A while ago I figured out what my 2018 freestyle build would be. Something that could do the new stuff throughout the year without needing to break the bank. The aim was to have the following:

• 2306 2400+kv motors
• 5inch frame with top battery and spare parts (4mm arms)
• F4 or F7 FC (needs to be future proof. So it should be able to easily run BF3.3 with Fast Kalman filters)
• PDB for easy build
• 32bit esc's
• Full telemetry (including ESC's)
• Smart-audio VTX
• Basically I want to do all this for ~170$

In a crash I do not want to have to spend more than 20$ to get back up in the air. So worst case scenario crash I would break for example: arm, esc and motor. In total this can't be above 20$. In order to get this done the drone frame needs to have separately available spare parts.

So I set out to find the parts and made a video about my choices:

Now after I have flown it for a while I can say a few things:

• The Matek f405 mini in combination with that pdb is so incredibly good! Easy build with tons of uarts and possibilities. Can easily do smartaudio, crossfire and camera control.
• The frame is not great. Broke an arm pretty early and will move to the real4 once the spare arm I had breaks.
• Motors are not great either. Easy to bend a shaft and some of them have rattling bearings straight out of the box. Will move to the Aokfly 2306 2400kv once these give up on life.
• The ESC's (which were on sale for 4€ when I bought them) might not be stellar. I burned out one of them in a pretty heavy crash (the one where I broke an arm). Never burned an esc before.