Great Scott!

So now that I'm more comfy operating a drone, I've started looking into ordering my first FPV Drone. I found a lot of sites and that sell parts, but they are all so far away from England to Australia to The US. Then out of nowhere I found http://www.nghobbies.com/ they had an awesome selection of parts, and the prices didn't seem too bad either. So I went to see where in the world they are located and to my shock they were just 5 minutes away from me! I dropped everything I was doing and drove over. I walked in and it was amazing inside, the store specializes in FPV products and had all kinds of goodies laying around I had to stay calm and collect myself before I ripped out my wallet and just threw my money at this place. In addition to all the FPV Drone goodness they have all these 3D printers printing custom drone stuff, that added +100 to the awesome of this store.

Outside of just looking awesome, it was nice to finally talk to someone about FPV Drones. Being new to this, it could be a little overwhelming figuring this all out. The gentlemen at New Generation Hobbies was great enough to talk to me about all the aspects of FPV Drone racing.

So now my first decision is what frame size I want to start with and go from there. I can start small with a 150 frame or big with a 250. I'm going to research the pros and cons before I choose my first frame.

I got my Drone back

Well the day after I summed up the courage to ask my neighbour who I've never met before "Hey I was flying a toy drone and crashed it in your backyard". I think it would have been a little less embarrassing if I wasn't a grown man lol. It had a broken arm and a lot of wear but nothing some tape or glue won't fix. January is almost here and I think I've watched and read enough about FPV Drones to start ordering parts for mine. I think I'll start with the frame first and go from there.

I lost my Drone

Well that didn't take long, I lost my first drone tonight. I don't usually take it out let alone at night but today my brother asked if I could show him the drone. So I said sure, no problem. After flying it around close to the ground he asked... How high can it go? Stupidly I said "let's find out" and that's the last I saw it, while about 20 feet in the air the wind blew it towards my neighbor's back yard across the street and no matter how hard I hit the throttle it dropped like a sack of potatoes bounced off the neighbours roof and into the back yard. It's too late now to knock and ask for it, even though I want to. I'm thinking if I feel this crappy losing a toy drone, how do people who build the crazy FPV drones and do stunts in and over buildings feel when they lose a drone?

New Paint Job & More Flying

So I've been flying my Holy Stone X300C everyday trying to get a hang of flying. It's not easy, mainly due to the fact that I don't have much space indoors so I can't really do much. Outdoors so far has been next to impossible, I live in Canada and right now it's not the coldest outside but it's windy as all hell. Here's a video of my last flight with the X300C, you might be able to see a violent movement every now and then. That's the wind throwing my little drone around. I record from the moment I start till the batteries run out, so each charge is getting me around 10 minutes. Sadly the video has been choppy for me. I've seen some people upload the videos they record and they seem much smoother than the videos I've been getting.

Outside of practicing controlling a drone, I wanted to give the drone a little more aggressive look than the one it came with. So I took the drone apart (taking pics every step so I can put it back together) then painted the body matte black and everything else gold. It lasted all of one flight till the paint started to chip but I'm ok with it. I also wanted to see what makes a drone seeing how my next steps are too build my own I thought it would be a good learning experience. I think I'm going to give it to till January before I order my first parts (I can't wait). My hope is when I build my own it will have a lot more control outdoors.

My first drone just came in!

So reading about FPV drone racing the one thing everyone recommended is getting a practice drone. A drone you could beat up and crash without hurting your pockets. So I went online to look for something cheap but still have enough depth to it that I actually get a hang of flying a drone. Randomly and out of nowhere I had an ad show on the side of Facebook staying Holy Stone X300C Wifi FPV RC Drone %55 OFF! on Amazon (First the videos that got me hooked now this, the interwebs is alive I say! ). So asking around on Reddit the general answer was yeessss! It's cheap enough and has enough depth too it that you might learn a thing or two plus it's awesome enough to have a little camera that you can view and record with via your mobile device. So it's finally in and it's pretty small to be honest, you always see photos online against white backdrops and have no sense of scale.But that's fine I don't care much for the size, I just wanted to see how it flys.

After charging both batteries for about an hour or so I can say without of a shadow of a doubt that I SUCK! I suck large! I can't keep this thing stable for the life of me. Every wall in my house has been attacked by this thing. I also do this thing when it gets too close to the roof I panic and drop the throttle then I panic that it's dropping too fast and I hit the throttle and it shoots up and so on and so on. I can't believe how hard it is, all you drone racers online make it look amazing and easy. Looking at the drone without FPV it super confusing when the front end faces the other way and left becomes right and right becomes left I wonder how much of that confusion lessens when you get some head gear. (Below is some video footage of how much I suck and a sample of the quality from the  Holy Stone X300C)

Also here is some video from my backyard, I found the  Holy Stone X300C can't handle the wind very well. Any wind would throw it around.



That's it for now, back to practicing with this little bugger, my goal for now is just to keep this drone up and not hit a wall for the duration of the charge.... here's hoping.

In a galaxy far far away, this video started it all!

I think I will start by saying, Curse you YOUTUBE! Not only have you killed numerous hours of my life browsing your never ending stream of useful and useless videos... more so the latter. You've now shown me a video that has gotten me super excited and has me thinking of little else. The video in question was sitting in my recommended videos tray, I assume due to all my recent Star Wars searches thanks to the upcoming hype from the Star Wars Force Awakens movie coming out. The video it recommended was titled "FPV Racing drone racing star wars style Pod racing are back!". Not understanding a word of french I kept watching, skeptical at first because I've seen drone videos before. You know the ones that do some nice landscape video or photo. This time it was different.... much different. This time they were racing each other not only that they had headsets on that allowed them to see the view of the drone in first person! (Hence the name F(irst) P(erson) V(iew))

I was hooked instantly, one video lead to two videos, lead to three and so on. By the time I was done I had seen more FPV Drone videos than I would like to admit. Not only did this look like a crazy adrenaline rush, but it also reminded me of Star Wars... don't agree?! Allow me to make my case with the following videos. 

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Episode 1 is my least favorite Star Wars movie, the only part of the movie I enjoyed was the pod racing. I remember play the living crap out of Pod Racer for Dreamcast back in the day. (Added Dreamcast video for bonus points)

As a huge Star Wars fan and a techie how could I not be hooked?! So now after a few weeks of watching videos and researching and reading about FPV Drone racing. I've ordered my first drone. It's super cheap and I've read it's good to learn on. All my reading had one thing in common, get a crappy drone to learn to fly on first. So we will see how it goes when it comes in and if after flying it, will I still be dead set on getting in this hobby.