 Hey guys, welcome to Road to Ride. I'm LaDream. I'm Alex Vanover. I'm Les Flairseed, and I'm Bubby FPV. And this is a flight controller. A flight controller is basically the brain of a drone. This controls how the drone stabilizes itself, sends all the signals to the motor, creates the on-screen display. I mean, this is a really impressive bit of technology. And today, for us FPV pilots, it's pretty easy to get your hands on one of these. But, you know, just a few years ago, back in like 2015, 2016, they were a lot harder to get. I mean, we were buying like $100 open pilot boards, and they're really hard to get, and they didn't fly nearly as well, right? Right. And before even that, it was even more difficult. Flight controllers didn't even exist, and people were actually making their own flight controllers with an Arduino. One board that has a bunch of inputs and outputs, and you can program it to, you know, say, look at the light from a light sensor, and based on the level of light, activate a server or really anything you can think of. So people were using Arduinos to create the first ever quadcopter mixers, where they would send outputs to four different motors based on the inputs of a radio. But what really makes quadcopters possible to fly is having an IMU, a gyro and an accelerometer that can sense the motion and the absolute angle of the drone to help that drone be able to fly. Right. You got to tell the flight controller what the drone's doing so it can know how to compensate. And this is, I think, the most interesting part of these early pioneers who are making their own flight controllers is where the gyro came from. Some of the very first hobby drones that ever existed were built based off of a video game. Back in the day, people actually used to take apart the Nintendo Wii game controllers and rip out the inside guts of them, pull out the gyros, and they would take apart the num chuck and pull out the accelerometer from inside so that you could stabilize the drone. All these parts actually came from a video game. It was a cheap way to get those parts. So this is a modern day drone with an old school Nintendo Wii game controller built flight controller. This is a home-built flight controller. I know what you're thinking. This is a Wii controller. This is not a Wii controller. In the early days of Wii, you actually had to clip on a separate device to get access to the gyros in the Wii Motion Plus. The newer versions of the Wii remotes have all that built in, so it was less bulk and less pieces in parts you had to swing around. Today, we don't really care too much about the accelerometer, at least not in freestyle drones because we don't want self-stabilized flight. We want a freestyle. We want to fly completely in manual control. So I didn't take the time to actually rip apart the num chuck to get the accelerometer out of it. But if you really wanted to have the full capabilities of the software, you could technically pull apart this num chuck rather than rip apart a perfectly good looking Wii remote. We're going to go on the internet and buy a generic Wii Motion Plus and just take out the pieces that we need. I've already cut some of these things off of here, but this right here is our three-axis gyro that we're going to be using to build our flight controller. I thought it would be more intense than this, but it turns out it's just a little board that all we need. We basically take off the components from the board and this is our gyroscope that we're going to need to attach to our Arduino, which we're going to load the software on, which is going to communicate between the two and then we'll have a working flight controller when it's all said and done. You have a tire that's spending $40 on a flight controller. Save money! You can go out and buy a $10 Arduino and a $15 piece of equipment from Nintendo and then you have a $25 flight controller that flies much worse. Crack open. Yeah, you think Betaflight's hard to use just wait until you're trying to do multi-way. Multi-way, that name just sounds old. I'm like listening to all you guys and I'm like, what the heck is LSF? I started off on a Brain FPV Radix board on Betaflight 357. Yeah, it was an F4. Back in my day. We didn't even know Betaflight. Betaflight didn't exist. Let's see how it flies. I think it's going to be really interesting because we've got the most archaic, old-school flight controller possible with modern ESCs, modern high-performance motors. We're even running BLHeli32 ESCs. Not that you can take advantage of any of that stuff with this old firmware. And not to mention the HD video system. When we were flying home-built flight controllers, I mean... Not only was it hard to fly, but it was hard to see. Yeah, I mean you were using like security cameras that were decased and all sorts of stuff. Super narrow lenses, niving goggles, just screens usually. So this thing definitely has a leg up on like the drones as a whole back in the day. Absolutely. But I think this is still going to give us an idea of what type of flight controller performance they were working with when FPV drones were really starting out. There are some uniquenesses about this that I want to warn you about, so you don't break it immediately. Okay. This doesn't have air mode. It doesn't have an idle up. And if you drop the throttle below 5%, the drone just loses all control. The props just stop. They don't completely stop. What do you mean they stop? They stay spinning. So back in the day, Bubby, again when we were flying uphill both ways, if you lowered your throttle all the way, the props stopped. What? The props