You Tube is a great resource and inspiration for quad copters and FPV.
This video taken by Trappy and Team Black Sheep of TBS flying a flying wing though NYC FPV blew my mind when I first saw it. I kept and eye out for more TBS videos and saw the Thailand episode.
Again mind suitably blown.
I was awed and excited by the video itself, but also by the tech and the possibilities I could see with that tech.
But to be honest I didn't think I'd ever be able to do anything like that.
I'd looked into RC years ago as a teenager and from where I was at that time it was prohibitively (for me) expensive.
Then I saw a video on building your own quad on Tested.
Again I was excited and not only excited I got the idea that maybe RC quads and FPV were maybe do-able for me.
In fact so do-able that I started looking for more You Tube videos, spent about a month researching and learning about quad tech and then started buying parts
So I owe a lot to You Tube for both getting me into this pursuit both inspirationally but perhaps more importantly as a learning resource. There are is virtually nothing that I know about RC quad copters/drones (and I know almost nothing) that I did not learn from the web and 95% of that was via YouTube.
I've learnt a ton and am still learning more. I'd guess YouTube is probably the number 1 resource for noobies in this and many other hobbies.
But it's not all sunshine and unicorns. There's a really big problem with YouTube.
It gets dated. And in the hobby of RC Quad Copters YouTube gets dated fast.
The building your own quad video I first saw talked about using the Naze 32 as a flight controller, and since the guy in the video, Charpu was the FPV poster boy (still is) I thought he'd know what he's talking about and dutifully went off and got a Naze based controller.
The problem is that video is 2 years old as I write this.
This hobby moves fast, and it is a tech hobby.
The Naze 32 is based on an ARM STM32 F1 chip.
The current state of the art in 2017 is the STM32 F4.
The F4 bit is the generation of chip, You know we had Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III and Pentium IV.
Well it's the same with the chips in flight controllers - F7 based flight controllers are due out probably in the first half of this year.
(In case you're wondering what happened to the F2, F5 and F6 - I can't really tell you, not even sure if they all shipped).
But there's a huge amount of video out there (and blogs and stock descriptions in stores) from 2 years ago, when the Naze 32 had taken the hobby from 8 bit to 32 bit flight controllers. The Naze 32 is well loved because of what it did, and when it appeared and a pile of other factors.
But no one who has more than a month or two in the hobby would recommend buying a Naze 32 as the FC for a serious racing quad these days (Feb 2017 - see this video for why).
These days the chip de jour is the F3 and a lot of people have F4s
And it's not just the CPU generations that have changed, features sets are constantly changing
And it is not just the flight controller that have moved on. ESCs are were originally controlled by straight PWM, then one shot, then multishot and it's variants and now D-Shot. But many ESCs on the market now -a-days are a year or two old and most don't support D-Shot without some kind of firmware flash (assuming they support it at all) and in some cases removal of/destroying a capacitor on the board. (Hint: if you're looking for ESCs in Feb 2017 you probably want ones with BL Heli S firmware and you want to see "D Shot" in the description/ad).
In fact it's not only hardware that gets out of date.
Right now as I write Cleanflight which you see lots of videos about is pretty much out of date and Betaflight is flavour of the day amongst the racing guys. Cleanflight was so 2015 - fashionable when the Naze 32 was still a thing.
Let me be clear here the Naze 32 will still fly, but after a few months in the sport when you have more knowledge you may feel limited by it's feature set and compute power. Then again you may not - you choose, just choose using recent research.
And so it goes, the tech get olds fast, but the old videos live on still talking about what was the latest and greatest when the video was made but what is now considered dated.
So the message here is when you use YouTube or other web stuff as a resource make sure you check the publishing date.
In many cases the hardware referenced and the OS/firmware versions and a whole pile of other stuff will be outdated. Basic principals will probably be the same (radio propagation is radio propagation) but protocols may have changed, the hardware will have changed and so will much else.
Again the principal here is check the dates of the material your referencing.
And you'll get bitten in stores too - online or brick and mortar. Half the time the people that run the store know nothing about the kit and the other half of the time, they have "old" stock and need to get rid of it. And with stores it's even harder to know if "the latest and greatest" in the product description was written yesterday or in the prehisotiric eras, e.g. 2015.
So do you'r research before you buy.
I'm so new to "the hobby" myself that I can't definitively tell you the best way to keep up to date or find what's current at the time you start into the hobbie.
I suspect the forums at RC Groups is probably a really good place to find out where the cutting edge is - the problem is I have not really looked there so I can't say for sure.
The other thing to do is find a couple of sources you trust and and be aware of the published dates of the material your watching - by all means use their older material to learn the concepts but if your looking for advice on what to buy for a modern day drone, make sure your checking out their later material or maybe ask a question in the comments - even if they don't reply, someone else who knows may.
Here are some of my favourites and I think they are probably more or less universally accepted amongst the community as pretty darn good:
- RC Model Reviews - Bruce seems to be the "Grand Old Man" of the hobby - and his videos? Cheap as beans! Bruce is also an ace pilot. Everyone knows he NEVER crashes.
- Joshua Bardwell - "the drone engineer". Bought to you by the letters P, I and D.
- UAV Futures - G'Day Stew!
- Project Blue Falcon - JC has great how-tos.
