I built a photography Quadcopter from scratch as a fun project. Like most builds of this type, All that was needed are parts that will work together: Motors, ESCs, Frame, Receiver, Camera, Gimbal, Flight controller. This isn’t really a big deal, as all you do is put the pieces together like a Lego set. However, I decided to go the extra mile and create my own flight controller.

I used the YMFC-3D flight controller tutorial to help build and code my controller.  This helped me learn a lot about how quads work, stay in the air, and how you should not re-invent the wheel.  With my controller, I could only fly in rate mode (Control by angular rates).  Rate mode is a common mode of control for FPV (First Person View) and racing, but not LOS (Line of Sight).  A more common mode for LOS is Atti (Control by orientation ie Auto-level).  In order to implement Atti, I tried using the YMFC-AL tutorial, but I never got much luck in that.

Below is one of the first videos I took with my flight controller in Rate mode, please forgive the techno music.

Since I was having trouble getting Atti to work with my own fc, I bought a real flight controller.  It is a CC3D running libre-pilot.  With this new Flight controller, I could do so much more without worrying about going too far before I lose orientation.

I guess I did not learn my lesson about re-inventing the wheel, as I decided to build my own Remote.  You can read the details about that project when I write it.