Hello from Kansas City, Missouri!

ahuff979

New Member
New to quad flying. Only have a hubsan X4 FPV, right now, but it's got me hooked and I'm already looking to learn more about this hobby!Maybe even participate in a race or two...after an upgrade or so...of course!

Sent from my SM-G920P using Tapatalk
 

vinito

Member
Hi. I'm in KC, KS !!
That Hubsan is always the quad I recommend to folks who want to give them a try. Cheap to buy, difficult to damage, indoors is easy so weather doesn't matter and the flying is exactly the same as anything else so it's an excellent thing to practice and get secure with your skills. The main problem, for me anyway, is for my brain and the quad to be oriented similarly so no matter which direction the thing is pointing, you know which way to wiggle the sticks to get it to do what you want it to do next. It's easy to lose orientation at first. I just got back into it after over a year off and I had to learn to fly nearly all over again, though it only took a couple days to get a decent handle on it this time.

When I say the Hubsan is exactly the same as anything else, I really just mean the sticks going the same directions for the quad. I have a cheap little 250FPV thing and the flight characteristics are much different (more stable, smooth and responsive actually) and I'm halfway through building a 500 thing which will have a little camera gimbal attached and it no doubt will have yet another envelope full of different characteristics. But for manual flight you basically need your brain to have orientation as close to second-nature as possible so you don't zig when you meant to zag every 15 seconds.

I am currently waiting on a little module to be back in stock so I can fly my Hubsan with my Taranis transmitter. Seems like that might be fun.

I should mention that I bought the stuff and started building my 500 after I had my Hubsan for a while. I'm pretty good at building stuff, but I bit off a lot with that jump as there were too many new facets for that to be enjoyable, i.e. GPS and Mission Planner, building a camera gimbal (because I'm into self-torture I guess), telemetry, etc. I ended up putting it on hold and built a cheap little 250 plastic frame thing and I tell ya, that thing is just a BLAST to fly out in the back yard. It couldn't hold a candle to any real racer, but it's plenty fast for me. Then I bought an FPV setup and installed it on that quad and started learning how to do that a little. Flying FPV is a lot different than line-of-sight and I had trouble for a little while, but I can explore my semi-wooded acre fairly decent now. It's kind of a whole new set of skills even though you have the same radio in your hands. Next I bought another little 250 frame and kit of parts just to have another little step-up FPV build and a lighter, more durable frame - it's starting to come together. I'm not in a big hurry and just enjoying the ride, and I have two "toys" (bought a Syma X5C somewhere along the line but I don't fly it all that much) and my 250 to fly around so that's plenty.

How many batteries do you have for the Hubsan? I have seven and sometimes I wish I had more, though usually four is enough to get my "fix". Those little batteries don't seem to last very long at all for me.

It's easy to get hooked on these things. It's so fun !!

edit to add: By the way, probably rare to get a reply to your post this soon. This forum is kinda neat, but there seems to be very little traffic here. It's kinda tumbleweedy. I would suggest to the site admin that they should reduce the headings to one or two to encourage traffic rather than having over 50 (over 50? really?) where pretty much everything gets lost, not much gets read so folks kinda quit showing up. But I doubt that would ever happen. Having too many headings can easily kill a forum. I frequent one which has only three headings and it's fun & lively and has hundreds of members. Anyways, have fun.
 
Last edited:

vinito

Member
I've been going a little nuts this week. Originally I had a good little build in mind for my current 250 quad project, then I fell off a cliff.

I picked up a nice little ALCE OSD module a while back. It's an On-Screen-Display which overlays various information on top of your FPV video picture and this one is kinda nice Improvement over the popular MinumOSD. Well I had a CC3D flight controller I was going to put into it, but it doesn't even have a magnetometer (compass) or barometer (altitude sensor) in it and both of those would be highly useful information to see on the screen. So I decided to punt on the CC3D and picked up the new CC3D Revolution since it has the bigger memory and speed to deal with this additional stuff. But with the new controller you can feed GPS info too, so I had to get one of those to add to it. I was tempted to get a high-power FPV transmitter, but I figured I could wait on that until I decide I need more power later. Truth is, for flying around the yard what I've got might be just fine. If I find that I get long enough flight times, I guess I could start to venture further away, but I don't know that either. But I digress.

Anyway, I was going to have this nice little cheap backyard flyer, but one little sliver of tech sent me down a rabbit hole, hehe. You kinda have to watch for this as it's pretty easy to do. Just a word to the wise. When upgrading to a new craft for the fleet and you start to feel a bit overwhelmed, step back and decide if you are going overboard and maybe consider stepping back to a simpler, lower rung on the ladder. In this case, I have done that and decided that the OSD features will be a worthy and fun addition since I've already got a basic FPV fun flier, so I won't have two vehicles so similar in capabilities that I'm just being redundant. If I didn't already have the first one already, I would have dropped back and skipped this new controller & GPS and stuff. Basically I decided "why not make it different?"

Just thought I'd offer this little story in case you face a similar situation in the future, which is likely.
 


Top