Learn to fly an FPV drone TODAY (for total beginners)

Way Way Back in 2015 I made a video series titled how to fly an fpv racing drone and in that video series here they are I took you through the process of learning how to fly you've just got an fpv drone you've got a controller you've got some goggles but you don't actually know how to fly the damn thing and a lot of times people learn to fly just by throwing themselves up against the wall until they finally start to figure it out and that works but it's not the most efficient way to do it the most efficient way to do it is to have somebody who has taught a lot of people how to fly an fpv drone take you through the process in a methodical and organized way that builds up skills and gets you to the point where you're flying the Drone as quickly as possible this is that video series I'm Joshua Bardwell and you're going to learn something today as excited as I am to get you flying as soon as possible and I hope you're excited too we're going to take care of just a little bit of bookkeeping before we get into the substance of the video the first thing I need to tell you is that this video series is going to be a playlist it's not just going to be one long video it's going to be several videos each of them focusing on one particular skill and you can work through them at your own pace don't force yourself to just search YouTube for these videos I have made a playlist all these videos are in a playlist there's a link to the playlist in the video description below as well I'll put a card on screen to that playlist save the link to the playlist somewhere so you can find it and work your way through the videos at your own pace instead of having to like search around and hope the YouTube algorithm decides to show them to you we are going to be learning using the liftoff fpv drone simulator and there's two things I want to say about that first of all why are we using a simulator why are we not outside flying a real drone well number one it's a whole lot easier for me to record these tutorials sitting in front of a computer and number two it is a whole lot more effective for you to learn in the simulator many people when they are first starting out very very much want to fly a real drone but here's the secret as soon as you start flying unless you're just very very exceptional you're just going to start crashing you're going to crash so much and it's going to take a lot of crashing before you start to actually kind of get good and be able to fly the actual amount of time it takes somebody to get to the point where they can basically just kind of fly around varies sometimes it's just a few hours sometimes it's maybe 20 or 30 hours hours it just depends and the simplest and most effective way to put that time in is on the simulator because in the simulator when you crash it doesn't cost you any money you don't have to fix your quad you don't even have to walk and go pick your quad cter up all you have to do is hit the reset button and start over again there are ways in which the simulator doesn't fly like a real quad but at the very very beginning of Learning to Fly those ways just don't matter and the simulator is the most effective way to learn I strongly recommend recommend everyone Learning to Fly start in the simulator before they fly their real quad the other question you might be wondering is why are we using the liftoff simulator and do you have to use the liftoff simulator and the answer to that is number one we're using it just because I like it there are other simulators out there that I fly sometimes and I like them too but I'm kind of partial to the liftoff simulator in part because they they built my house as a level in there and it's awful fun to fly around my house and I don't know if you decide not to use the liftoff simulator you 100% can do all of the things we're going to do in this tutorial if you have another simulator that you like to use or if you want to use a free simulator liftoff does cost money if you choose to use a free simulator I suggest the fpv skydive simulator which is also available on Steam uh it's pretty good and it doesn't cost any money but we're going to go ahead and start up the liftoff simulator and the very first thing we need to do is get our controller working with the simulator I am going to suggest that you use a real fpv controller and not like an Xbox or PlayStation game controller if you have a game controller and that's all that you have you can use them they will work but the sticks on a real fpv controller they're longer joysticks and you can make more precise movements and I know what you're thinking I make plenty of precise movements playing uh games on my Xbox or Playstation or whatever I can be precise with it's those games are designed around that controller and fpv drones are not designed around that controller those little short stubby joysticks do not have the same precision and they're more difficult to use so I'm going to have a list down in the video description to a couple of controllers you might consider getting the cheapest one is only about 40 or 50 bucks the one I actually recommend is in the range of about a 100 bucks and of course you can always spend more money if you decide to this controller is going to stick with you throughout your fpv journey so it think of it as an investment and if you spend 50 bucks or 100 bucks on it now and you know two weeks from now you decided this was all a big mistake you could probably sell it and get most some of that money back the controller that I'm using in this video is the radio Master boxer and if you decide to get that one again there's a link in the video description below where you can pick it up but whatever controller you get I'm going to strongly recommend that it runs the open TX or Edge TX operating system openx and htx are an open- Source operating system think of it like when you go to buy a computer you buy a computer and it runs Mac OS or maybe it runs windows and whatever brand of computer you buy you know if it runs windows it's going to sort of work the same way it doesn't matter who made it uh same thing is true for these controllers there are other controllers out there for manufacturers like Futaba or Spectrum or radio link I don't recommend that you get one of those they don't run the opx and htx operating system and I'm going to suggest you go with one of the ones