So I've never really gave drones too much interest until my wife let our 7 year old buy a sharper image 2 in 1 car drone.....it's a 60 dollar pos but it still got me hooked lol. I don't want to spend a ton of money as I have too many projects already so my wife says but I seen the tinyhawk 2 freestyle bundle. Now after messing around with this cheap quad I can't see flying one without fpv to be feasible. I constantly lose the front and rear even with the red lights and I painted half of it red. Shadow in the sky is all I see. So I want fpv. I also don't need it to go the 50mph that they say the tiny hawk does. I'd rather have longer runtime than a wild quad right now. Motors and props are cheap is there a recommendation on putting some lower power units to get run times somewhere around 15 minutes? I get that I will need to buy extra batteries I just want to be in the air longer. And along with being in the air longer I want distance. I've read about using repeaters to extend range. Now I've already looked into using something along the lines of a linksys wrt1200ac which is cheap now with some outdoor omnidirectional antennas. If I can use this to extend the control and video range I'd do it in a heartbeat and have the antenna mounted on the roof of my house so we could explore the whole damn neighborhood. I just want the battery life to get back if I'm way out there. Last thing sorta unrelated I have no interest in gps control however I wouldn't mind having a gps tracker for anything just to help pinpoint what tree I crashed into after the drone is completely dead and I haven't found it yet so some little self powered chip if anyone knows of one. I know that's alot but any response or advice will be appreciated.
Ads are generally over inflated, that said tiny hawk 2 race can go fast but once you learn to fly acro mode (or even flying it angle mode) it can be pretty tame (still more for outdoors on calm days than an indoor one like a tiny whoop but fair trade off in power/fun to size). A big part of how fast you end up flying when doing it FPV depends on the camera "uptilt" or how much the camera is pointing towards the sky, the more you have the camera tilted up the more you have to tilt the quad forward to just see the ground or what is in front of you so the faster you are naturally flying when things are in view, the flatter the camera tilt the less you need to tip forward to see the ground or horizon and so you will naturally just fly a lot slower if you flatten the camera angle (also will make it hard to see where you're going when moving fast since will be staring at the ground but trade off in problems).
Regarding flight times on anything small like this you really aren't going to get 15 minutes unless you are hovering in one spot inside a gymnasium with no wind, the more throttle you give it the more amps being drawn and more power pulled from the batteries. Expect 3 minutes of ripping hard on anything in the 3-5" category maybe 5-8 minutes if not just punching it out and doing flips etc. all the time but it's hard to stop yourself once you get into it
Flight time really isn't an issue though 3 minutes of intense flight or 8 minutes of chill flight in FPV still feels like a pretty long time and just get a handful of batteries like you mentioned and are all good for 30 min to an hour of cruising around which is a lot of time to spend in the air/under/goggles/toying around
Regardless of what you do though hope you have fun, welcome to the hobby!
If/when you need more technical hand holding recommend checking on YouTube "RotorRiot" and "Joshua Bardwell" especially good resources for generic fun stuff and JB for the deep tech knowledge and get you out of a hole in betaflight config.
Thanks for the input. Purchase is probably going to happen very soon. The sharper image drone locked up a motor in flight last night and fell a good 100 feet and hit my neighbors house. Surprisingly only busted a rotor guard but motor is locked so it's junk. I was wondering to myself how long I'd be able to have the goggles on without getting really uncomfortable so 5 minutes is probably good for now. If this hobby takes off with my boy obviously we can always spend more money at a later time. I've watched alot of reviews on the tiny hawk and seen a number of rotor riot videos. I was hoping this cheap drone would have worked a little longer so we could have atleast got used to flight controls. I'm not really looking forward to learning the rest on something worth something lol. I did see the 1s batteries are really cheap even hv ones so I'll buy a few of them and work on building a charger power supply. Probably going to modify one of the atx or server power supplies I have around to run the lipo charger.
Wafflejock reading this thread got me thinking with the technology we have to day why have they not come up with away to have a camera tilt with quad linked to throttle or angle of quad so you fly as slow or as fast as you want camera will always be right
Other than the added weight of making the mechanism to actually tilt the camera that wouldn't be hard at all. But diving and fast climbs wouldn't work right. A little bit of code to lock position after so much angle is sensed maybe.
I've been thinking about the camera tilt with the throttle (as kwad goes faster camera uptilts). It's possible but would probably have to be written into the fc firmware.
Yes or link a channel for throttle and camera tilt . I am old so dont do code my day was 72htz and Crystal with a colour flag on the end of the aerial so every knew what frequency you was on
Yah I know betaflight already has servo control (sends pwm signal on some pin) but haven't really dug through the source enough to say how hard it would be to tap into the accelerometer data or other flight info to adjust the output for a camera servo it sounds doable for sure but would take some digging... Maybe after I get through the backlog of 50 or so projects I've put on myself could look into this too but by then I may also be an old dog
