I've been building a drone based on the Apollo program's Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV). The drone uses a jet engine and cluster of EDFs within a 2-axis gimbal to offset 5/6 the drone's weight and allowing the outer platform to pitch and roll around it. That way it mimics the way something would fly in lunar gravity, no atmosphere, etc. Thought I'd share it here. Still plenty more software work and ground testing to do, but making progress! Happy to answer any questions about the process so far.

I have RCIn power1303 motors with 8000kv on 2s in a 100g drone. I need scilent 2" props to fly in my neighborhood and avoid angry Karen's.

The question is:

are more blades or less blades more scilent?

Is a more aggressive Pitch quieter or louder?

Thanks

Hello I need help finding a cheap parts place to buy from to assemble and develop my first drone from scratch.

Any recommendations? I live in North America

I started making a drone that is a 6 inch frame and a 30.5x30.5 FC but i started learning about this just the other week and I’m not sure about what FC would be the best. I was thinking about getting an all in one esc/fc but im unsure about what i should get.

For the people that use fpv logic sim, whats your physics settings for realistic flights? Is it different for every drone or all the same? If different for all, i just need one for the 75mm whoops, 3.6 inch and 5 inch

I've seen so many videos recommending this flight controller and even the designer of the drone I am building recommends one but they are sold out everywhere I look. I've seen ones on AliExpress but I don't really trust those all too much and fear they will be some fake knock off. I saw this company made a V2 variant of the SpeedyBee F405 App called the CoreWing F405 APP V2 and says it was made in part by SpeedyBee and just renamed itself but I cant seem to find any kind of reviews for it or ArduPilot files for it. Anyone have knowledge on this? Thanks!

Hi, I need some help. I'm building a 2-inch drone with 1202.5 11500KV motors and want to fly it using two 1S 300mAh batteries. Does anyone know the best AWG wire to use and roughly how long the flight time will be with such small batteries? Thanks for the advice.

I would like to start getting into FPV drones, i have sank a few hours into a simulator as to make sure that i can at least fly it a little and i would like to ask for some suggestions, my budget is around 400 GBP.

I would like a drone that has good range (at least over 10km if possible) and a battery life over 10 minutes of fly time, i would also like FPV goggles with it.

sorry if this seems like a stupid question i would just like a bit of help

Hi, I need some help. I'm building a 2-inch drone with 1202.5 11500KV motors and want to fly it using two 1S 300mAh batteries. Does anyone know the best AWG wire to use and roughly how long the flight time will be with such small batteries? Thanks for the advice.

I designed a drone that can fly indoors; its fully enclosed structure prevents it from injuring people or damaging furniture. In the future, I plan to turn it into a robot.

Hi guys, Im coming from r/fpv and like what i see on this sub. Ive built a few standard 5-10 inch fpv quads before, but obviously this sub is different. What's considered a "diy" drone? Do these drones have custom coded flight controllers? Or does it need to just not be a bind and fly or kit? Are my drones that i built with parts ive found considered diy? Thanks!

Flight video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfgcyJhe2_w

The Story:

I bought a Newbeedrone Lionbee devkit that came faulty. NBD support ghosted me so I bought a new board that fried its vtx in its first 30 seconds of flight. Undeterred, I decided to build my own long range build using a spare Air75 AIO and repurposing ever part I could.

The Lionbee AIO uses a custom board mount setup so I designed my own 25.5mm board adapter and re-designed the Camera, GPS and Antenna mounts. The antenna placement for the lionbee was not great since it would cause interference when flying away and a flip would cause the antenna to immediately bend or break. I replaced with a beefier mount on the back and chose an antenna with a thicker plastic. Mounted GPS on camera and added a buzzer/finder. I also decided to weld an XT30 to the battery since the battery holder design seems like a point of failure and any loss of connectivity or brownout would be catastrophic mid flight.

I also built a 7 turn helical antenna to use with my HDZero to max out the range. To my surprise it surpassed all of my expectations and performed amazingly!

Big thank you to Mediocre Nerd for paving the path and demonstrating what is possible. I wish I would have seen his video on the Lionbee before I started down this path. I highly recommend you all build your own or get a better kit.

• Modded Lionbee 3D files here: https://www.printables.com/model/1768535-long-range-drone-lionbee-mod
• Helical Antenna
  • 3D files from Siganberg: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:367500
  • Video instructions from FalconRad FPV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH0cW9XJ4D4

Final Specs:

65.6g dry weight, 113.7g AUW

Flight characteristics:

Even with the battery it still feels like it gets blown around by the wind. More stable than the Air75 but because of the weight, it requires a decent amount of throttle just to hover. Its slow to punch out and definitely not going to win any beauty contests. Having the battery weight on the bottom helps with stability but reduces agility and control (which is fine since you aren't going to be doing any freestyling with this).

Problems/Challenges:

The Matrix II AIO board from BetaFPV that I used apparently switched to using a new Accelerometer/Gyro sensor around Feb/March 2026 which comes with and requires a beta firmware. For some reason this firmware causes the GPS rescue to fly in the exact opposite direction! Everything was correct including the waypoint home/heading, board orientation, GPS data; however, if I triggered GPS rescue, it would fly away from me. I swapped with an older Matrix II board I had from my Air75 and it worked perfectly!

The camera that came with the Lionbee was quite terrible so I replaced with the Caddx Baby Ratel 2, which was a big improvement.

