Build a Freestyle FPV drone for $150!!

what is up guys i'm pretty excited to make this video this is going to be a very helpful video for anyone who's looking to learn about the individual parts that make up an fpv drone it'll also be good for anyone that's looking to get into the hobby but doesn't want to break the bank this is my 2021 budget build 5-inch freestyle drone and all of these parts cost less than 150 so let's go over all the parts that i got for my budget build drone this is a steel five inch 220 millimeter frame this is gonna hold five inch props so it's gonna be a nice little freestyle frame and it feels pretty thick so i'm excited to see how durable it is next we have some hq freestyle prop this is five by four point three by three we have two counter clockwise and two clockwise props in here next up i'll show you the motors so here we have a set of four racerstar racing edition 2205 2300 kv brushless motors these motors are capable of handling 2 to 4s so it's perfect for this budget build next let's talk about the fpv camera and the vtx so for the budget build i chose the mini vtx5848 this is a 48 channel 5.8 gigahertz so it's analog uh vtx this vtx is capable of 25 milliwatts 100 milliwatts and 200 milliwatts so you'll get some decent range with it now for the camera i've never used this but i am a fan of caddix products this is the caddix ant nano and it comes with a bracket in there to adjust to the frame so the cadx ant is a 1.8 millimeter 1200 tvl this is the 4x3 mode and you can get this in black or silver now the last part is the flight controller and esc's so for this build i actually decided on going with a stack and this is the mamba f405 mini mk2 f4 flight controller now this is a stack so this has the flight controller on top and esc on bottom so this is gonna allow us to have a nice clean build so obviously the first thing you're gonna need to do is put your frame together so here's the frame this went together just about the same as every other frame i have up in the front here you have the two little brackets i'm going to be holding on our fpv camera we're going to mount those in a little bit but right now all we're going to focus on is getting our flight controller on here so depending on what size flight control you have and what size frame you have typically frames will have holes to hold a certain size flight controller this frame has holes that will hold a 30 by 30 flight controller and i have a 20 by 20 flight controller so as you can see this flight controller won't mount on this frame so what i've done is i just 3d printed this piece right here and this is basically just going to sit where a 30 by 30 flight controller would sit and instead i can now mount my 20 by 20 flight controller right to this plate right here so now all you need to do is figure out which direction your flight controller should be facing so typically with mamba stacks i've noticed that they have the usb port on the right side of the drone but another easy way to tell is i bet if we lift this sticker up right here you see a little arrow that's going to be pointing to the front of the drone so since this is the front of the drone we're going to want our flight controller sitting right like that perfect so now that the flight controller and esc stack that i have is mounted to the frame what i'm actually going to do is disconnect the flight controller so push those wires off to the side and now what we can do is loosen up these screws and we're going to actually get to mounting the motors and soldering the wires up to the esc's underneath the flight controller here all right so this is where our esc stack is going to be sitting so now what i'm going to do is put everything off to the side so i don't lose it and we're going to get our motors hooked up since the motors do have arrows on them it'll just make it easier with putting props on so i am gonna put them on in the order that they should be according to the motor itself so a good rule of thumb when you're building a quad is right here you have motor one motor two motor three and motor four motors one and four will always spin clockwise and motors three and two will always spin counterclockwise so here if you're looking at the arrows they're pointing in this direction so they're spinning clockwise each motor came with its own set of screws so now all i'm going to do is secure those to the frame now that you have the motors all mounted up it's time to solder these wires to the esc whether you have an all-in-one esc like this or if you have the individual escs you're going to have three pads on a board or on the individual esc that are dedicated to the motor wires and it doesn't matter which wires go to which pad i like to keep it nice and tidy and just keep the three that are in line in line on the board but you can swap them you can take these wires and twirl them up if you like how that looks i don't i'm gonna keep them nice and tidy so the first thing i'm gonna do before i start just soldering these onto the board is actually just measure out how long of a wire i need to reach the and then i'm going to give it a little bit more and then i'll cut it and i'll solder to the board so i'll do one of these on camera i'll do motor one so since we know that this is the length of the wire we know that the wire is gonna be sitting like this i'm gonna have it run right along the side and right to the pads right like that so i'm gonna cut these wires right about where my thumb is now you can do is just rip the tubing off of the end just do a little tiny piece you can use wire cutters but you basically only want that much wire showing so do that to all the wires so these wires are ready now so now you need to get your soldering iron and we are going to put a little bit of solder on each of these pads so there's three on each side so you have a total