It's not easy to fly FPV during winter weather. You either have to have weather proof quadcopter (airplane) or fly indoors. And it's not simple to find a good, big and cheap place to fly FPV in. But, how about flying FPV in a living room?

Required hardware:

Nice to have hardware:

Process of equipping Eachine E010 with small camera with integrated transmitter and antenna is super simple: remove E010 body, put camera on top and solder camera wires directly to flight controller board.

If you have access to 3D printer, you can print custom mount that is light and fits nicely both TX and E010. If you do not have 3D printer access, no problem. For a first few days I was using mount built from sponge and zip tie.

Putting relatively heavy camera on top of pretty small quadcopter have some drawbacks. First of all, flight time. It drops to about 2 minutes. Usually less than that. Second of all, it looses "punchiness". To be honest, you have to plan your altitude and push throttle up. On the other hand, fun factor goes up like crazy!

Eachine E010 and FrSky Taranis

The weakest component of Eachine E010 is the transmitter. It works, but hmm... while it might be enough to do VLOS, it is not good enough for FPV.

Luckily, the is a solution that allows to use FrSky Taranis, or any other transmitter with PPM output to connect to E010 and many other RC toys. It is called Multiprotocol TX Module.

To make it work, put it in Taranis external RF module bay and enable it in configuration.

  • Internal RF: OFF
  • External RF:
    • Mode: PPM
    • Channel range: CH1-12
    • PPM frame: 30.5ms 300us

During first power-on you have to select RF protocol. It is done using sticks positions when powering Taranis up. For E010, sticks combination is as follows:

  • Yaw - right
  • Roll - right
  • Pitch - down

Also, since binding is required every time power is cycled, it is a good idea to mix switch SH to channel 12. CH12 is a bind channel: E010 quadcopter will bind to Taranis every time CH12 will be switched HIGH. So, after you switch battery, just flip switch SH and done: ready to fly.