Looking to build my first quad

handruin

New Member
Hey there. I'm looking for some pointers to get started with building my first quad. I have no prior RC-related experience with flying vehicles like quads or anything with rotors but I do have many years experience with racing on-road and off-road vehicles. I mention the experience to suggest I'm comfortable with building kits/rigs and with soldering, wiring, etc but not to compare or suggest that any skill set will help with flying a quad. I plan to take some advice I read elsewhere which was to use a radio and connect it to my PC and fly a sim for a while. I may also just get something like a Hubsan X4 to get started praticing.

Goals:
I'd love to build an quad to fly FPV for some free style flying and also aerial movies/video that I can capture at fun locations in the highest quality I can manage. I want the experience of building my own so I know how to repair it, mod it, and tinker. I may eventually want more than one quad to play around an experiment.

I've been watching many videos of quad builds and component reviews from YouTuber's such as Mr Steele, Onigiri, UAVFutures...not sure if that's good, bad, or indifferent but I've been trying to start somewhere and that's where I've been so far before here. I found my way to liking the design of the Armattan Rooster frame based on how solid it seems to be engineered as well as they claim to warranty it pretty well...but I haven't decided on anything just yet.

At this point in time I have very minimal gear. At most I have decent soldering equipment and hand tools to do the work. Aside from those I have no batteries, chargers, radios, goggles, etc. What I'm trying to figure out are all the required PCB components for things like the ECUs, RX units, flight controllers (and software, I keep hearing about KISS), FPV cameras, motors, rotors, etc and I'm a bit overwhelmed. I could copy someone else's build but that doesn't mean I understand why they've selected the components.

My budget is reasonably flexible to get started; I'm just starting a dialog here to see what I should read up on next or things I should avoid. Thanks in advance for any help you all might be able to provide.
 


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