of 12 pads but all you want to do is just take your soldering iron heat this pad up put some solder on there and that's going to get make it easier to connect the wires so do that to all of these pads [Music] something else that we can do while we're doing these motor wires is actually put our cable on so i have this xt60 cable that i'm going to use it the flight controller that i bought does come with wires but this one's just ready to go i am going to use the capacitor that came with it so i'm going to trim these down a little bit you can tell which side is which because this side has a negative on it and this side doesn't have anything so this is gonna go right like that [Music] with this temporarily bent up i can it gives me a little a little bit better access so i can put the xt60 connector on there i'm going to pre-tin these makes it a lot easier to put onto the board when you have solder already on the wires so the solder that i'm putting on right now is going to be for the battery and for the capacitor those definitely aren't the prettiest solder joints that i've done but they'll work so now i'm just going to bend the capacitor back over oh that's hot i'm going to bend the capacitor back over to where it is going to stay which is right about there i'm going to spread these wires out a little bit because i think i can get it down a little bit more right like that that's fine so now with the battery lid all set we can go back to the motors so here's motor one which is the one that we were working on and just like the battery leads i'm going to put a little bit of solder on each end and i'm going to get it on the board to keep this nice and clean all i'm going to do is have the wires run straight out of the motor flat and then this motor that's on the far left is going to go to the far left pad the motor the wire that's in the middle is going to go to the middle pad and the wire on the right is going to go to the right pad [Music] my then once we're done we can take these wires put a zip tie around them and secure them right down here and in the end it will look pretty clean so i'm going to go ahead and just do that to the rest of these motors so fast forward to what that looks like right now there we go this is looking pretty clean so we have the motors all hooked up to the esc's so now all that's left is putting the flight controller on top and then hooking a couple things up to that and i'm going to take this and this is front so it's going to be sitting right like that stick that right through there take the two screws that we just removed put them right through the top so now i'm just going to secure this to the board reconnect this so now the only things that we have left to connect are the camera the vtx and whatever receiver you're going to use i didn't include this in the build because this is going to vary from build to build i have this rxsr laying around so i'm going to install this on this drone you can use tbs crossfire you can use you know you can use a variety of different receivers on this i run fr sky so i'm just going to use this so we have the vtx and the camera now when you're getting ready to hook this stuff up you're going to want to look at the diagram for the board now whatever board you get it should come with an instruction booklet or at least something telling you the pin out of the flight controller so this camera has a pretty good input it requires 3.7 to 26 volts i believe so we can power the camera off of a 5 volt pad so here we can see that this goes to a 5 volt we have 5 volt ground and video in so those are the pads that we're going to want right here so i'm going to put some solder on those three and for this specific video transmitter this requires 7 to 27 volts so i'm not going to get enough power if i use this 5 volt pad that they have going to their video transmitter so i'm going to have to find a pad that says vcc or battery power and that's right down in this corner so i'm going to have to power the vtx off of these two pads and have the video out wire run straight to the vtx so i'll use this power and ground and then the tx3 and video out over there and then receiver we can figure out afterwards but i'm just gonna put some solder on those three pads up there these two right here and then these two right here so since i'm using an rxsr this has sbus and then it requires 4 to 10 volts and it has a ground so i'm going to be able to actually use the 5 volt that we didn't use for the video transmitter because that also has the s bus right underneath it so i'm going to solder up the ground 5 volt and s bus pads and that will be for our receiver [Music] so now we just got to get it soldered up first i'll do the camera so since this flight controller doesn't have a port that fits this so i can just plug it in i am going to have to solder on these wires both ends are the same so it doesn't matter which end you cut off and take a tiny piece of the tubing off i'm going to put a little bit of solder on the end just so that i can attach it to the pads a little easier [Music] actually it looks like this yellow wire is spilling over onto this other pad i'm not sure what that is but it will definitely cause interference in the video so just double check to look for stuff like that that pad is a 5 volt so that might have ruined my camera had i plugged it in and that's not the kind of thing that would show up on a smoke stopper so that's our camera i'm gonna get the camera set up because i do have a bracket that i'm putting it in so they can fit this frame [Music] oh it's so cute so i'm going to slide this into its adapter i'm going to find these pieces now these are the pieces that i haven't put in yet but they sit right in the frame right like that so when the camera's sitting like that it's gonna go together right there so the camera came with a bunch of screws