listed in the video description below or anyone that runs the opx or EDG TX operating system and one reason that's important is because if you are using a radio that runs the opentx or edtx operating system then the things I'm going to show you right now when we set up the controller will be pretty much the same even though you have a radio that looks slightly different than mine and the first thing I want you to do is create a new model on your radio specifically for use with the ulator you can see I've I've already done this and mine is named joystick and the idea is that you're going to have a certain way that the controller is set up for use with flying your actual drones and then when you go to the simulator it doesn't may not need to be set up the exact same way and so you're going to have a separate model that holds those settings for use with the simulator or use with your actual drones the way that we can do this on the boxer is to long press the model key which takes us to our model select screen we're going to choose an empty slot for me the first empty slot is slot five and I'm going to click the jog wheel and that's going to give me the option to create a new model once the model is created that's really all you need to do you'll see also that there is a star next to that model indicating that model is selected and that's what we want if you want to you can press the page key one time and go to the setup screen to put in a model name and you can name it joystick or whatever you want to name it by clicking the jog wheel scrolling the J wheel to select a letter and then clicking the jog wheel to lock in that letter this is a slow and painful and annoying process but you can do it if you really want to once you've created that model and selected it the next thing we need to do is connect the radio to our computer and we're going to do that using this USB port on the top of the radio please note that the boxer has a USB port both on the bottom and on the top the bottom one is for charging the top one is for use with a computer some radios will only have have one USB port that is used both for charging and for the computer you'll just need to kind of look at your radio and figure out if it has two USB ports or just one when I plug in USB I'm going to get a message pop up on screen select mode and I need to select which mode the USB connection is going to be in I'm going to choose the USB joystick option you can just scroll the jog wheel highlight USB joystick and click the jog wheel and when I do that liftoff May detect that a new joystick has been detected that's what we would ideally like to see the next thing I'm going to do is Click options controls and controller the next thing you're going to do is Click calibrate and we're going to go through this manual calibration process the process is time sensitive you need to complete each step before the timer runs out and if you miss a step you'll have to stop and start over so I'm going to go through this and I want you to watch me go through it and then you can go through it as well I'm going to click Start calibration and I'm going to move the two joysticks in circles and that's going to tell it which uh channels are being output by the joystick then I'm going to Center the sticks then I'm going to push the throttle up and that's going to be the left stick and then reenter the sticks and then I'm going to push the pitch axis up and that's going to be the right stick pushed forward and center the sticks and then I'm going to push the roll axis to the right and that's going to be the right stick push to the right and center the sticks and I'm going to push the yaw axis to the right and that's going to be the left stick to the right and center the sticks and when that is done I can test that the quadcopter is moving correctly so oh Center those sticks and are we done I think we're done now okay now we finished calibration let's check that things are working correctly if I lower the throttle that is the left stick if I move it down the Drone moves down and if I move it up the Drone moves up and also I can see on screen that the stick on the controller on screen is doing the same thing that my controller in real life is doing if I push the left stick to the left and to the right the quad moves on the yaw axis if I push the right stick to the left and the right quad moves on the roll axis and if I push the right stick forward and back it moves on the pitch axis yours should be doing exactly like mine there's one more setting that you might want to add and that is deadband deadband is going to be especially useful if you have a controller where the gim TOS are not the best and they don't always reenter the best we specifically see that users of the TBS Tango and TBS MBO radios need some deadband as well as if you just have an older or cheaper radio where the gimbals are a little worn out if you find that the gimbals are sort of drifting and not returning to Center over time you can go in and you can click finetune and you can add a little bit of deadband this is the deadband slider here a good amount of dead band to add is 0.05 there's no reason to add dead band on the throttle though you could add dead band on the r throttle doesn't Center so it's not affected by dead band we can add dead band on the roll pitch and yaw axes if you run into that problem where as you're flying the quad cter is kind of drifting even though the stick is Centered for now I'm going to I'm not going to add dead band cuz my my gimbals are fine if you're not sure I would suggest you add a little bit of deadband and later you could try removing it once you're a little bit more experienced as a pilot and can really tell when things are wrong and when things are right go ahead and hit save when you're done the calibration will be saved and we should be ready to go I will exit out to the main menu now and we will begin with the very first exercise oh uh by the way you may have noticed that I don't have any music playing and you have music playing probably if you like the music that the game is playing great enjoy it after about uh 27 hours of flying you'll get tired of it at least I did you can go into options and you can go to audio and you can turn the music off which I have done the next thing I want you to do is go into steam not liftoff but Steam and click settings and I want you to go down to the in-game setting