My Favorite starter drone kit is the SK450 Kit from Hobbyking This is a strong and useful machine that will not disappoint you and opens the doors to expansion as your skills progress, it is simple and low cost. I have used this as a base to build my current Drones, This is why!
When you have been building these wonderful devices for a while you begin to realize just how much “Stuff” you have in the workshop, this includes cables, plastic supports, screws and bolts. These are the bits that get you out of trouble when you are building or repairing your aircraft.
This site is aimed at Newbies and Newbies do not generally have this supply of parts to fall back on.
By purchasing the SK450kit you have ALL the basic parts you need and they are ready assembled so you see how it all goes together. This means you are not twiddling your thumbs hoping for a parcel to arrive form Hobbyking when you drop one in the grass on a Sunday afternoon. The SK450 is Stong and will survive most minor accidents as you grow comfortable with its flying. A good idea is to purchase several sets of propellers (both clockwise and anticlockwise ) in different colors and what I did was buy a spare frame kit (20$ ) so I have Arms, Plates , Standoffs and screws.
This SK450 is the base for most of the content of this build, we will go through the basic aircraft and then change out the Flight controller to give better flight, We will tune this to fly well and we will add GPS capabilities with Telemetry to your ground station so you can see all that is happening to your machine in flight. We can add FPV (first person view ) systems and go for a pilots eye view of your suroundings. We can add Still cameras for mapping and general views of property or the local lake.
When you have done all this you can take the same motors, batteries, flight controllers and add them to the 550 size kit with the purchase of 2 motors and 2 ESC to make a Big Hexacopter. With the 550size Frame kit you will get more stable flight and better chances of a successful recovery should a motor or propeller fail. You can carry caneras and video , FPV as well as a Gimbal for super smooth video .
I will discuss the flight controllers in a new post next week .