Interlude -Brief and dramatically over simplified summary of parts in a quad and what they do:
And when I say over simplified I really mean it, just something as simple as the frame can spark:
Aluminium standoff’s -what grade aluminium
Aluminium, steel or tatianium nuts and bolts, cap head? Button head?
What type of carbon, how is it cut (direction)
So this is reallly just to get you familiar with the basic parts.
Frame - the carbon and metal bits -pretty self explanatory, good frames are well thought out, protecting components and giving places to mount stuff. At first you tend to think your frame needs to be heavy to be durable but actually lighter quads carry less momentum into crashes so don’t need to be as strong, also the grade of material effects both weight and strength. The frame also governs the layout of the motors, racing quads tend to favour “stretched x” layouts where the distance between the front and back motors is longer than the distance between the left and right. Acro quads tend to be true x or even short x.
Stack -the electrical boards, I am gonna list them out, in many cases multiple boards are combined, this tends to be cheaper to buy and lighter as well as easier to build but means if one component fails you have to replace the lot so can be more expensive, it also gives less isolation and can result in interference on fov feed.
Flight controller -the brains, they will generally be reverend to by the cou generation (F1, F3, F4 and F7), F1s (naze32 for example) are pretty dead, F3 are struggling, F4 is the standard nowerdays and F7 optimisation is working its way in. This board has sensors built in to it which we are gonna call the gyro, and runs flight control software like Betaflight. It basically takes the signal from the receiver telling it what you are commanding the quad to do, takes a data set from its on board gyro, works out what it needs to do to make the quad behave and sends those signals to the ESCs
Power Distribution board - this has a connector to the lipo and sends power out to many, but not all other components, it may well have a regulator on it so it can provide 5v as well as battery voltage but many flight controllers also have this nowerdays too. It is very common for the PDB to be integrated into the flight controller
ESCs (electronic speed controllers) one for each motor, these take battery power from the PDB and based on what the signal is from the flight controller, change the speed of the motor it is controlling.
The protocol the flight controller nowerdays tends to be digital (dshot) as this gives a more stable and accurate signal than the old PWM based protocols (PWM, oneshot and multishot). ESCs typically run a piece of software called blheli, there are a number of flavours of this, original blheli, which no one uses nowerdays, blheli_s - what you have, ok, blheli32- the current generation.
Motors, -pretty self evident, knowing what motors to use with that quad and props to produce what flying style is in the area of complex
Size is expresses as a 4 figure number eg 2206 the first two are the width of the stator in mm, the second two are the height in mm
The speed of the motor is expressed in kv which is rpm per volt
OSD (on screen display) these used to be separate on on the PDB but nowerdays tend to be on the flight controller or built into the cam.
Rx (receiver) - will need to be from the same manufacturer as your radio, takes the signal from your radio, translates it and tells your flight controller what to do, this is unidirection, from the rx to the F.C. there are various protocols for this, in the old days PWM was used with one wire for each channel, then PPM took over as a serial protocol with 1 wire for all channels, now digital protocols (sbus, ibus etc are used -quicker and more stable). The conversation can be bidirectional with the F.C. passing telemetry data back to the rx which will transmit back to the tx, but this largely pointless for fpv.
Camera - lots of important detail here, latency, lense, TVL, sensor type, light handling etc etc. Takes an image, most can add the lipo voltage and flight time to it, then passes it on, eventually to the vtx, although usually via the flight controller so it can do the OSD bit.
Vtx (video transmitter) - takes the video signal and transmits it to your goggles, antenna selection is an art in its own right.
Props - just too complex, what is good for one quad may well not be good for another, what is good for one pilot may well not be for another etc etc.
Lipo -generally most people are flying 4 cell (4s) which means 16.8v when fully charged. They have a basic summary of how much they can hold (eg 1300 mah means it can provide 1.3amps for an hour), a c rating, which is multiplied by the mah to give you a max amps, (always over hyped by manufacturers) so a 1300mah 50c can provide 65 Amps max, what you try and draw is governed by your throttle, your motors, your props and the weight/momentum
How is that for a primer?