A DRONE

Any baseball fans? You might remember Trevor Bauer as the guy who cut his finger on a drone, delaying his start in a series game two years ago. A former mechanicalengineering student, Bauer taught himself how to build drones in 2014. He explains the basic components you need.

Frame

Carbon fibre offers the best mix of strength, lightness, and durability. That’s great for when you’re starting out and crashing a lot. Buy a frame that uses 13 mm (5”) propellers from companies such as flyingrobot.co or quadcopter.co.za.

Battery

The industry standard is four-cell.

Motors and propellers

Electric motors are rated in KV, or rpm generated per volt. High-kv options will be more responsive, but they’ll burn through the battery faster. When starting out, you’ll want a less aggressive freestyle motor and propeller set. Stick to a thrust-to-weight ratio of around 4:1. So if your frame, the battery, the motors, and all the other major components weigh 500 g, you need motors that will give you 2 kg of thrust, or 500 g per motor. The more experienced you get – and the faster you want to fly – the more you will increase that ratio.

Brain

Flight boards do all the calculations that keep your drone in the air. An ESC (electronic speed controller) then delivers those calculations to the motors. Keep it simple by getting an ESC that can take direct input from the battery, so you don’t have to get a power-distribution board too.

Vision

To see what the drone sees, you’ll need a small security camera, video transmitter, and viewing goggles. Fat Shark makes the most popular goggles, but any 5.8-gigahertz camera and transmitter will work. Use a circular polarised antenna to connect your goggles to the transmitter. There are two polarisations, right-hand and left-hand. Make sure the antenna has the same polarisation as your goggles.

Control

To start with, choose a handset that transmits in 2.4 GHZ and can connect to your computer with a USB so you can practice on simulators. Drone Racing League has a good free option. You’ll have a chance to crash without destroying your new drone.

Programming

There are two dominant firmware options: KISS and Beta Flight. Beta Flight is open source; KISS is closed. Flash your board with the firmware and then calibrate all the settings to ensure that everything talks correctly. It can be daunting. How do I get my propellers to spin? Why is this one spinning the wrong way? Luckily there are a lot of guides out there – try Youtube, drone forums, Facebook groups – that can help.