FPV Drones

Project overview

An ongoing personal hobby: building, repairing, and flying FPV drones, from tiny whoops to 5-inch freestyle quads. This page covers a few distinct facets of it rather than a single build, repair work, simulator practice, and an active 5” build, and keeps growing as new builds and repairs happen.

Tiny Whoops

Tiny whoops take a lot of crash damage for their size, and motors are usually the first thing to go, so replacing one is a routine repair rather than a rare one. Inspecting and reflowing the solder joints under magnification makes the difference between a clean, reliable repair and one that fails again mid-flight.

Magnified view of a tiny whoop flight controller board, checking the solder joints after a motor replacement — Checking the solder joints under magnification after a motor replacement

Practicing in the simulator

Acro mode has no self-levelling: the sticks command rotation rates directly, and the pilot is fully responsible for attitude, so building that muscle memory in a simulator first is far cheaper than doing it over real hardware. I use a Radiomaster transmitter bound directly to a laptop simulator to practice freestyle and racing lines before flying them for real.

Holding a Radiomaster transmitter in front of a laptop running an FPV drone simulator, flying a simulated course over a city — Practicing acro-mode flying in a simulator before taking it to real hardware

That practice carries straight over to real flying: the same acro inputs, now with a real digital HD FPV feed and OSD (voltage, GPS lock, link strength) instead of a simulated one.

First-person view from a digital HD FPV system, OSD showing voltage, GPS lock, and link strength, looking down at the pilot on a porch — The real thing: digital HD FPV feed and OSD, flying for real after practicing in the simulator

SpeedyBee 5” Drone

5-inch FPV quadcopter build using a SpeedyBee F405 V4 flight controller stack, working from the board’s own pinout reference to wire up the LED, VTX, and receiver connections correctly.

SpeedyBee F405 V4 flight controller pinout diagram, labelling the Betaflight LED, analog and DJI VTX, and SBUS pads — The F405 V4's pinout, used as the wiring reference for this build

Build log and more photos coming soon.

Current status

In progress: the SpeedyBee 5” build is wired and being finished off; tiny whoop repairs and simulator practice are ongoing, not one-off events.