i'm sure one of these screws will work hopefully so that's where the camera is going to be sitting so here's vtx since this is 20 by 20 you could always put this right on top of your stack and just keep it all nice and tidy in this but free up a little space because i have it i'm gonna just put the vtx right back here underneath the power cable i'm going to get a couple little standoffs for this there's actually a couple extra ones that came with the flight controller so i'm probably going to use those but this is going to sit right back here here we have a cable that they included with the vtx so this is going to hook up to the flight controller on the pads that we already pre-tinned so i'm not even going to trim this because i like the amount of slack that they gave me i'm just going to take the wires as is and just hook it up to the pads and then this one now we can grab our video cable and our tx or rx and those ones are going to go right in here all right so with those hooked up i'm going to just try and get this to be nice and coiled up and then we can plug it in to our vtx so like i mentioned earlier the flight controller stack that i got came with a bunch of extra little rubber grommets so i'm actually going to use those for the vtx here's a little tip for you when you're installing these grommets they can be very difficult you can't just push it in and that's that i've found that the easiest way to do this is actually get some dental floss put it through one of the holes like this open it up put the grommet in [Music] like that and then just pull it through done now with those grommets on there i can secure the vtx down i'm gonna run the power cable over it so it sits right like that so i'm gonna go find some screws and secure that to the frame and always secure your antenna this is the antenna that came with it i'm not gonna be using this one this is basically just a ufl two sma connector so i can put one of my standard antennas on this and it will help with range as well so connect this end right to here and then just make sure you have your antenna on the other side [Music] so now i'm going to just solder the wires onto my receiver this could be different for you depending on what you're using i'm like i said i'm using an rxsr so five volt down here ground right underneath and then s bus it's right here in the middle now these wires are a little long i like typically having the receiver hang out up here and that is pretty much our drone that's everything now it's just a matter of kind of tidying it up and making it look nice so here's the drone in its final form i'm very happy with how this came out i came across a couple 3d printable files for this drone here's a little antenna holder that i found i'll leave a link to this in the description i also found some landing gear i have these on each arm and that's just going to protect the bottom from scraping on the cement when you land and another thing that i did was i ran the antenna for the rxsr right along the front right arm and it's held on by just a zip tie and some heat shrink so that'll keep it out of the props keep it nice and secure out in the open so that you get good range i think if you had a couple extra bucks to spare maybe put it into an antenna like i did this is an upgraded antenna than what came with the vtx the vtx comes with this antenna which isn't bad but you're not going to get too good range out of it so i have a bunch of these antennas laying around so i just got a ufl to sma connector printed this thing and now i have a little bit better range with this antenna [Music] so that's like if you have an extra 10 bucks laying around you can do that upgrade if you have an additional 20 to 30 dollars to spend on the drone put it into the motors i think that's something that you'll notice a big difference with otherwise i'd say every other component in here is pretty decent for the price that i paid so yeah that's pretty much the build now all that's left is going into betaflight doing some slight tuning and then i'll post some flight footage all right so let's go ahead and launch betaflight so this looks good so next i'm going to scroll down to ports and i have the vtx on uart3 so i'm going to scroll over here to peripherals and i'm going to change this to vtx irc if you're using a vtx with smart audio you would select this one the one i'm using is irc trim so i'll select that and serial rx on uart 1 looks good because i'm just using the s bus pad so i'll hit save and reboot now scroll down to configuration so the board that i'm using is actually capable of d shot so i'm going to change this from one shot 125 down to d shot 300 it's capable of d shot 300 600 but i'm gonna just put a 300 this all looks good you can give it a crap name s bus that looks good i'm going to turn on telemetry and that looks good i usually keep these off because i hate it when the drone just beeps when i turn my controller off otherwise all this stuff looks good but all these settings look good so i'm going to hit save and reboot and and now comes the test to see if the receiver connects to the drone so when i plug a battery into the drone it should automatically connect to the qx7 i already bound the qx7 to the receiver and i can see that it works so now it's just a matter of getting the stick commands into betaflight so when i plug so when i plug this battery in it should just pop up [Music] i'll move the six around and it looks good so it looks like everything is showing up so this all looks perfect so i'm going to hit save and scroll down to modes and this is where we can configure our our arm switch so on the controller since you can see that the switch has worked you're just going to go add range arm is for when the propellers are going to start spinning and it's on auto so whenever you flick the switch that you want to be the arm switch