone stuff.
For the Monocopter I ended up getting the same digital servos and the same motor and propeller as the designer specified, this at least allowed the thing to take off and remain in the air for a short time, it was not very stable but also my flying skills were zero. After becoming more familiar with the subject I switched the flight controller to use ArduPilot (instead of Betaflight), and added a barometer for controlling the height and a GPS to control the position. I was able to get it to fly with Ardupilot (actually the Arducopter variant for Monocopter) but again not for very long, and I was getting tired of having to reprint bits to repair it after every crash. I also was using an Olimex STM32F405 board as the FC as I had one sitting around. This gave me more access to spare SPI, I2C and UARTS than a regular FC.
I put the Monocopter on the shelf for the time being so I could learn how to actually fly one of these things. To that end I bought a Flysky FS-I6X transmitter and a receiver bundle, and started to train on a simulator, first fpvfreerider then moved up to velocidrone. I then bought the cheapest Quadcopter I cold find that had good reviews, this being the DarwinFPV BabyApe. I only had to add the receiver and solder it in. Despite all the experts saying to learn in Rate mode from the start I found this way too hard, so started in Angle (stabilized) mode, which is much easier. I found controlling the altitude really hard and was bouncing up and down like a Kangaroo. I then bought a cheap toy drone that had altitude control built in, and was able to fly this easily but it was boring to fly after a while, and you couldn't turn off the altitude control, however it did teach me the basics of the yaw, pitch and roll controls (without having to worry about also keeping the altitude constant).
I couldn't fly the babyape indoors and the weather being what it is in the UK i decided to get a whoop style drone to fly indoors as well, so I got a Happymodel Mobula6 (also highly recommended). This proved to be harder to fly indoors than I anticipated and I think it was because the gimbals on the Flysky were not very good. After some research the currently highly rated Transmitter was the Radiomaster Zorro, so I got myself one of those (I was now into this damned hobby by several hundreds of pounds). The Gimbals on this were indeed much better and always centered as expected, this made flying the Mobula6 inside much easier as it didn't drift as much. Up until now I was only flying Line of Sight despite two of my drones having FPV cameras.
Wanting to see what all the fuss over FPV was I had to buy a video receiver (VTR), unfortunately I got a cheap one that only had 8 channels on the E band which turns out none of the frequencies were legal in the UK despite buying from a UK seller. I did play with it and tried hooking it up to an old pair of Video Goggles I had, but the resolution was not good enough and my flying skills were still too weak. So more time was needed on the simulator in FPV mode. I then ended up getting a pair of relatively cheap Goggles (Eachine EV800) that had a 48 channel receiver which allowed me to use legal frequencies. This was much better and I was able to fly outside in a big field without too much crashing. (The simulator stick time helped). I was still disappointed with the video quality, but apparently this is what using Analogue VTX is like and people put up with it. (Although there is a digital option now, but much more expensive, not sure how much better it is though).
This hobby was starting to get very expensive! But I was hooked.
Over the next year or so I built a drone based on the toothpick form factor specifically the babytooth, I used two blade props for this one, and flashed betaflight. It was quite nice to fly around the garden until i upgraded to the latest version of betaflight, then it got much harder was way too sensitive, so probably needed tuning, which is a skill I have not been able to master.
Next I built a really tiny one using the spare motors I had got for the mobula6, it is called the pickle and I found the frame on thingiverse. I cut it out of carbon fiber on my mill. This flies quite well indoors, but is maybe a little more finicky than the mobula6.
Lastly I built a 7" drone based on the Mk4 7in frame, I got the frame and motors really cheap on aliexpress. I used the SPEEDYBEE F405 V3 conroller stack that I had got a while back. This flies really well, I used INav and stuck a GPS on it, so return to home works really well and flies in place as well. I really like INav for these kinds of things, basically almost autonomous flight with a little operator input.