Ok, so, hot take. I am familiar with the home-built drone hobby, and they use it for racing (which is really fucking wild to watch).
It’s going to get insanely expensive to build these. If you have a 3D-printer you can make a frame, and maybe propellors for a big enough one.
You can etch a circuit board. Wiring and soldering isn’t hard.
But the difficult part is the electronic parts themselves. the motor speed controllers, the power distribution, the microcontrollers, the radio receivers and transmitters, the brushless DC motors that are so tightly wound I’ve never seen it done by hand. You also need high current lithium polymer batteries, camera and it’s transmitters and more. None of that is made domestically. What they’ll have to do is break down existing electronics and try to salvage what they can from that. That gets really hard quickly.
Ok, so, hot take. I am familiar with the home-built drone hobby, and they use it for racing (which is really fucking wild to watch).
It’s going to get insanely expensive to build these. If you have a 3D-printer you can make a frame, and maybe propellors for a big enough one.
You can etch a circuit board. Wiring and soldering isn’t hard.
But the difficult part is the electronic parts themselves. the motor speed controllers, the power distribution, the microcontrollers, the radio receivers and transmitters, the brushless DC motors that are so tightly wound I’ve never seen it done by hand. You also need high current lithium polymer batteries, camera and it’s transmitters and more. None of that is made domestically. What they’ll have to do is break down existing electronics and try to salvage what they can from that. That gets really hard quickly.