wafflejock
Well-Known Member
Yeah fair point didn't really clearly make that distinction up front.
Most of the "toy grade" quadcopters will either come with a very cheap (99% crappy plastic) controller/transmitter/tx that pairs only with the included receiver (sometimes hard to find) or expect to use your phone as control and or video display and the flight controller (brains that take receiver input and control motor speed and reads sensor input) is typically some proprietary thing you can't update or change configuration on. Toy grade things will use cheaper components in general and are not going to be easy to work on or find standardized replacement parts for (every brand makes their own tweaks).
"Hobby grade" things are generally designed to be interoperable with other third party components and can/must be configured by the end user to basically tell the hardware what it is hooked up to and how (which pin and what protocol). A hobby grade tx/transmitter can support many models so one transmitter can have settings and bindings saved for lots of quads (I have three and use one TX). Same goes for receiving video, my quads all have analog video transmitters and I have one pair of goggles with analog receiver that works for all of them. If I bought three off the shelf toy grade things the TX and video on each is likely different and probably proprietary in some way.
Also should add DJI has much of the lock in as with toy grade quads but the quality of product and support is more on par with hobby grade parts.
Most of the "toy grade" quadcopters will either come with a very cheap (99% crappy plastic) controller/transmitter/tx that pairs only with the included receiver (sometimes hard to find) or expect to use your phone as control and or video display and the flight controller (brains that take receiver input and control motor speed and reads sensor input) is typically some proprietary thing you can't update or change configuration on. Toy grade things will use cheaper components in general and are not going to be easy to work on or find standardized replacement parts for (every brand makes their own tweaks).
"Hobby grade" things are generally designed to be interoperable with other third party components and can/must be configured by the end user to basically tell the hardware what it is hooked up to and how (which pin and what protocol). A hobby grade tx/transmitter can support many models so one transmitter can have settings and bindings saved for lots of quads (I have three and use one TX). Same goes for receiving video, my quads all have analog video transmitters and I have one pair of goggles with analog receiver that works for all of them. If I bought three off the shelf toy grade things the TX and video on each is likely different and probably proprietary in some way.
Also should add DJI has much of the lock in as with toy grade quads but the quality of product and support is more on par with hobby grade parts.