and I want you to enable the in-game FPS counter I like to put it in the top right the reason for that is that the feel and the physics of the simulator are heavily affected by the frame rate if your frame rate is too low the physics won't feel good so we always want to be keeping an eye on that frame rate especially if you maybe have a little bit of a low-spec computer with that in-game FPS counter enabled you may need to restart the game in order to get that to activate you should see in the upper right hand corner of the screen a frame per second counter and you want that frame per second counter to be as high as possible that's the short version I'm getting 60 FPS which is the absolute minimum that you want to see uh obviously when we actually start playing the game the frame rate may change we're just in the menu right now um so you're going to want to keep an eye on that and we can go into options and we can change some of the graphics options to make that Higher One thing you're going to want to do is have the vsync turned off that is going to decrease the latency of the simulator and you may need to decrease the resolution if you're not getting a high enough frame rate you can also decrease the quality setting uh from Fantastic which is the best all the way down to maybe fast or fast test your graphics will look worse but that doesn't matter we're not here to look at the game we're here to learn how to fly you're going to want to also make sure that limit frame rate is off and you have unlimited frame rate so you get the fastest frame rate possible with that being done we can go to single player free flight and uh we can load up a level and do the very first exercise we're going to do that exercise on the straw bale map and we're going to click no track because we're not going to be racing yet we're just learning how to fly I want you to make sure that here on the left you have official blueprints selected uh instead of any customized drones that you might have made or maybe not and we're going to go through the official Blueprints and we're going to select let's select the ladb Skyliner this is a nice 5-in freestyle quad that's going to be perfect for us to learn on notice now that my frame per second counter at the top is oh my goodness it's 250 260 frames per second we're out of the menu and the frame per second is now uncapped and ready to go if you're not seeing at least 60 frames per second hit the Escape button go to options and change some of those graphical options to try to get that frame counter up you ideally want at least maybe 100 or 120 frames per second for the physics to feel the best the next thing I want you to do is I want you to press the up and down arrow keys and the up and down arrow keys will change your camera angle we're not going to go too in depth on the effective camera angle cuz I'd really just like to get you flying but what I'd like you to do is lower your camera angle by pressing the down arrow key to about let's say 15° ignore the fact that it's turned red 15° is a good camera angle for uh you to learn on every time you load the level you're going to need to change that camera angle I'll show you later in a later tutorial how to change that and lock the camera angle in permanently but I really just want to get you into the exercise right now uh so we're not going to do that right now the other thing I want to show you is that if you press the a key look in the upper left hand corner of my screen you see it says Acro if I press the a key it changes from Acro to 3D Horizon level and back to Acro again you want to be in Acro mode for these lessons just in case you accidentally bump that key and mess it up you will also see that on my screen you can see my stick overlay at the lower center of my screen so if we look at the camera here we can see that as I raise the throttle right the stick is moving up and down and if you look at the lower center of my screen you can see that representation of the throttle going up and down it is a very basic graphical depiction of my sticks but most of the time I'm going to want you to be looking at that stick overlay on screen not looking at this camera it's more precise you can see more precisely what I'm doing with my fingers and it's easier on the editor if he doesn't have to edit in a whole camera overlay so I'm going to go ahead and take the controller over here and we're just going to be looking at that stick overlay instead of at a camera and here is the exercise that I would like you to do here at the beginning of the level in this exercise we're going to start to learn throttle management this drone isn't like a DJI drone where it will automatically hold altitude for you you have to manage the altitude by adjusting the throttle the throttle controls the output speed of the motors when you raise the throttle the motors go faster and make more thrust when you lower the throttle the motors slow down and make less thrust so what we can do is we can begin to raise the throttle and you'll see that as I start to raise the throttle you'll hear the motor speed up but but really nothing will happen if I continue to raise the throttle ever so slowly eventually we'll reach a point where the quadcopter begins to climb you see it's not climbing yet we are not making enough thrust yet to overcome the weight of the of the quadcopter if I keep raising that throttle there we go we found the point where we lift off of the ground and now we're kind of bobbling around this bobbling here where we're not quite off the ground but we're not quite flying yet either is referred to as ground effect and we were going to want to continue to raise the throttle until we climb up out of ground effect and if I raise the throttle just slightly now see no look M No Hands We Are Climbing don't worry about the fact that the quad is drifting you see I'm drifting towards the edge of the map who cares don't worry about that all I want you to think about is the throttle and nothing else that's why we're in the simulator as I continue to drift off the map that's fine eventually I will will drip far enough off off the map that the game will reset me or I can just lower the throttle and press the r key on my keyboard to reset now we're going to do that again we're just going to raise throttle until we lift into the air there we go and the first thing I want you to think about as you learn to take off