 Think back to that first time that you went on a FPV Facebook group and you started reading some of the threads and you saw things like, hey, I've got my SBUS wire from my RX connected to the FC and I'm not getting a signal. Should I be on PWM or PPM? What's going on here? And you just thought, is this English? What's up guys? I'm Lidrib from Rotor Riot and in FPV there are a ton of acronyms, abbreviations that you need to understand. It's basically a whole separate language that you need to know to communicate in FPV. Heck, FPV itself, the very hobby is an acronym, first person view. So if you're just getting into this hobby and you are overwhelmed by all the little acronyms that you're seeing and you have no idea what people are talking about, hopefully this video is going to clear some things up and even if you've been doing this for a while, stick around anyway because you think I might learn something here and there. When you're getting into this, you're probably looking at drones that are built for you and you see a couple of different ways that they're described. There's the BNF, there's the RTF, there's the ARF, that's my favorite, it's like RF. What do those mean? The pictures that might even look identical. To start with the RTF, that stands for ready to fly. An RTF package includes everything that you need to fly. So you don't just get the drone, you get a radio to control the drone and goggles that you need to see through the perspective of the drone. So it's the complete package. If you're just starting out, an RTF package might be the way that you want to go. The downside is you don't get to necessarily pick the different components. If you do decide that you want to pick out different gear, that's where the other two variants come in. The BNF that stands for bind and fly. That is just the drone. You need to have everything else. You need to have your goggles, you need to have your radio and then you get your BNF, your bind and fly drone and you bind it to your gear and then you fly that drone with the gear that you own. That third option is a little bit less common in this space is the ARF and what that means is the drone is almost capable of flying but it's missing a component. The component that it is usually missing is the receiver. This gives you the most flexibility because you get your aircraft but you still get to choose what receiver that you're going to use whether you want to fly free sky, fly sky, Futaba, Spectrum, Crossfire, whatever it is. So if you already have receivers lying around, you can just get that drone and then add in one of your receivers. But it's not that common of an option. Usually drones are sold as bind and fly with the receiver already built in or ready to fly with everything that you need. Now once you've got the drone, all the different components are often referred to with abbreviations themselves. So let's start at the center. Let's start with the stack, the stack of electronics at the heart of your drone. We've got the FC and we've got the PDB. FC, that stands for Flight Controller. That's truly the brain of your drone. It is at the center of everything. It's ultimately going to be connected to your powertrain, video system, control system, anything that is on your drone that has a function usually goes through the FC, aka the Flight Controller. The Flight Controller doesn't just control your flight, it really controls everything. Sometimes these FCs have power distribution built in and you will solder the power and the ground connections of your speed controllers and of your battery connector directly to the flight controller. But if it doesn't, then you're going to need something for power distribution and that's what the PDB is, the Power Distribution Board. This is one of the most simple components that your drone is going to have because it's simply taking power and ground and distributing it to the other things that need power and ground delivered with high current. Moving outward from the center of the drone, we hit the ESCs, the electronic speed controllers. These components take power from the battery and signal from the FC and turn it into AC current to spin your three-phase brushless motor. ESCs come in two form. They can come as individual ESCs, but then they can also come in a four-in-one package and that's where all four speed controllers that are needed for all four motors are combined into one component. In this case, the four-in-one ESC usually takes the place of the PDB. So you would have your Flight Controller and your four-in-one ESC and then your motors get to connect directly to the stack, which can make for a very clean build. Now connected to the speed controllers, you have your motors and there's not really an abbreviation for motors. You just call them motors. There is the KV rating, which describes how many rotations that the motor will have for a given voltage. Just in general, know that the higher KV rating, the more responsive and the faster spinning the motor is going to be and the lower is slower and less spins per volt. And what you need to do is match your KV to your battery size. For a 4S battery, you want like a 2400-ish KV motor. For a 6S battery, you want more like a 1700. You don't know what 4S and 6S, well, just hang in there. We'll get there. We'll get there. But first, we're going to jump over to other things connected to the FC. We got the RX and the VTX. And those are connected to the TX and the VRX. What are those things? So RX usually refers to the receiver. So that is the thing on your drone that receives the signal from your TX, your transmitter. So now maybe you can guess where we're going with this. VRX, VTX, that's your video receiver and your video transmitter. So on the drone, you will have your RX to pick up your TX signal. And also on the drone, you will have your VTX to transmit the video to your VRX, which is the