When I began to build my first Multicopter, I found lots of information regarding construction. The most puzzling thing to me was the yaw control for a tricopter, but I eventually figured that out thanks to the great advice on this and other boards and the help I received from countless experts on these boards. I quickly managed to build two tricopters, my first with conventional helicopter type gyros and then a tricopter based on the Wii motion plus gyro and arduino board. I'm now building a Y6 version based on the MultiWii Paris 4.0 board.

However, flying the darn things was a different matter entirely! I built my tricopters with the intention of doing high-altitude videography and photography using a GoPro Hero camera or equivalent. I challenged myself to do this after working on a PBS TV series (Wild Photo Adventures) in the Florida Everglades on which I first used the GoPro. I quickly realized how flexible it was and how a low-budget production could easily afford some kind of drone-based copter or plane for aerial videos.

Yet, I never flew RC planes and had no idea how to fly an RC plane, helicopter or multibladed copter!

My first option was to strap a GoPro onto an RC helicopter. However, as I researched, I realized how much skill and how much time it takes to master these little devils. Far too much time than I was prepared to spend - not to mention the expense and delays of repeated crashes during the learning process. There had to be a better...Continue Reading