it'll automatically select that aux channel so aux 1 is the one that i'm going to use for arm and that's in the up position so i'm going to move the slider to be right like that and you do this with any mode that you want i don't usually use angle mode but i do usually keep it on a switch so in this case i'm going to put it on aux 3 when it's all the way up i don't use horizon mode if you are using a gps this is where you could control the fail safe i'm going to use the beeper so i'm going to hit range and then i have this switch i'm going to position that right there camera control flip over after crash i always use launch control those are pretty much all the modes that i use so let's save and you can actually hit this and it'll hide all the modes that you aren't using so now you can come to the motors tab and this is where you can test each motor to see if it's spinning the right direction or if it spins at all looks good looks good looks good looks good so to test the direction of the motors you can take a prop put it on the motor and don't have any nuts on it and just slowly spin it and you can see which way the motor is actually spinning so i have a prop on motor one right now so i'm just going to slowly spin it and make sure that it's spinning clockwise and it is so that mode is good now if i move the prop to motor two i'll be able to see now i can see that motor 2 is actually also spinning in the clockwise motion so i'm going to have to reverse motor 2 and bl heli we'll test out motor 3. motor three is also clockwise so i'll have to reverse motors two and three and now we'll test motor four and motor four is clockwise as well so all the motors are clockwise so we're gonna have to reverse motors two and three in bl heli i'm gonna turn this off i'm going to unplug the drone and now you can go over and start configuring your osd so this is where you're going to see your alerts and your flight statistics and everything and everything that's going to pop up in your goggles so let's save and now it's time to configure the video transmitter now you can only configure the video transmitter when a battery is connected so what you want to do is since this is irc we're going to go over to github and i'm going to find the vtx table that corresponds with irc trim so i just saved it so i'm going to go load from file and then it should just populate right here so this vtx does not have these power levels it has 25 100 and 200 so i'm going to change this to three profiles that looks good i like i said i like having my drones on r3 so i'm going to come under here we're going to put this on raceband channel 3 and let's save so this is all looking good so now all that's really left is changing the direction of motors two and three so i'm going to disconnect and keep the battery plugged in because you need the battery plugged in for blheli s i'm going to close betaflight and i'm going to open blheli configurator so this is pretty much just like betaflight select where your device is plugged in hit connect it's good read setup and then everything pops up here so like i said we got we got to reverse motors two and three so we're gonna go under this hit reversed hit reversed and right setup so now that's all set you can change the volume of the beeps i'm going to keep them just how they are all right so now we're pretty much all set with bl heli you can go under flash firmware and see if there's an update that's newer than 16-7 i know 16-7 is pretty new there might be 16-8 or 69 out but i'm just going to keep it on 16-7 because that's on all my quads and it works fine so i'm gonna disconnect and we are all set so now we should be ready to throw the props back on go outside and go for a test flight so in the flight footage you're about to see i'm going to be flying this drone with this battery this is a sipom 1300 milliamp 4s battery so this is a four cell battery with an xt60 connector this is capable of 100c and you can buy these on amazon i think it's about 40 dollars for a packet too i had never heard of saipon before they reached out to me and they actually sent me a couple of these batteries to test out and do a review on and i gotta say i'm actually pretty impressed as far as amazon batteries go this is gonna become my new go-to for my 4s drones just because of the price plus the size and i'm not running into any issues with this they have some good juice in them and i'm just a big fan of these batteries so highly recommended the fly footage you're about to see is using this battery [Music] [Applause] [Music] hmm [Music] wow [Applause] [Music] wow [Music] so yeah very happy with this drone very happy with how it came out and how it flies obviously it needs a little bit of a tune but then again what drone doesn't after you build it i think if you had a couple extra bucks to spend maybe buy an upgraded set of motors otherwise i think this is a pretty solid 150 drone build so if you learned something or you got something to say you got a suggestion leave it in the comments section below because i always love to hear from you if you like the video smash on that like button for me it'd mean the world make sure you subscribe and ring the bell that way there you can be kept up with all of my latest content thanks whatever dude

Channel: TRONCAT FPV

Views: 1,280,879

Keywords: cinematic fpv, drone, racing drone build, racing drone, custom drone, reelsteady, quadcopter drone, drone flying, best racing drone, how to build and fpv racing drone, fpv racing drone build guide, cheap fpv racing drone, fpv racing quadcopter, how to build and fpv racing quadcopter, best cheap racing drone, diy racing drone, diy cheap racing drone, $150 drone build, budget fpv drone, affordable fpv drone, beginner, DIY, DIY drone, budget build

Id: 5_NMqSIzx-g

Length: 35min 41sec (2141 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021