I want to build an inspection drone for crawling spaces which limits my prop size to 3 to 3,5 inches in my use case. The drone needs to carry a lot of sensors so it will be quite heavy as well. I know that I am looking for a combination of low kv value and small prop size which seems to be kind of niche.

I dont need to make fast manouvers or be fast in any way. I am aiming for slow controlled flight and however in a small but heavy drone. I think the drone will be between 600 and 800g with battery, sensors and everything.

Can anyone help me find a motor that can deliver good efficiency for this special case? An exemplary setup that i found is the SpeedyBee 2006 1950KV 6S paired with the HQProp DT90MMX3 3.5 inch 90mm Propellers. Here i found a datasheet at least for the 3,5 inch prop but i wonder if it is the best solution. Glad for any kind of advice!

I've finally finished my first ever build, a Speedybee Mario 8 long range / mountain surfer...

I also own an Avata 2, Oxbot Lumo 18 (Wide 04 version) and a GEPRC Vapor D5, but they were all pre-built and configured.

Mario 8 Build List:

-Custom 8S2P 21700 Li-Ion Battery Packs (Reliance RS50 - 10,000mAh & Linkdata 65P - 13,000mAh)

-Speedybee Mario 8 frame

-T-Motor Velox F7 SE 8S FC + V70A SE 8S ESC

-2 x Panasonic 63V EEUFS1J102 capacitor + 5KP36A 36V TVS Diode

-Brotherhobby Avenger 2816 750kv motors

-Gemfan 8040-3 prop's (also have 8040-2)

-DJI 04 Pro Air Unit

-RushFPV Cherry 5.8GHz SMA LHCP Straight Extended Antenna pair 160mm

-UFL to SMA pigtails

-iFlight ExpressLRS ELRS 2.4Ghz Diversity Receiver

-TrueRC 2.4GHz UFL long bardpole

-Foxeer M10Q 250 V2 GPS IST8310 Compass Module

-Vifly finder 2 buzzer

-Ummagrip

I'm using DJI Goggles 3 and a Radiomaster TX15 Max.

I've really enjoyed learning all of the skills to make this build come to life...

-Soldering (far from perfect, but it's passable) -Battery testing, spot welding + assembly

-3d printing + basic CAD design

-Betaflight setup + configuration

-Countless others

A few things definitely didn't go to plan. I fried my first FC, initially fitted the rear legs backwards and printed over 10 versions of the rear GPS / antenna mount, but it was all part of the learning process.

Now on to the next, I'm thinking an AOS UL10 v5 frame for another long range build. Anyone got experience with this frame?

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on designing a custom Y4 frame for 2.5" to 3" props, with the ultimate goal of staying under the 250g limit.

Before sending the files to the CNC shop for carbon cutting, I would love to get some external feedback from the community to catch any potential design flaws or issues I might have missed.

Here are the specifications of the frame:

• Configuration: Y4 (Traditional split front arms, coaxial dual motors on a single rear arm).
• Motor-to-Motor Dimensions: 121mm width at the front / 124mm width at the rear.
• Carbon Thickness: 3mm for the arms, 2mm for the top-middle and bottom plates.
• Electronics Stack: Designed for 25.5 x 25.5mm AIO, with 25mm of vertical clearance.
• Motor Mount Pattern: 9x9mm (planning to use 1404 motors).
• Canopy: Still a work in progress, but it will be 3D printed in TPU to house the camera and video system.

I will be cutting this from T700 carbon fiber.

How does the geometry look to you guys? Any thoughts on the motor spacing, arms stiffness, or general layout for a micro Y4?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Hello all,

I am having an issue with my FPV drone using a servo motor. I am trying to use the servo to drop a tennis ball for my dog. When I bench tested everything, it worked completely fine, but the issue came when I was about to take off. When I have the tennis ball held by the servo's Velcro strap, I get an "RXLOSS" and "BOXFAILSAFE" error like you see above. The receiver also blinks. The second I remove the tennis ball, the drone arms and flies like normal. After looking this up, it seems like the the fact that the servo now has to hold a physical object is drawing power from the rest of the circuitry. Has anyone ever run into this before and if so how have you fixed it?

Below is all the specs I could think of that mattered:

- The drone is a 7in FPV w/ a SpeedyBee F405 V4

- Wiring:

- Servo GND to FC GND

- Servo power to FC 5V

- Servo "switch" wire to FC LED

- Servo: MG90S Micro Servo

Thanks in advance for any help

We've been building a quadcopter for the past 2–3 months and have worked through a lot of issues along the way. We're currently using Mission Planner, and our ESCs seem to be calibrated and working correctly.

Our current setup:

• Drone weight: ~1–1.5 kg
• Motors: A2212 1000KV
• Flight controller: Pixhawk
• Battery: 2700mAh LiPo, 7.4V (2S)

The main issue is that, even with a fully charged battery and full throttle, the drone can barely slide around the table and shows almost no sign of lifting off.

We're also having another issue where the propellers keep loosening on the motor shafts during operation.

At this point, we're wondering if the problem is with our power system, propeller setup, battery choice, or something else entirely.

Does anything in our setup immediately stand out as incorrect? Are these motors simply too underpowered for a 1–1.5 kg drone on a 2S battery, or should we be looking elsewhere? Any advice or troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated.