simulation
I should start the story here, because I first purchased a RadioMaster Zorro transmitter and Liftoff! on Steam. I practiced here for 30-40 hours. It was a good check to make sure I was actually interested in flying FPV and not just one of my transient interests.
sourcing
I bought a kit of drone parts from GetFPV. The contents were curated by Joshua Bardwell, who is a sage in the FPV community. I bought DJI Goggles 2, which had their software recently unlocked to work with a more broad set of FPV cameras (for a long time after they were released, you could only pair them with the DJI Avata drone). I also got three batteries, because I heard the battery life of FPV drones is not great (~6 minutes per pack) and wanted to have longer flight sessions.
assembly
I followed Joshua Bardwell’s video to assemble the drone. I’d say it’s not a great assembly video. There were 3-4 times where he would provide instructions and only provide corrections afterwards. If you watch each video segment while assembling each segment of the drone, you’ll get burned by this. I recommend all instructors to use the magic of video editing to correct themselves before showing the step that needs corrected. That aside, his camerawork and explanations are great, I succeeded with 0 experience in FPV drones and learned a lot from it.
configuration
If you told me that assembly would be the easiest part of building a drone, I wouldn’t have believed it. I spent more time configuring the firmware of the drone and various accessories (goggles, controller) than actually building the thing.
there is a big community around FPV that makes some great open source configuration software. BetaFlight and ExpressLRS-Configurator were surprisingly good. I may have just been bad in using them, but I ran into a few road blocks that cost me a few hours, especially when upgrading my radio transmitter’s firmware.
first flight
For the first flight, I drove to the middle of a cornfield with minimal obstacles. My transmitter ran out of battery very quickly (I drained it during configuration), so the flight was cut short. I had to sit down halfway through because the goggles were giving me slight motion sickness, just as in VR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBwFgSyr88o
roof inspection
I drove home a few weeks later and immediately geeked out and showed my parents the drone. I flew over their roof and spotted a missing tile! I was able to extract a few frames from the drone’s video and send it to them. My dad (who is an immigrant, and doesn’t do great with English) asked me to write an email to their HOA requesting repairs. I said no, it’s 2023, we have ChatGPT. I introduced them to this wonderful tool and they were astounded. I’m still surprised how few people know about this technology. It seems like everyone in my “bubble” knows about it and it’s weird to step outside of it.
crash and burn!
I had lunch with a friend and showed them the drone in the restaurant parking lot (bad idea…). I was flying near a tree and clipped a propeller. This little bump dislodged the battery’s balance wire, which is a set of small wires used to balance-charge each cell in the pack. The balance wire was then clipped by the propeller resulting in a big poof of smoke.
I quickly landed and we walked over to investigate. While approaching, I managed to accidentally arm the drone and launch it into the sky! I quickly disarmed it and it fell from 50 feet, slamming into the ground a second time.
I put the controller on the ground and approached again. I disconnected the battery and checked for heat / puffiness (both signs of imminent boom), and it was good! At that point I discovered the balance wire was clipped when I accidentally shorted it against the drone’s frame, creating another shower of sparks.
The drone is OK! They are more resilient than I expected. The battery is not ok…