Mini quadcopter

Drone mania bite me and now I have a new hobby. After two weeks of research and tons of watched videos, I placed my order, actually dozens of orders. Complete solutions are cool, but I like to build things from pieces. That way I can learn how things work and have unique product at the end. I decided to start with 250 mm FPV category. These kind of quadcopters are very popular, meaning it's easy to find parts and build tutorials.

Main tutorial that I followed was recorded by Bruce Simpson. Here is the first part in series:

In video's description on YT, there is a list of parts but it's incomplete, so here is a full list of parts I used:

• AfroFlight Naze32 Acro
• Afro ESC 12Amp
• ZMR250 (QAV250)
• FS-iA6 Radio
• DYS BE1806 2300KV
• ZIPPY Compact 1300mAh 3S 25C
• Gemfan 5x3 Inch Plastic 5030 Propeller

FPV system:

• Boscam FPV 5.8G 8CH 200mW AV Wireless Receiver RC305
• Eachine 700TVL 1/3 Cmos FPV 110 Degree Camera w/32CH Transmission
• Quanum DIY FPV Goggle Set with Monitor
• Turnigy 1000mAh 3S 20C

I bought as much as I could from local stores. To my surprise, some prices were lower than ones on ebay.

Short build log

After one month majority of parts came:

and fun started:

I didn't documented the whole process, so it might look from pictures above that it can be completed between breakfast and lunch, but just video tutorial series that I linked above lasts few hours.

PS4 or quadcopter?

The price between those two is pretty similar. That is, if a quadcopter survives first fly tests. My first fly attempt ended after just a few seconds. Quad raised a bit but floated backwards and scraped a wall with propellers, resulting with light prop damage and one prop cap falling off. On my second fly attempt I managed to get quad in the air and wrestled with controls on the radio to hold quad steady. My happy grin didn't last long, because suddenly, at maybe 3 meters height, prop cap got loss, and quad hit the grass. I spent half hour searching through grass, but didn't find the cap.

Flying by looking at quadcopter is OK, but the real fun starts with FPV. I'm still waiting for my action camera to come, so I'll share a FPV video from a pro pilot Boris B.:

So all in all, my answer to the question is quadcopter.

UPDATE:

Here are two videos that I took. First one is altitude test, second is distance test.

dotSwift

dotSwift is a Swift conference, held this year on February 6th. With my colleagues from FIVE, I had the honour to attend this event in gorgeous Théâtre des Variétés in Paris. With the promises given on their website and a sound list of lecturers, expectations were high.

Taken at dotSwift in Paris on November 6th, 2015 by Nicolas Ravelli

One of dotSwift's mottos is "Made by developers, for developers". At the very start of the conference, director Sylvain instructed audience to shake hands and introduce with people around. Interaction between developers was additionally encouraged at coffee breaks. The conference consisted of three blocks of lectures with coffee breaks between blocks.
There were 8 lectures capped on 20 minutes and 5 mini lectures caped on 5 minutes. Twenty minutes is short enough for keeping concentration but barely enough for deeper insight into a topic, not to mention five minute ones. Though, it all depends on lecturer and how he's prepared and there were noticeable differences in quality between lecturers.

Main theme of the conference was state and maturity of the language and accompanying tools like XCode and comparison with its ancestor Objective C. Overall conclusion is that language is mature enough for production but XCode is trailing behind and still has some frustrating bugs. All lectures were recorded and are available on dotSwift's website. I advise watching lectures from Ash Furrow on Swift in production, Daniel Steinberg on comparison between Objective C and Swift, Dimitri Dupuis-Latour on Optionals in Swift and Kyle Fuller on Functional programming.
After the conference, main sponsor BlaBlaCar paid a round in nearby French Beer Factory and socializing continued till late hours.
Next day, there was a workshop organized on a subject of building frameworks with Swift. It was available only to first 30 people who registered via external page and a lot of people ended on a waiting list.

This was a first dotSwift conference and there is a space for improvements. Inspiration should be WWDC. Themes should be more distinct. Specific lectures like Core Bluetooth can't be fitted in just five minutes. It would be nice to have more than one workshop. Updates and news should be visible on official website, not just on Twitter. With all that said, it was an interesting conference with several great lecturers that I mentioned above. I recommend it.