title: "T.E.R.N. FPV drone" author: "Kieran Klukas" description: "a dji fpv drone that i'm building from scratch" created_at: "2025-5-29"#

The Journal#

Total Time spent: 8 hours

hopefully this ends up being semi interesting to read lol

1 hour

2025-05-29 - Thursday evening#

Did a bunch of brainstorming about which motors and frame I want to use and sent my pitch in pitstop. I'm largely basing this around the new DJI o4 system since it's so tremendously powerful. When I saw it release last year it really made me want to build something with it.

2 hours

2025-06-10 - Tuesday morning#

Did a ton of research on the different dji headsets. I pretty much just started to ignore dji stuff a few years ago since I was only flying analog so I'm rather out of touch. So far i'm fairly sure i've settled on the DJI n3 instead of the goggles 3 or integra. A fair bit cheaper ( $220 vs$ : "T.E.R.N. FPV drone"

5 hours

2025-06-10 - Tuesday after lunch :)#

Looking into frames again. The one I was planning on using (the djin f25 sp) is completely out of stock and not likely to restock untill mid June (whcih it is now soooo 🤷). I saw a few people recommend the avion rc Ikon 3 which looks super nice. I attached a picture of that frame below. It's also just a tad bit cheaper at $43.95 than the djin and reviews say its about 20g lighter which is nice. Looks like props come with the frame which is nice as well.

I'd already decided on ELRS when I first started thinking about this drone but I decided to go with the Radiomaster rp1 2 as its fairly tiny and nice and powerful. As for motors I'm looking at the iflight xing2 1404 as they looks super nice. A tad bit on the heavy side but they seem to be a bit more performant and efficent than similar motors so that should cancel out.

Okay hhhm, (if you haven't already noticed this is being written as I think / research) looking at the avion rc frames they have the 3.5 evo which does look tempting. It's not terribly more expensive ($48.95) and that slightly bigger frame is going to mean a much higher thrust to weight ratio. Looking at motors the iflight xing2 1404 looks pretty good. The 1504 would have been perferable but I think going with xing2 should outway that.

I also decided to buy a beeper with a integrated battery so that even if the main battery gets disconnected I can still be blasted with 105 decibles of noise :)

The flight stack is going to be a speedybee 405 aio which has some very nice shielding / heatsink aluminium on it and should help protect it. The solder points on it are some of the absolute nicest i've seen on an esc / flight controller recently.

One really nice bit is that the aio comes with all the cables and such

Oh goodness was that horrible. I paid for all the components except for the frame, batteries, and o4 air unit. My bank actually contacted me for withdrawing so much lol.

Just made the wiring digram! I did it on figma over at https://www.figma.com/board/V3yHTGLW7VbZYWka2fCPID/tern-wiring-diagram and it wasnt terrible! I would have prefered slightly better routing but idk you do what you have to :)