 Well, hello everyone. Welcome to Road to Riot and welcome back to Learn to FPV. Today, we're going to talk about the pros and cons of going with a bind-and-fly or building your own drone. So in the bind-and-fly world, there's actually two different ways you can go. You can go bind-and-fly or you can go ready to fly. And it's important to know the difference between those two. So a bind-and-fly is not going to come with a receiver. Jeff from the future here. So I was editing and I realized that I actually got that mixed up. A bind-and-fly does come with a receiver. The difference between bind-and-fly and ready-to-fly, ready-to-fly is going to also come with a radio. So it's going to have everything that you need. Bind-and-fly will have a receiver, but it's counting on the fact that you already have a radio. And then there's a third option called ARF or RF for almost ready-to-fly. That's the one I was getting confused with bind-and-fly. So almost ready-to-fly means that there's no receiver on it. So the main important thing to take into account is just look at whether or not it's going to come with a receiver or not. All right, back to the video. And also with both of those, you're likely going to have to do at least a small minimal amount of setup to get it going. So let's start with the pros and cons of a bind-and-fly. So a lot of times bind-and-fly are actually going to be a little bit cheaper, even though they're already put together and ready to go. A lot of times by bundling parts and in some cases by cutting corners on certain components, they can be quite a bit cheaper than if you were to build your own. Now that's not always the case. There's definitely bind-and-flies that cost more than a drone that you could source affordable parts and put together on your own. But on average, if you're looking at putting all the parts in your cart for a drone like this versus looking at a drone that's already ready to go and like bang good or something, you can find them a lot cheaper. Typical price range, depending on the size, let's say for like a five-inch quad. Anywhere from like two to 300 bucks, you can find a bind-and-fly. Whereas building it yourself, you can probably still build it for around 200, but a lot of times it's between like 300 and 400 because you're typically going to get nicer parts if you're building your own. But again, not always. It depends on what you choose. Another protocol with the bind-and-fly route is you're going to be in the air faster because you don't have to take the time to put the thing together. You don't have to sit and research and understand all the parts and how they even go together to even know how to get the thing together. And you won't spend as much time shopping around for all the different parts and trying to find, you know, one shop that has every part that you're looking for. So it can be a bit of a time-saver. Now let's go into some of the cons. So although, like I said, a lot of times they can be cheaper, sometimes it may end up costing you more in the long run because a lot of bind-and-flies that I've run into with people coming into the hobby shop with problems with them, they can sometimes not be of the best quality control. Sometimes they're not the most reliable. Now you can find examples both ways. I've met people that got the cheapest possible ready-to-fly drone they could find and it lasted a long time. They had a great time. But I've also had a lot of people come into the shops and I just got this thing off of Banggood and I can't get it to work. And then I hook it up and parts are faulty right out of the gate. Another downside is sometimes when it is a cheaper drone and the price is really low, it's because they've used components that really aren't that great and you don't want. So a lot of the areas where they cut corners are they put a really cheap camera on it, they put really cheap antenna on it, and that you definitely don't want because it's really frustrating to not have good video. The video gear is probably at the top of my list of what I would invest money in because it's okay if it's not the highest performance flying drone when you're a beginner but you definitely don't want to have a hard time seeing where you're going. That's just going to get frustrating. You're not even going to want to fly it. Another downside to going with the bind and fly is at least upfront and immediately you don't really learn anything about how it goes together. Of course obviously that can go both ways too. So you can learn. You can take something that's already put together and look at it, figure out how everything's put together. You could even start taking it apart and putting it back together. So it's not necessarily true that you don't learn anything going the bind and fly because you will eventually eventually it's going to break and you're going to have to fix it but you're kind of taking a shortcut and you're not learning the things that you probably should right up front. Some other downsides might be depending on which one you find it could actually be a little bit harder to work on. Bind and flies have kind of gotten away from this recently but like this one in particular the Vortex Mojo it's it's really sleek and nice looking and all sealed up but when you need to replace parts it's actually more of a pain in the butt because being all sleek like that everything's all kind of hidden away inside. So it's not as fun to work on whereas this I can get it open and replace parts really easily. Once you do get inside and you want to replace parts what you'll find on this one in particular is that the parts are proprietary they're really only meant for this drone and you're not going to be able to just throw whatever you want in there with it. I think a lot of the bind and fly and ready to fly drones nowadays have kind of gotten away from that so if you are going to go for a bind and fly I would definitely recommend look for one that looks like it was just built by someone who put it together. It can be tempting to go for the really sleek and fancy sealed in nice looking one but I wouldn't recommend that it's going to be harder to work on and you definitely don't want one that has proprietary parts. So let's talk about some of the pros and cons of building your own. So obviously when you build