RE: Solving Drone Problems the DIY 3D Printed Way

Depends on the video system you get into. The biggest money is in the goggles to be honest. Then you need a radio (controller). This drone uses the DJI O3 air unit, which is now discontinued but are still highly sought after. The used market is going crazy on those. The O4 unit is the new one. The goggles you need for that are $500. The video units you would put in the drone (camera and video transmission unit) are around $110 for the O4 light and about $220ish for the O4 pro.

Once you have that all set, then you are looking at $50-100 for a frame (depending on the size of the drone you are building), motors (4 at $10-$40 each depending on size, power, etc), flight controller and ESE (this is an all in one chip or AIO) and they are between $70-100. Then you could get a beeper that helps when you crash, that's around $10. Radio receiver is $20 for ELRS and $40 for Crossfire.

For radio, being I have the DJI air unit, I use my DJI Remote Controller 2 from my first DJI drone that links with the air unit. This saves me the extra on the radio receiver. But if I were to use a different video unit like an analog rig, I would use either ELRS or Crossfire, depending on the purpose of the drone.

So to sum it up, you can build a digital 4K drone for around $400-500 if you already have the video units.

For an analog drone, you can build a 5 inch unit for like $200 and then get an action camera to ride on top that gets your digital 4K footage. Your pilot camera will be analog though. Good analog goggles are about the same as the digital ones.

Not a cheap hobby for sure, lol. This is a replacement for sports cars and motorcycles in my mid life crisis, lol.