4 ms·

I'm not an expert but I have quite a bit of experience in the RC world. I haven't seen anything that fits those requirements in that price range. Just getting

I'm not an expert but I have quite a bit of experience in the RC world. I haven't seen anything that fits those requirements in that price range. Just getting a PixHawk flight controller so you can program the drone would cost that much. Same for a good radio transmitter to actually fly the drone. I think DIY is out of the question at that price point.

nanospeck 9y ago
That's enlightening. Do you know anything with a higher price point? Like around $500 ?
VLM 9y ago
"PixHawk flight controller" That's a nice controller, but heavy and expensive, 37 grams and $75 according to amazon. My sub-250g build used a Naze32 which weighs about 4 grams without connectors and was $35. I flashed it with cleanflight from github https://github.com/cleanflight/cleanflight https://github.com/cleanflight/cleanflight Presumably OP wanting to modify stuff will want FOSS like cleanflight. This is of course ancient obsolete history because things move fast in multicopter world and that was like 6 months ago. Not even sarcasm. This advice was reasonably contemporary last fall, but this spring I donno. OP will rapidly get into a scalability problem where I assume OP wants to do something interesting or complicated and aerospace is highly optimized so OP is likely to have much more success driving a flight controller as if it servos using a ras-pi or something, than trying to compile cleanflight to add Alexa to the cleanflight itself or whatever it is OP is trying to do. Electronics have improved quite a bit. Back in the 80s we'd buy a $200 mosfet motor controller with a half pound heatsink and connect it to a $20 motor in your RC dune buggy (running off old fashioned nicads LOL) but now a days you attach a $11 no-heatsink controller to a $40 brushless motor and call it good. Of course you don't need a cooling fan if you have hundreds of watts of fan blowing on it from half an inch away... Something to think about ops desire for a $100 multicopter is control electronics and surprisingly chassis and props and serial receivers are cheap, but I dropped $40 on EACH motor, by far the most expensive part of the build. Of course at 220 grams flying weight my build has the vertical acceleration performance of a large model rocket, which can be slightly terrifying when learning to fly, something lower performance but still flyable might be cheaper. I just thought it interesting that most of my build's money is in the motors, like about half of it.
- codezero 9y ago
  Do you have any videos of the acceleration? That sounds awesome.
  - VLM 9y ago
    No, but while learning to fly I'd describe it more as terrifying. OK big wind gust or whatever we're getting too low, too low, too low, floor it, ... and a second later we're 50 feet up moving very fast upward and that's the new problem. Pilot induced oscillation, never fun. I can hover around 1/3 throttle so that would imply 1 G of thrust so you can guess that flooring it would be 2 G vertical acceleration. So 64 ft/s squared so one second after I floor it I'm going 40 mph straight up.. It feels like throwing a $300 volleyball as hard as you can straight up. To stay underweight I use small 500 mAH lithium poly batteries which lead to both high acceleration and short flight times, like 3-4 minutes tops. I think I have a 250 somewhere which is really small and light. I could probably physically lift 2000 mAH batteries or larger, but would then be over the FAA 250 gram limit so I'd have to register as a drone pilot, which I'm OK with, other than I haven't done it yet. Great, another government list to find myself on, just what I needed. Once you're on enough lists, one more won't hurt...

nanospeck 9y ago

That's enlightening. Do you know anything with a higher price point? Like around $500 ?

VLM 9y ago

"PixHawk flight controller" That's a nice controller, but heavy and expensive, 37 grams and $75 according to amazon. My sub-250g build used a Naze32 which weighs about 4 grams without connectors and was $35. I flashed it with cleanflight from github https://github.com/cleanflight/cleanflight https://github.com/cleanflight/cleanflight Presumably OP wanting to modify stuff will want FOSS like cleanflight. This is of course ancient obsolete history because things move fast in multicopter world and that was like 6 months ago. Not even sarcasm. This advice was reasonably contemporary last fall, but this spring I donno. OP will rapidly get into a scalability problem where I assume OP wants to do something interesting or complicated and aerospace is highly optimized so OP is likely to have much more success driving a flight controller as if it servos using a ras-pi or something, than trying to compile cleanflight to add Alexa to the cleanflight itself or whatever it is OP is trying to do. Electronics have improved quite a bit. Back in the 80s we'd buy a $200 mosfet motor controller with a half pound heatsink and connect it to a $20 motor in your RC dune buggy (running off old fashioned nicads LOL) but now a days you attach a $11 no-heatsink controller to a $40 brushless motor and call it good. Of course you don't need a cooling fan if you have hundreds of watts of fan blowing on it from half an inch away... Something to think about ops desire for a $100 multicopter is control electronics and surprisingly chassis and props and serial receivers are cheap, but I dropped $40 on EACH motor, by far the most expensive part of the build. Of course at 220 grams flying weight my build has the vertical acceleration performance of a large model rocket, which can be slightly terrifying when learning to fly, something lower performance but still flyable might be cheaper. I just thought it interesting that most of my build's money is in the motors, like about half of it.

codezero 9y ago
Do you have any videos of the acceleration? That sounds awesome.
- VLM 9y ago
  No, but while learning to fly I'd describe it more as terrifying. OK big wind gust or whatever we're getting too low, too low, too low, floor it, ... and a second later we're 50 feet up moving very fast upward and that's the new problem. Pilot induced oscillation, never fun. I can hover around 1/3 throttle so that would imply 1 G of thrust so you can guess that flooring it would be 2 G vertical acceleration. So 64 ft/s squared so one second after I floor it I'm going 40 mph straight up.. It feels like throwing a $300 volleyball as hard as you can straight up. To stay underweight I use small 500 mAH lithium poly batteries which lead to both high acceleration and short flight times, like 3-4 minutes tops. I think I have a 250 somewhere which is really small and light. I could probably physically lift 2000 mAH batteries or larger, but would then be over the FAA 250 gram limit so I'd have to register as a drone pilot, which I'm OK with, other than I haven't done it yet. Great, another government list to find myself on, just what I needed. Once you're on enough lists, one more won't hurt...