Thinking more of the budget end – £50 ish
as a present of the youth

Anyone got one & care to drop in a review.

How good are they outdoors & how easy to fly?

Hmmmm. We have a slightly bigger one as a project at the office. It was a bit out of that budget though (it contains a GPS enabled autopilot system and a load of other bits).

Have you had a look at Hobbyking’s website? my ads here >>>> seem to now be picking up on them.

I had the Hubsan X4. It was a great little toy, had plenty of fun flying it about the house and back garden until one of the dogs decided they were going to try and eat it once I’d crashed it 😀

I have got this, build from bits from Hobbyking.
Just perfect for mounting gopro under.

PC257796 by msh_sco, on Flickr

@ Mikkel,
if not too personel a question – how much did that cost to build??

roughly 100 pounds, all from hobbyking UK.
biggest cost is the motors and speed controlers which is around a tenner each.
but if you don’t have a transmitter you need to add that as well ofcourse.

noooooooooo

that hobbyking site is bad news.

cheers guys

I got a little Hubsan Quadcopter from ModelZone for £45. You can get it cheaper online. It was quite good fun until a colleague crashed it and bust a motor. Now waiting for replacements.

It’s a tiny wee thing. About the size of the palm of you hand.

this filmed from mine (tweaked to look like nightvision)

OK, can someone tell me how you get those things to follow you down a hill or trail without crashing and without the camera ending up pointing in a totally wrong direction?!

I saw a long DH trail filmed on one of those, surely too far for one person with a controller to see where it was going.

Live feedback from the on board camera? Some sort of laser tracking? I know you can get GPS auto return for them so it’ll just hover in the same place if it loses contact with the transmitter but I’d be interested to know how the hell you stop it crashing into trees when following riders down a trail.

crazy-legs, you need FPV for that. Look up “Team Blacksheep” on youtube for some good examples of this.

Essentialy you are sticking a small camera next to the GoPro and piping the output from that over radio to a pair of goggles you wear whilst you steer. It means about 350 quid extra on your build though.

Mikkel, I recognise the frame you’ve got, but do you have a list of the other bits in your build? I might be able to sneak a hundred under the radar at home…

live feed from a camera often to a pair og goggles
Look up FPV flying

this is the parts used in mine

http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=24723
http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=29353
http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=29050
http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=25890
http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=29048
http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=25457
http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=25458

cheers mikkel – very helpful.
The price is rising for the lads b’day though.

Lads birthday, so thats the excuse your using?

It’s a good excuse and if it works…

Mikkel, cheers for those links. I’ve got a spare Rx at work that I can plumb into it and a Contour that something like that should lift.

this thread is a wallet basher……good job i cant fnd the wallet.

I’m currently building up this x525 framed quad. I’m building it slowly with a couple of being bought each month.

Total cost of this build will be around £150, and should be able to lift my slr. But it will ultimately be ‘upgraded’ to a custom framed octocopter.

this thread is a wallet basher……good job i cant fnd the wallet.

I’ve been sort of half-heartedly looking at quadcopters for a while but not really knowing the kit and stuff to buy. That and the fact that I certainly don’t *need* one.
But it’s getting ever more complex as I find out the requirements and cost for on-board video!

great.. another thing I need want…
🙂

there goes at least an hour of internet time looking for a fpv quadcopter that will carry a gopro/contour without breaking the bank.

There are some out there, but they will be expensive. As I mentioned above, TBS make a dedicated FPV quad designed around carrying a GoPro that is, well, not extorionate. If I had the spare cash…

The thing is, I am crap at flying an R/C plane and am wondering if FPV would make it any easier. Or if a quad would be easier. The last one we had at work suffered an ESC failure and sort of crashed. A bit. From height…

Thinking more of the budget end – £50 ish
as a present of the youth

Anyone got one & care to drop in a review.

How good are they outdoors & how easy to fly?

For no more than 40 quid you can get one of these Hubsan Quadcopter

This might look like a toy (which it is) but is remarkably well built & spare parts are cheap & readily available. The supplied control is pre set up but fully configurable & can be operated in two modes. Novice or expert.

See the thread I posted here

Far too good a toy for the kids & I quickly confiscated it as my lad was having too much fun 😉 Gyro stabilised & a total hoot to fly around the inside of the house. How do they build these things & ship them half way around the world for the money ?

D

I may just have bought one of those Hubsan Quadcopters. By accident obviously.
Sort of tripped over the computer and ended up on Amazon… As you do.

Damn! Seen this on my youtube subscriptions. Want one even more!

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxBM-JLNyBg[/video]

Those hubsans look good to practice with though

A mate has a quadcopter, & filmed another mate UP RIVI.

You can just see ‘the pilot’ to the left of the screen at 2mins 19 or so.

I built this a few years ago:

(Note carbon cover!)
But a warning, potentially dangerous if you use an old transmitter that pick up something, and turns all four motors on 100% when you’ve got your face next to it. It shot up about 100m, stopped, dropped like a stone onto the house roof, and into the front garden, never to fly again. I’ve got a small Hubsan x4 now, much safer.

I’ve got a little Hubsan. It’s awesome.

Just for the fun of it – here’s my toy:

Mikrokopter Hexa XL 1 by Ben Cooper, on Flickr

😉

Ben,
Looks good. The bowl looks like the one I used for a mould to make my cover, see above!

99p from Poundstretchers 😉

(The official Mikrokopter one costs €25)

Mine was from Wilko, so not the same after all!

wanted to go fly mine, and now i cant find my transmitter 🙁

I’ve been tempted by a quadcopter for a while for some alpine singletrack filming. I want one for a gopro or maybe with enough power to lift my Nikon P7100 large compact. I thought the cost was a lot until I saw this:

http://quadcopters.co.uk/dji-phantom-ready-to-fly-quadcopter-570-p.asp

However, since reading this thread it seems one can be built for far less. Is it difficult? Can you buy kits to assemble? Can any of them be folded up and put in a back pack? Sorry for the hijack!

Yes, lots of bits available.
Good info here:
RC Groups, warning: you’ll spend money

they are going to take over the world, check out this ted talk….http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ErEBkj_3PY

I got one of those DJI Phantoms, mainly because I was in a bit of a rush, had no idea how to fly a Quadcopter and thought the “return to home” function would be handy if it all went horribly wrong.

Used it a couple of times now for filming with the GoPro. Very, very easy to fly, but I need to do some work on isolating the camera from the frame, as the “jello” effect was quite noticeable.

They are quite a few tips online on how to do this, but I haven’t got around to it yet.

The “return to home” function works perfectly too!

You get about 10 minutes flying time on each fully charged battery, but depending on where you buy it from, you get a second battery for free.

The end of this flight went horribly wrong (not a quadrocopter)!

Return to home sounds like a sensible function to have when carrying expensive cameras.

wheelz: I was looking at the DJI Phantom but when you add in the camera and the FPV add-on, it’s still the thick end of £1000. 🙁

Otherwise it looks a great bit of kit, something dead easy and off the shelf.

return to home does not help much when the plane is lying in bits on the ground somewhere Ebygomm….
GPS locator is what is needed 🙂