Building the GEP-LX5 Leopard

The poor man's Dquad Obsession

Somewhere last February there was a Drone Racing League gif on the front page of Reddit. After seeing the gif I was like what an awesome hobby would that be! First thing I thought was it would probably be out of reach, costing multiple thousands of dollars per quad etc. But hey, let's search online and see how many thousands of dollars these guys are throwing against it :)

Fast forward 2 months and I've got one myself. Hours and hours of reading and research went into it but it was worth every minute. I've learned so much along the way. Simulators, volts, amps, soldering, parts, DMM, Betafight, you name it. This was exactly the kind of hobby I was looking for. You can choose to go all out and spend those multiple thousands of dollars, or keep it normal and get airborne for around $500,-.

I've changed my part list a hundred times. Went from a (cheapish) Realacc X210 Pro frame to a GEP-TX5 Chimp frame and eventually changing it to a GEP-LX5 Leopard frame. From Racerstar motors to T-motor to Emax RS2205-S. Cheap Banggood FC to Omnibus clone to a Betaflight F3. Reading everybody's experiences on RC-Groups and Reddit was really helpful. The builds on RotorBuilds really complimented it, you can check all the builds and automatically know if parts are compatible or not. Thanks to all those site's for pointing me in the right way. The final part list is shown below.

For now I'm only flying LOS with angle mode enabled. The FPV camera and VTX in the pictures were only mounted for the pictures. I'm still waiting for my goggles so I've removed all the FPV parts, no point in crashing those. I've practiced LOS with a Hubsan but the difference with this thing, OMG. Going flat out is just amazing, the power is incredible :O

Will update with final pictures as soon as I got all the VTX stuff soldered up.