German hacker FPV Geek has been constructing DIY drones for years. Pondering again on all of his previous designs, FPV Geek began to surprise simply how small a first-person view (FPV) drone might get earlier than it could begin to damage the video footage it captures. That is greater than only a curiosity, after all. Smaller drones can match into tighter areas than their bigger counterparts, and so they additionally require much less vitality for flight, which is a large concern on this area.
Fairly than simply surprise, FPV Geek did some experimentation. He began by getting collectively absolutely the smallest variations of the bare-minimum required parts that he might discover. This included a Matrix 1S Brushless Flight Controller, a set of 4 BetaFPV 0702 II 30000 KV Brushless Motors, a DJI O4 video transmitter, a BetaFPV 300mAh 1S BT2.0 battery, and Gemfan 31mm 1209-4 1mm propellers.
These motors spin at 130,000 RPM (📷: FPV Geek)
A 3D-printed body was designed, together with a customized PCB to hook the parts collectively. It was rapidly found that for the reason that motors have been pulled in so near the middle to save lots of area, the air they pushed down would largely hit the PCB and different {hardware} parts. To keep away from this drawback, the drone was redesigned to have the propellers on the underside in a pusher configuration.
That was a step in the precise course, however there was nonetheless one other drawback. The motors have been so shut collectively that the propellers would come into contact with each other throughout flight. To get round this problem, small 3D-printed spacers have been put in above two of the motors. This launched a small offset of their heights, stopping them from colliding throughout flight.
FPV Geek believes that his drone is the smallest 4K FPV drone ever constructed, however these items are very tough to conclusively show. In any case, the drone performs very properly in real-world assessments and captures glorious high quality video. I’d depend that as an enormous success whether or not it’s the smallest ever or not.