is finding the hover point or the takeoff point of the quadcopter so I'm going to reset again and lower the throttle what I don't want to do is I don't want to raise the throttle into that position where I'm kind of in ground effect and bobbling and bouncing off the ground that is very uh that's bad for the quad and it's not doesn't look good it doesn't fly good it's not good what I want to do is I want to raise the throttle to the point where the quad begins to climb and get it to definitively climb there we go now I'm climbing right I found that point where I'm climbing don't don't take your hands off the sticks in real life when you're flying just we're just we're in the simulator and I'm doing a demonstration so it's okay the very first thing we're going to work on is just being able to take off to be able to raise the throttle and find that takeoff point and begin to climb there we go and you see the quad kind of jumps off the ground when the quad is close to the ground it pushes off the ground with the thrust and it push it gets extra thrust but once it gets up in the air it's only pushing on the air and the air doesn't push back as hard as the ground so it will kind of jump off the ground and then you need to continue to raise the throttle just a little bit till it continues to climb now you don't want to overdo it so you don't want to just raise the throttle and shoot up into the air that can be really impressive when you're hanging out with your friends but it doesn't demonstrate good throttle control we just want to raise the throttle so the quad begins to lift off and then raise it a little bit more so we get out of ground effect and continue to climb [Music] okay once you've done that the next step is going to be establishing a hover at a consistent altitude and I don't even care what that altitude is do you see in the upper right hand corner of the screen you've got there's an altitude and a speed indicator I kind of don't even want you to look at that because in real life you probably aren't going to have an altitude and a speed indicator and even if you do that's not how you know like when you're driving a car assuming that you drive a car which maybe some of you don't drive cars but when you're driving a car you're not like looking at your speedometer to find out how fast you're going you're looking at the road you're looking at the rest of the traffic the only time you look at your speedometer is if you think oh am I about to get a speeding ticket and the same is true with quads we are not going to be relying on an altimeter to tell us how high we're going because these are Acro and racing drones they're probably not going to be high enough in the air that the numerical altitude actually matters we're going to be looking at the environment around us so in this case I want you to look at the Horizon off in the distance and if I raise the throttle and begin to take off you should see that the Horizon moves downward in the screen as I climb the Horizon gets lower you can see the Horizon U moving up to reveal itself from behind the trees and the trees are getting further and further below us we want to judge our altitude based on those visual references not based on uh an altimeter or any readout in the screen and what I want you to do is I want you to climb to a certain point like for example let's just say we're going to climb to about the the top of the trees we're going to be level with the top of the trees so I'm going to climb until it looks like the top of the trees are approximately in the center of my screen that seems about right and then we're going to adjust throttle up and down very slowly to try to hold that altitude without climbing or [Music] descending and I want you to take a look in fact I'm going to put it on screen as a replay and kind of Zoom it in I want you to take a look at how microscopically small the Motions of the throttle that I'm making are to maintain altitude precisely requires extremely precise and small movements of the throttle um and this is something that as a beginner you're you're going to struggle with probably I just everyone struggles with it so in the beginning what'll happen is that you'll get to that altitude and you'll oh I'm climbing and you'll lower the throttle and you're like oh I'm falling and you'll raise the the throttle and oh I'm climbing and you'll have these big kind of oscillations around the hover point that you're trying to achieve the altitude that you're trying to achieve and as you get better and better you'll begin to anticipate what's happening and be able to make those smaller movements in addition your muscle control your fine muscle control with the with the sticks and the gimbals will become more precise and more practiced and you'll be able to make those very small movements but in the beginning this first exercise what we want to do is just take off climb to let's say the level of the trees and then adjust the throttle to try to hold that altitude as precisely as we can don't worry about the fact that we're drifting forward and going to crash into the trees it doesn't matter that's why we're in the simulator we just want to make very small adjustments of the throttle to try to hold that altitude and the of course the ideal would be to perfectly hold that altitude at exactly the same altitude and to be able to just take your hand off the stick and float at oh I'm descending see I'm descending I'm have to raise the throttle slightly you're always making little adjustments on a quadcopter you can really hardly ever just take your hands off the sticks and have it be perfectly balanced and hovering see now I'm climbing right why am I drifting I don't know that's the beginning of this exercise so that's what you're going to start working on it's super boring but it is going to get you to the good stuff faster and so if you want to come along on this process with me that's where you're going to start work on that for a while until you're ready ready to go on to part two and then you'll see you in part two which is linked in the playlist down in the video description or the card on screen I'll see you there happy fly

Channel: Joshua Bardwell

Views: 156,986

Keywords: joshua bardwell, ultimate fpv shopping list, support me on patreon, This is my full time job

Id: SpuXqNakP2A

Length: 24min 40sec (1480 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 14 2023