If you’ve found this post, I gather you want to build a racing drone and you’re looking for a place to start. By the way, I’m just learning too. Yes, I’m a Computer Engineering graduate, but I’m new to this field right now. Still, by the time you start reading this, the series will have moved forward a bit. I started the job by buying the radio first. The radio I bought is the FlySky FS-i6X 2.4GHz 10-Channel Radio with FS-iA10B Receiver. The reason I chose this radio is that I had already tried it before, thanks to a friend.
FlySky is one of the most widely used radios in this field, so the abundance of resources was my first reason for choosing it. After that, of course, the high channel count. It has 10 channels in total. It ships with 6 active channels, but it can be upgraded to 10. That applies to the FS-i6X series, of course — the regular FS-i6 is strictly a 6-channel radio. As for what “channel count” means: say you push the drone forward, that’s one channel; banking right and left is another channel. Or if you set up another sensor, that’s a separate channel too — that’s the short version.
By the way, I also own a DJI Mini 2 drone. So if you ask why I’m building this drone: DJI’s classic drones are extremely stable. Because of all the sensors on them, you can’t fly them like a racing drone anyway — to pull off those acrobatic moves, you’d basically have to turn all the sensors off just to move freely.
If you say “there’s the DJI Avata, why not buy that instead of building a drone from scratch?” — the reason is that the risk of smashing a racing drone is very high. You might break it on your first flight or your tenth. Something will inevitably fail and you’ll have to replace it. But try replacing a part on a DJI drone and you won’t really have the option. On this drone I’m building, if a part breaks, I can fix the problem by replacing just that part. With DJI, if something breaks I might have to send the whole thing to warranty or buy a new product. On top of all that, I think the journey of building a drone will be its own kind of fun.
Remember I said you might crash the drone on the first flight or the tenth? Those numbers assume you’ve completed simulator training. If you jump into this without any simulator practice, there’s a very high chance you’ll hurt yourself or someone else. I mentioned I have a DJI Mini 2 — even on my very first flight I could fly it easily, without any trouble, because it has sensors everywhere and protection everywhere. They designed that drone so that even someone who knows nothing can fly it.
But when it comes to FPV — First Person View — racing drones, even the sharpest drone pilot only starts getting good results after spending around 100 hours in the simulator. You might be wondering what this simulator is. You need to buy the Liftoff simulator sold on Steam. It was 199.00 TL when I bought it. Then you connect the radio you bought to your computer and train yourself in the simulator.
I added the Liftoff and FlySky radio links to the words above as references. None of them are ads — I just tried to link to the most reasonable places I could find. As you’ll see in the next posts anyway, almost every part of the drone will end up being gathered from a different electronics store.
