Module 0 — Foundations & orientation

What an FPV drone actually is, how all the parts talk to each other, and the map for everything that follows.

🟢 Foundations. An FPV (First-Person View) quadcopter is four motors, a battery, a radio receiver, a video transmitter and one small computer — the flight controller (FC) — that runs a control loop thousands of times per second. You fly by looking through goggles at a live camera feed. Unlike a camera drone, an FPV quad in acro mode does not stabilize itself to level; it holds a rotation rate that you command with the sticks. That is why FPV pilots train in simulators first: the machine does exactly what you say, including flying into the ground.

The whole machine is two signal chains meeting in the middle:

You — the pilot — close the loop. Later, software will close parts of it for you (Module 11).

🟡 Practitioner. Learn the vocabulary that every manual assumes: roll / pitch / yaw (rotations about the drone's own X/Y/Z axes), throttle, AUW (all-up weight), BNF/RTF/kit, acro vs angle mode, failsafe, arming. Learn the coordinate frames: the body frame is glued to the drone; the world frame is glued to the Earth. Almost every equation on this site is a conversation between those two frames. Adopt the safety culture now: props off for bench work, smoke-stopper for first power-ups, simulator hours before real packs.

🔴 Advanced. Understand the open-source stack as a stack: EdgeTX (radio OS) → ExpressLRS (control link) → Betaflight / INAV / ArduPilot (flight firmware) → BLHeli/Bluejay/AM32 (ESC firmware). Each layer has its own configurator, its own release cycle and its own source repository. Knowing where a behavior lives is half of every debugging session.

⚫ Master. You can draw the full end-to-end latency chain (stick → RF → FC → ESC → motor → camera → VTX → goggles → brain) with millisecond estimates for every hop, and you mentor others through their first build without a checklist.

Mastery checklist

• Explain to a beginner, in 60 seconds, why an acro quad falls out of the sky when you center the sticks — and why that's a feature.
• Name every component a stick input touches before a prop changes speed.
• Set up a new simulator + radio from scratch in under 15 minutes.

🖼️ Image ideas (copyright-free): your own annotated photo of a bare frame with parts laid out; Wikimedia Commons category "Quadcopters" (filter CC0/PD).

📚 Free resources: Oscar Liang "FPV beginner's guide"; Betaflight documentation "Getting started"; any FPV simulator's tutorial mode.