The RC community was pretty awesome even before DIY drones/Ardupilot, helping push the quick rise of electric flight and FPV cheap video over unlicensed RF. Qu

The RC community was pretty awesome even before DIY drones/Ardupilot, helping push the quick rise of electric flight and FPV cheap video over unlicensed RF. Quadcopters wouldn't have taken off if MEMS gyros hadn't gotten cheap and easier to build with (flat Z-axis), possibly due to video game controllers and smartphones. Electric flight probably benefited from laptops then smaller portables pushing li-ion manufacturing. If you look at helicopters of a few years ago, just getting a single yaw gyro was expensive. For quadrotors, you could only get props for the counter-rotating motors in a limited selection of diameters & pitches.