Flying drones is fun, but it’s almost more gratifying when you can fly a drone that you built yourself!
And perhaps the most gratifying aspect of flying your own piece of genius: saving money while doing it. Rather than spend several hundreds of dollars to buy a drone, you can build your own drone for as little as $99.
For such complicated machines, drones have very few parts and don’t take fancy engineering to build one. There are a bunch of fun “build your own drone” kits. Some have varying degrees of effort, and you can choose one to fit your needs. For example, for kids, this LEGO drone kit is simply delightful.
But perhaps the best homemade drones come not from a kit, but from individual parts, allowing you to buy the best gear at the best price.
And there’s no better person then RC Hobby Review expert Jake Carter to tell you what parts you need to make your own. So without further ado, I’ll let Jake take it from here.
Here’s Jake’s guide to exactly what you need to know to build your own drone for under $99:
Choose a Quadcopter Frame Design
Quadcopters are the most common type of drone — recognizable for their “X” shape with a propeller on each tip of the frame. Frames also come in tricopter (three propellers), hexacopter (six propellers), and octocopter (eight propellers) designs. Hexacopters are great for redundancy; if one motor fails you still have some stability. Since they are so large, octocopters are typically reserved for flyers looking to carry a payload.