would come to a stop and you would be a dead duck. And then you could raise the throttle and start the props, but then the drone had shifted. So it would like snap back and sometimes over on. Don't drop zero throttle. Really? This is not a joke. This is not a joke. So then the first solution to that would be in your radio you'd have a setting. You would flip a switch so that even when your stick was down all the way, it would keep like 5% throttle. That was called idle up. Another thing that I want to warn you about is it doesn't like to disarm if the throttle is not all the way down. So if you're in the mid-throttle and you hit disarm and it ain't gonna disarm, it doesn't just drop out of the sky like beta flight. You literally have to disarm and drop the throttle. Otherwise it won't technically disarm. So be warned that when you come down a land, drop throttle and disarm at the same time. Also on the pitch stick you go up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right. B.A. select start. What? That was joking. That was always joking. Wow. What was that? What the heck was that? It does stuff that you don't expect. What the heck? I can't fly this thing. Oh my God, what the heck? You're right. You literally adopted the darkness. You were pouring in it. I'm at like 60% throttle. What is this? Why? I started automatics. Yo, I just did a roll. Let's go. Yeah, back in the day. I bet you Sharpu's old videos look really good to you now, right? Oh, I'm so impressed by them now. Back in the day, that roll was pro. You were like, oh my God. Oh, you shot a gap. To be honest, if I'm gonna be honest, watching a lot of the old school videos, I didn't realize how hard it was to actually fly the quad. So I have a new level of respect for you guys. You started two years ago, then you don't understand how good those videos are. Exactly, that's what I'm saying. What the heck was that? I didn't do that. I did not do that. Why are the rates so low? I cranked them up. They were even lower than that. Oh my God. You can't really go full stick. Try a full stick roll and see what happens. Oh gosh, do it. What the heck was that? What was that? I did the roll. You just go up and there we are. That was so scary. No, I didn't drop the throttle at all. No, not there. So if you go a full stick roll and have that much speed. What did you do? I don't know. Honestly, I think you just saturated the gyro, right? Really? I think that it can't work as fast. I don't think that it actually sends updates fast enough to compensate for such a fast. Yeah, you know how we were like, you were like 8k, this is like 500. Wait, so did you start off for the quad that flew like this? Not this bad. No, I was kind of three or four stages past this. Okay. But my quad's definitely had that drunken feel that you're saying. Oh, but not... I'm excited to try this. This will also be for me the... I mean, back in this day, if you crashed like that, you pretty much went home and rebuilt your drone. This is actually like kind of... I want to build one of these now just to see how good I can get. Yes, I do. Yes, I do. You want to crack open Nintendo Wii? Whoa. Yeah, I think you should power cycle it. The coolest thing for me when I was watching Sean build this is that like... So you've got the Arduino. Yeah. Which is like... It's an Arduino... What does he have? An Arduino Nano? Is that what you used? Yep. So it was like a little rectangular board. And then the board that has the gyro on it out of the Wii is like a separate board. So there's no one flight controller in there. So how many boards are there? There's two. There's one that does the flight controller thinking. Okay. And one that has the gyro. And they're just connected with soldered wires. I don't see battery voltage, but okay. Yeah, you go. Onscreen display. Yeah. Oh. You've got a timer on the radio. That's how you know how to do that. Really? Yeah. There we go. Let's go. Okay. I'm going to put stick center. Whoa. Crazy how you literally have to power cycle it just to get it to go back. Yeah. I'm going in a straight line and my sticks are not even centered. Like I have to... It drifts a lot. And that's the best tune I could get it. I literally spent hours tuning this thing to try to get it as good as I could get it. This is the best tune I can come up with. Let's go. I'm going to throw another roll. There's no filters. There's no special fancy stuff. You got PID on pitch roll and y'all. That's it. You've done open air rolls. Made it through some gates. Matty flip, right? That's the next thing. Sure. I can guarantee you no one has ever Matty flipped a multi-weaflight controller. Yeah, probably not. I mean maybe. Send me your videos if you... There's no way. Oh, you went through the gate. I meant Matty flipped the trees. I thought that too. Holy crap. Let's just do the trees. The gate is easy. Because the tree is big. There's a huge gap. That's the point. What? I mean, if you can do the gate, go for it. I wasn't clean. Do you think you can do the gate? I think the gate would be easier. Okay. Okay, Zuber. Yeah, Zuber. No way. Oh my gosh. He's so close. You almost did it. Oh my gosh. I didn't even know my battery is that. It's funny. Dude, this is full yaw. Why is it so slow though? Shouldn't it still be able to... That's how it was. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. I'm going to bring it in because your battery might be dead. The multi-wee Matty flip. Oh my gosh. Did you hear that oscillation? Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. No, it's dead. No. That's a lot of fun. That experience was so good. I don't even know if I can go back to modern quads. I was talking about this is pretty bad. I'm like having to hold full right yaw just to go to straight line. I'm trying to do a left yaw. Oh yeah. She yaws good. What? Didn't yaw good for me? She's got some kick to her. I think it's up over the gyro. I knew I wasn't that bad. Look at my stick. This is to go to straight line. Tell you. My wee bowling balls are always going off to the left. I think it's because that gyro has been off the whole time. Oh come on. Just go right. I'm full right yaw. I'm full right yaw. Come on. They're not towards us. Bacon yank. Bacon yank. I'm bacon yank. I'm bacon yank. I'm full right yaw. I'm trying to turn right. Let's see a Rubik's cube. A Rubik's cube? Okay. Rubik's. I got to get it to turn. Go really high. It's an altitude. Oh my gosh. Let me get more altitude. Let me get more altitude. You couldn't have made it. No. You couldn't have made it. You couldn't have made it. The gyro is definitely messed up after that crash. I'm like holding full right just to keep it straight. It won't turn right anymore. That's pretty high. Oh. Okay. Yaw. Inverted yaw spin. I was thinking the same thing. I don't know if I'll be able to get out of it though. I might just mess up the entire house. Don't do it over the tree. Yeah, totally fine. I think I'm over the field. Yeah, you're good. Right here. Oh my gosh. Oh, kind of. I mean, yeah. You get like two degrees. I have to hold so much throttle just to keep it from a... Which way is the faster yaw spin? Left. Yes. I was going left. That's how it was, man. Just doing simple open air tricks was like mind blowing. Ground effects. I see why now. That was good though. I'm pretty proud of that. To be fair, I have flown quads that fly. It's been like 10 years. I've flown some stuff that's about that bad. That's how it used to be. I'm pretty impressed with the fact that we built that flight controller and it flies this good. I don't think with the older stuff you could have done inverted spins, matty flips. You just couldn't have done it. Kind of combining the two is the only way you're even able to do it. There was a point in the history of drone technology that yaw made a huge improvement, a huge leap. I was super excited because I could actually do a really fast yaw at that point. Up until that point, yaw was really slow. They had to figure something out. The best way to get good yaw back in the day on a multi-rotor was to build something with an articulated motor like a tricopter. That's why tricopters happened. It was because yaw on quadcopters, really yaw on anything that was relying solely on that vectoring the angular momentum just didn't work that hot. But they figured out something eventually, right? Yeah, they figured out something and they were able to just get that yaw performance to be amazing where it actually surpassed tricopters. It's so weird seeing that he's given it everything he's got and it's just like, it's barely moving. Originally built this, I didn't have a way to mount the flight controllers to the drone because they don't have this amazing little 30x30 mounting holes that we use today on our flight controllers. I ended up just mounting it into the drone with double-sided tape in the first couple stages, so I ended up 3D printing these mounts to actually lock them in place so that they would be a little more stable. It also added the soft damping effect of TPU that we would normally get off our gummies on our current modern flight controllers. So it kind of added a little bit of damping to it to help it fly a little better too. Well, when I originally built this, I didn't have these 3D printed parts ready yet. I literally put it together with double-sided tape because I wasn't sure which direction the gyro needed to face. The first couple flights didn't go so well. You can't just change the gyro like... You take it in the configurator? Right, yeah. In some code? Let's show you what the configurator looks like here. Show me this, I'm really curious. There you go. That's what the configurator used to look like. I can see the pixels. You see all of that tuning you have access to? That's all your tuning right there. I went through hundreds and hundreds of lines of code trying to just figure out how it all worked. It was kind of cool because I learned the software. You can learn the software just by reading the code if you know a little bit about coding. You can figure out how everything works and how anything, everything connects together. It's kind of cool, but it's very tedious and time-consuming. Turns out I only had to change a couple of values, but knowing which values to change was the tricky part. Without having the proper documentation, it was really difficult and time-consuming for me to try to figure out in code what I needed to change to make it work with just the regular Wii remote, which is the first piece of software that was written. What type of receiver protocols did you guys use? This was all PWM. Back in the day, we didn't have S-Bus. We didn't have D-Shot or Multi-Shot or any of that fancy stuff. We had one wire for Yaw, one wire for Pitch, one wire for Roll, one wire for Throttle, and one wire for Ox. Really? You had to do that many wires? Yes. A wire for everything. And so the cool thing about the way I set this up, I'm actually running Crossfire, but the Crossfire Nano receivers, you can actually program each pad on the board to do what you want it to do. So I actually set it up to be Channel 1, Channel 2, Channel 3 through 6. So I have channels 1 through 6 actually mapped from the Crossfire Nano into the board from an old technology