AcroBee (Inductrix clone) FPV drone build

After taking basically a year of from freestyle/racing (First Person View) FPV, I’ve decided to get back into it in a very small way. Tiny actually. The latest craze in FPV is building really tiny drones carrying cameras with onboard video transmitters began by the Blade Inductrix, AKA Tiny Whoop, AKA AcroBee, AKA a bazillion other names, to fly FPV indoors. And I’ve pretty motivated to fly indoors given the recent drop in temperature and short days of Winter.

How small is the AcroBee that I’m building? Well here is a carbon Lumenier QAV 250 that I built in early 2015 with the AcroBee props spread around for comparison. It be tiny!

And this is what came in the box today from newbeedrone.com. Not a lot to it.

Normally, it takes me at least a week to build a racing drone, mostly done after the kids hit the sack. But I’m thinking that this should only take a couple of hours, plus some time to update and tune the flight controller. Haven’t built one so speculating based on the low part count. Will update the thread with the results.

On a somewhat related note, this past weekend I happen to be watching the latest race in the Drone Racing League (DRL) on ESPN, and was really happy to see that one of the guys that I used to fly with won the overall. Not that I am in any way in the same league as these guys. I basically suck compared to the fast ones. But good to see local chaps doing well. Here I am practicing in Sept 2015 and collide with another drone (in a really big field) which doesn’t happen that often. Promise. Willard is the middle guy when we gather to inspect the carnage. Second crash is testing after the repair and throwing a prop. Probably why I took a year off. Was spending more time building than flying :smiley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNqpQo5WaoE

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I really want to get into this. It’s on my list of projects for sure. Just need the time and money :slight_smile:

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Finished and ready for programming using Betaflight.

The only challenge was soldering the camera’s power lead to some small pads on the flight controller. I enjoy soldering…except tiny components, yours truly being equipped with unstable and oversized meat hooks. It would be typical of me to solder the pads as one blob turning the tiny drone into flaming mess in a nanosecond. So I scraped the area between the pads pretty carefully with a tweezer tip before applying power. Yeah, no smoke.

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