your own drone you have full control over what parts are going to go into it. So that means you can choose things that are in your price range or the most highest performance parts. It means that you can choose things that you know your favorite store or local hobby shop maybe has those parts so it'll be really easy to find and replace them again later. Another thing is you're going to learn all those skills that you need to put this thing together up front so that way once you do break and crash it you're not stressed out you put it together the first time so you know how to take it back apart you know how to replace those parts. Not always but usually when you do pick all your own parts you put it together you've learned all the skills of how to get it set up and tuned right you're usually going to get a little bit better performance out of this than a bind and fly out of the box. It's not always true a lot some there's definitely bind and flies that have good parts and they can be tuned up and fly just as well but it's just I would I would lean a little more towards you're probably going to get a little bit overall better drone if you build it yourself. Some of the downsides are while a lot of the people I've met in this hobby they absolutely love building and repairing and tinkering with their drone that's not for everyone some people just hate having to work on it and while it's kind of inevitable maybe for some people they want to do it as minimal as possible so they'd rather just buy a bind and fly if something breaks they'll either just you know just fix that one thing maybe they have a friend or a shop they can go to to have them do their work for them and there's really no shame in that it's not for everybody like maybe some people just like to fly they don't want to work on it so much that's okay but a lot of other people they love to build so it just kind of depends on you. Another downside is maybe it's a little too expensive to build your own drone so like I said you can probably put your own together for just as cheap as most of the cheapest bind and flies but maybe even that is too much so maybe you're going to go for a micro and in the micro world it's it's probably a lot less common to actually build your own. If we're talking two inch props or smaller it's almost a no-brainer to go for a bind and fly they're small they'd be tedious to put together and there's a lot of good companies making really good micro bind and fly so if so if like 200 bucks for a drone is out of your budget then you're most likely going to go bind and fly and you're probably going to go for a micro. Another thing to keep in mind is where you get in the drone from so there's a bunch of cheap Chinese websites where you can get a ton of different bind and fly and ready to fly drones but they don't really discriminate so some of them are going to be really good a really great deal they're going to perform really well but they're right next to some that are just a subpar components the quality control isn't there and they really just don't discriminate so unless you do a lot of research and asking around you're not going to really know which one I which one you should get and which one you should probably stay away from. If you go to our store or race day quads or get fpv pyro flip if you go to a known trusted fpv store and look through there ready to fly and bind the flies you're more likely to get one that's has a good reputation is going to be more solid for you. A couple companies that I know make really good bind and flies are emacs there's a holy burrow copis that one's really nice HDLRC makes good ones so if you do want to save some money and try to go for the you know direct from China route I mean I hate to say it but one thing you could do go to our store go to get fpv look at look at the things they have and see if you can find a similar one elsewhere but for cheaper. I would much rather you spend the money with us but if your budget is low you need to get the cheapest thing just take your time do your research figure out what's good figure out the best price you're probably going to have to wait a little longer for it to ship but whatever gets you in the air that's what it's all about and finally the main thing to remember is no matter which way you go whether you're going to build it yourself you're just going to buy a drone and fly it you're never really just going to buy a drone and fly it there's always going to be some level of knowledge that you have to do I don't think any drone is going to come I mean unless you buy the whole thing ready to go there's actually some shops that will build everything for you bind it up to a radio and mail it out to you you take it out of the box and play with it but almost always you're going to have to at least bind it you're going to have to do some very minimal beta flight setup you're going to have to go in there and assign which switch is going to make the thing take off you're going to have to you it's smart to go in and confirm the sticks are moving the right way you don't want to find that out by having the thing flip into your face you want to at least know the base amount of knowledge that it's going to be safe to take this thing off if you are shopping around for binding flies I would definitely recommend go to their product page and go down and look for their component list so this might not mean a whole lot to you if you're super duper new but you want to know what's actually in it so once you know that and even if you don't know what each thing is you can get online and ask around you don't want to buy something that has junk components in it and then have to replace them later because it's just going to end up costing you more look for price but don't get the absolute cheapest thing understand what components are in it make sure you don't get anything that's totally proprietary and other parts won't work and you won't be able to use those parts in anything else and if you can look for reviews look for people that have bought it and had it for a while and try to gauge how many people are happy versus how many people are frustrated with it so with that thanks for watching I hope this gave you guys a little bit more info on which route is going to be right for you and this has been Learned FPV