from a new receiver. I can't wait to see this drip flow. Old people stuff. See, you can just hold Yaw. Oh my God, the latency. It feels like I'm going to move this stick now and then it moves. Oh, it feels like a half second or more of latency. Oh, that's what it feels like to me. Now let's just see this roll action. Oh, a little too much roll there. Too much roll. Let's try one the other way. Oh my gosh. Yeah, if you give it a full stick, the gyro can't keep up. It's kind of crazy. That wasn't full stick. Okay, I'll do one full stick. Go for the high. Full stick. Okay. Yeah. It feels like it's doing it in chops. It is. Yeah, exactly. It's doing it like, here we are. A little elbow in there, a little elbow in. Drew is really good at flying this quad. Drew is like ripping. I was trying to link a matty flip. Dang. What am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to try to spin this thing? You are too good at flying. Stop. Yo. What? What? How much right yaw are you holding? Yeah, look like you're holding much. Maybe your calibration was like... I'm holding a left yaw actually. Really? That's what it was for me too. I was holding right. Changes every time you look in. It looks like it's flying really good right now. May it look right way. Oh my god. Oh my gosh, she's actually... Wow, that looks really good. I can really only pull one rotation. Trying to link more, it just doesn't want to do it. Yours seems more powerful. It's flying much better. You think? I think so. Dude, I was holding full right yaw. I'm just that good, man. I think I'm just that good. I don't think so. Are you kidding me? I'm working this thing... Okay. This is... It's called finesse children, okay? Oh, I've been flying longer than you. I think it just depends on what it feels like when you plug it in, really. I really do feel like that. You guys are jokers. I'm gonna land this. I'm gonna hand the controller to you. Hand it to you. That there is no difference. Okay, I'm just gonna land it right here. Just undo the thing. These kids really think I'm cheating. Think I'm cheating. It's way better. No, it is not. It's way better. It's way better. It's way better. Look at it. I will say that... It's way better. I will say that I noticed that if you plug it in, sometimes the gyro does better than other times. Sometimes it won't even take off off the ground. It's really weird. I don't know why. He's pretty spinning. Oh my gosh. He's doing so good. Look at that. I told you it's flying better. I wanna try this thing. Give it back. Give it back. It's way better now. Way, way better. No. It just didn't trip me spin. After you saw me do it. It flies way better now than when I flew it. I'm not kidding you. It flies way better. It flies way better. What changed? What did I do? Nothing. That's how it flies. Okay, well Bobby still can't fly. It does not fly any different. I wanna flew it. I promise you genuinely it flew better. And for two reasons why. Well I think the real reason is just the gyro calibration was better. On your plane than it was on mine. Mine I was full right now. I couldn't do anything. It flies just a lot faster. It's more throttle. What are you talking about? And I can leave the stick centered and it just doesn't go anywhere. I was having to hold so much. No it's true. Well, Bobby at the same time. Bobby you're not holding our case very well when you fly. I think the battery died. Sometimes when you drop slowly it'll decide it wants to drop throttle fast. What? It does what it wants. It's weird. Drew flew it. Drew flew it the best. He flew it the best. This actually is a phenomenon. Like back in the day performance was so inconsistent. I mean it would just be from like still you know today you know changing temperatures air pressure you know plastic props are a little softer stuff for the gyros warm whatever like the quads might fly a little different from one day or a week to the next. But like back in the day from one plug into the next day it could feel like just drastically different results. Just because it just was weird. Yeah now it's really consistent. It really makes you appreciate what we have in our modern day stuff because you can just plug it in and go. I'm excited. We got a home-built flight controller to even fly. I mean the fact that it flies good enough to do a trippy spin. I mean it really did fly. It flew better because of the modern day frame and motors. But like the actual flight feel on the sticks was I felt that before. It really just again makes you appreciate how much the technology has come along and anyone who's just started flying in the last like six years in my opinion is not going to really be able to know the difference. It's so hard to communicate just what it feels like you know what I mean like you guys are just seeing it move on the screen but like I don't know it's hard to like we're really working at trying to keep it like under control it's like it's like riding one of those mechanical bowls. Yeah a little bit. It's doing what it wants and you just got to kind of guide it. It's an armadillo is that? Oh my god. Dude I've never seen an armadillo. Hey buddy. There's just a dillo man. Hello. Look at him digging. He's digging though. He's digging. I've never seen an armadillo in real life. I think they have these in California. It's just digging. What's he looking for? It's so cute. Do you know about this double whip? What if I did it off the table? Do it. What is this? What is happening? Double whip. What is happening? You got wood right below you. It's cute. That was the most lame thing I've ever seen in my life. I've never seen in my entire life.