I must admit I have a ender 3 v2 with zero upgrades. I just prints without a lot of tweaking.
I do however look what I can upgrade, but as it’s working fine never did it.
I feel hobbies are just the early research phase of future technology. It’s starts as a diy, people invent iteratively on the idea, bringing new theories and solutions until a company takes all those patchworks ideas and turns them into a working product. Bambi seems like the first company to present a decent turnkey finished solution taking all its ideas from the DIY scene. Yea there is Ender and Prusa but they still need all that learning.
I know two of mine were. 3d printers and quadcopters were both cutting edge, barely developed tech when I started out. Now they are full-on industries
Same here. FPV and 3D printing. Then there’s Ergo Mechanical Keyboards. And now I’m just straight up making my own projects with microcontrollers.
Seems we like the same stuff. I’ve been using a Kenesis Advantage 2 since 2015. I’ve considered making my own, but the Kenesis is pretty great. The only drawback is that the layout isn’t good for FPS games.
I built a couple of 98mph 5" FPV quadcopters for about $150 around 4 years ago. I recently wanted to add a 3" to my collection and was absolutely shocked at the prices. What the heck happened there? It would cost me $500+ to build the same quadcopter that I built for $150.
Yeah prices soared with Covid chip shortage. Plus now most drones are using more powerful MCU and HD video transmitters that are much more expensive. And also the global price hike.
Ah man, I don’t even have HD goggles. I have Fat Shark analog goggles. I’ve seen some videos from HD though, and it’s pretty amazing.
DarwinFPV BabyApe is $80 and flies better than anything you’ve built 4 years ago due to improvements in Betaflight. Sure, if you want O3 you need to pay more.
Can I just update BetaFlight on my current FCs?
What is 03?
You probably can! At least if your FCs are at least F4/F7 - F3 series microcontrollers are no longer supported. But the way Betaflight ‘upgrades’ work you’ll need to reconfigure the FC after the upgrade. And using the CLI dump made with an older firmware version isn’t supported - some options go away or get renamed, PID tuning options in particular should not be blindly copied between versions.
O3 is the best quality digital video system (made by DJI). The air unit (camera+digital vtx) is $230, and the goggles are $500. It can also record up to 4K at 120 FPS (in-goggle max quality is 1080p at 100FPS). Analog is definitely way cheaper (at least the vtx side), but I think most people who could afford digital have switched over the last couple of years.
Thank you for all of the information! I’ll try to update my FCs this weekend.