receiver built into your goggles. Now when you're talking about these transmitters and these receivers, you're also probably going to be talking about antennas. And then you're probably going to run into this little acronym that goes RHCP or alternatively LHCP. And that stands for Right Hand Circular Polarized and Left Hand Circular Polarized. So if you want to learn more about this, you can Google to your heart's content about antenna design and theory. But in short, what you just need to know is that the right hands go with the right hands and the left hands go with the left hands. And they're supposed to reject each other. If you're flying with lots of people, you can have some people on right hand antennas and some people on left hand antennas. And it's going to help those signals not interfere with each other. That pretty much covers it for components acronyms, but those different components all talk to each other. And you're going to start seeing acronyms for the way those components talk to each other. Common ones that you do need to worry about when thinking about your receiver to your flight controller connection are SBUS, SBUS, DSMX, CRSF. I think that's it. What does SBUS stand for? I started this video and I actually don't even know. Dude, I can't even find it. I don't know if these are technically acronyms per se, but they are a few letters matched together that have meaning that you need to know. So SBUS is a serial protocol that's very common for use on free sky and DJI systems. DSMX is a serial protocol that's found on spectrum systems. CRSF is a protocol for crossfire systems. The only thing that you really need to understand about different receiver protocols is they need to match. The receiver protocol that your radio is using needs to match the receiver protocol of the receiver and the output of that receiver needs to match the expected input. And that's really the most important thing that you need to know. Now thinking about how the flight controller talks to the ESCs. Now, we pretty much always use D-Shot. The D stands for digital. D-Shot is so, so superior to something like PWM because it is a digital signal. PWM is very susceptible to noise. So you're going to get much better response times out of using something like D-Shot. So on the flight controller itself, another thing you're going to come across is 8K, 8K, 4K, 4K. All these different Ks. What is that? Again, it's not an acronym per se. What those represent are speed. So when you see something that is 4K, 4K, that is referring to a 4 kilohertz speed of the gyro loop and a 4 kilohertz speed of the PID loop. So on the gyro loop, it's the frequency of how often the gyro is taking a measurement of your delta angle. And the other one, the PID loop is the frequency at which it's updating. How often is it sending signals to the motors to respond to the changes or your inputs? You don't know what you're doing. Just go with 4K, 4K. That's the safer bet. I got to power this monstrosity that you've put together. And that's where you need your lipo. That's your battery. Lipo stands for lithium polymer. There are other battery chemistries like lithium ion, which is actually called lion. But they're not as common because they don't have the punch that lipo has. Lithium polymer batteries are excellent at delivering high current. So they are the most common battery that you're going to see when powering an FPV drone. So now when dealing with your lipo batteries, there's a few different acronyms or abbreviations that you're going to run into mentioned previously. The 4S, the 6S, what does that stand for? Well, the S stands for series. So when you have a 4S battery, you actually have four cells of a battery in series. If you know anything about electronics, that means that the voltages of each cell add up. Those are the most common two Ss that you're going to come across because those are the two most popular voltages that people use to power your drone. The other thing you might run into is MAH, or some people say maaah. Now that stands for milliamp hours. And that's the way that we rate the capacity of the battery. It's very simple, bigger to the number, bigger to the battery, bigger to the capacity. We're usually using between a 1000 and a 1500-ish sized battery. And that's like, it's like a little, it's a little brick. It's this little brick that we strap onto the top and that powers the drone. All right, what else did I forget? I've got a really, this is a really long list. PID, we mentioned that, the PID loop stands for proportional, integral, derivative. You could take a whole class on PID controllers, but really what you need to know is the PID controls the drone and you change your PID values to change the responsiveness and the handling of the drone. And people will obsess and obsess over the PID tune. Honestly, a little secret. Nowadays, default PID values are probably okay. Here we got OSD, that stands for on-screen display. That is the thing when you're looking through the things and you got things on the screen. There are so, so many little abbreviations and acronyms and all those little special terms that you need to know to know everything. You're never really going to know everything, but the things that we cover today are a really good place to start. And if you can remember these things, you're going to be able to blend right in with that Facebook group and know sort of what they're talking about. Guys, whether you've been flying for a long time or are just getting into this whole FPV, first-person view thing, which is the greatest hobby ever, we hope that this video was helpful to you. And if you are considering picking up a new FC or ESC or maybe splurging on that fully-built BNF, we hope you will visit rotariot.com. Thank you guys for hanging out. Make sure to hit the subscribe button for more videos. I'm Lidrib and I'll see you next time.