How It All Started

It all started with a pile of old quadcopter parts gifted to me by a well-meaning family member. I couldn’t actually use any of them, but they sent me down the rabbit hole of FPV and eventually led to me building my first drone, a giant 7-inch long-range quad.

After building, flying, breaking, and repairing a lot of drones, I found myself drawn to smaller sub-250-gram builds. They were cheaper, safer, and easier to fly almost anywhere. The problem was flight time. Five minutes or less was completely normal, and I wanted more.

Eventually, I came across a small quad that could fly for over 20 minutes using a single lithium-ion cell. I built one myself, started experimenting with the idea, and shared the results on my YouTube channel, Mediocre Nerd. I quickly discovered that a lot of other people were just as interested in seeing how far these little Li-ion builds could be pushed.

That’s how I eventually met John Nesel. He reached out after watching one of my videos, and we started trading ideas about how these builds could be improved. Those conversations eventually turned into a bigger question: why was it so difficult to find standardized, comparable testing for FPV components?

There are tons of people experimenting in this hobby, but the results are scattered across videos, forums, posts, and spreadsheets. We wanted a place where that information could keep building instead of getting lost.

That’s where LithiumIonFPV came from.

It’s a place to document our testing, builds, successes, failures, and everything we learn along the way, while giving the community a place to contribute their own ideas. We want every test, build, failure, and new idea to move the whole community forward.