Drone Update

From previous posts, you may be aware that I started building my own quadcopter a while ago. Since then, I have made several improvements. For many years, I've always wanted my own DJI camera drone for taking videos and just general cinematography. However, these drones are incredibly expensive, unless you buy the new DJI Spark, which still starts at $500. The Spark is a good drone, but I feel that its capabilities are limited by its size and performance. Because of these reasons, I decided to build my own drone, centered around cinematography, basically my version of a DJI Phantom. I started with by upgrading the frame on my existing drone to a bigger 500mm frame with more room for camera equipment. It also has landing gears that are far more stable and stronger than those from my old frame. To improve the camera capabilities, I bought a 3-axis gimbal (same type on DJI Phantom) to replace my 2-axis one. This means that the camera I use will now be stabilized on the pitch, roll and yaw axes. Overall, it provides smoother video to get me closer to that DJI level. Another significant upgrade that I made was with my flight controller. When I started this drone, I was still a beginner builder, and I used the KK2 board to start. While this flight controller is fairly cheap and good for beginners, its technology is outdated and isn't very customizable. Because of these factors, I switched to the far more advanced Naze board. These boards are very popular nowadays, mainly being used on high-performance racing quads. Naze boards are compatible with a computer software called Betaflight, which allows for lots of customization regarding self-level, motor speeds, orientation, and many other things. It allows me to tune the self-leveling feature of the board so that my quad can still maintain a stable position in wind to improve the quality of the video recording. To make the drone easier to fly, I've also added an FPV (First Person View) system. This essentially allows me to see what the drone is seeing by wearing VR-like goggles. The camera on my quad both records and transmits video to my goggles. In the future, I hope to add things such as a GPS system, so that my drone can stay even more stable in the air and possibly do autonomous flights. I have attached pictures of my drone and some sample footage that I took with it here.