DIY Drones for the Evil Genius: Design, Build, and Customize Your Own Drones

"DIY Drones for the Evil Genius" (by Ian Cinnamon, Romi Kadri and Fitz Tepper) provides a very effective overview to move from the many available toy drones to the more serious hobbyist level. The book is well organized, allowing the reader to dive into the theory as deep as desired or pick and choose specific subjects of interest to rapidly meet their needs. For me, I was admittedly after more of the "get your hands dirty" portions of the book to get right in and start building my own drone after "outgrowing" my more "toy" drone. But for those more interested in taking a "theorist" approach to the flight of drones, the book also provides aerodynamics of aviation flight and supporting physics, all very useful depending on how much you thirst for theory vs. just the practical aspects. Regardless of which extreme you fall into, or a balance of both, the book provides the information in a well written, easy to understand document, along with great illustrations and organization. In conclusion, the reader can immerse themselves in as much or little of the theory needed to build their own drone, or more likely, come back to the theory later on as building and flying the drone progresses and the interest level for the theory increases. Several key considerations make this book a great purchase. First, its very well priced, and provides ever so important specific drone first class component sourcing references and vendors to build a top notch drone, and at attractive pricing. One of my concerns going into this purchase questioned if the supplier references would be limited to purchasing from authors of the book, which refreshingly was NOT the case. In fact, the references provided in the book take you to various Amazon vendors, many of them "Prime" in fact, selling the specific components and at very reasonable and competitively priced. For me, this is very important keeping the presentation/learning materials very separate from the purchasing side of the components so the book does what its supposed to do, provide objective guidelines and references. Finally, and something one does not often see when purchasing "how to" books is the outgoing support and availability of the primary author, Ian Cinnamon. I had several questions regarding following my initial reading of the book. A link is provided to reach out to Mr. Cinnamon, which I honestly did not expect any kind of effective or timely responses. To my surprise, he responded within minutes of my first inquiry, answering all questions with a willingness to continue helping me as needed which he has. So the author takes a wonderful "hands-on" approach through his timely availability. I look forward to progressing towards the start of building my first drone which is anticipated shortly, having confidence that the book will provide such a broad amount of information, but most important, knowing that the author openly is making himself availble via email to help, making this home-built drone nothing short of a success.

Good book to lay out some clarity of those considering getting into drones, or those of us with questions. Interesting read.

For an entry level book I would definitely recommend this book. I followed the instructions and built my first drone with the help of this book. Every person will probably make their own adjustments to suit their need as they build their own, but I think the author does a good job focusing on the basics and not making it too complicated for beginners. There are some parts that may need a little more description (some wiring), but over all I really enjoyed the material of this book. The website used makes it easy to search for the materials needed, some of the products are naturally updated, but all the materials are comparable to the predecessors. If you want to get into building your own drones and don't know where to start, then I would highly recommend this book to start with.

Great book! Ian Cinnamon and his coauthors do a great job making complicated subjects extremely accessible to just about anybody. The book not only tells you how to build drones but exactly what each part of the drone does. Mr. Cinnamon does not push you to do what he does; he explains the parts, offers suggestions as to which ones to buy, but then leaves the choice up to you. I came away feeling very confident in my new knowledge of how drones work and how I could build and/or customize them how I want using my imagination. The book even tells how to customize consumer drones. It is so interesting that even if you don’t plan to build a drone I would recommend it! Definitely a five star book! - John

I got this book and the parts needed to build a drone; great Christmas gift for my husband. Diydronebook.com had the links for what we needed and author Ian responded within a day when one of the links didn’t work. (If you are a novice, don’t waste your time trying to figure out which flight controller you need. Also, use amazon prime gift option in case you choose wrong.). You really should have some experience working with wiring. Husband needed to get easy disconnecters (from autozone) for the ECM and motors, and then use shrink wrap to make sure positive and negative stayed separate. Also had to get a XT60 male connector for the battery we chose. And the frame we chose did not include the little 3mm x 10mm screws to connect the motor to the frame. Finally, the battery charger did not come with an outlet plug so we had to find one that meets the specs. So, you see, a great guide but be prepared to problem solve. It’s alot of effort but much better to spend about $300 instead of over $2000 for an already built drone!

I bought this book with the hope of clearing up misunderstandings concerning several aspects of building a copter. The first part of the book goes into great detail about basics of flying. That made me feel that the remaining part of the book would do the same with the drone stuff itself. However, that's not the case. 1. The author doesn`t introduce you the algorithm of choosing parts for your DIY drone. Instead, he feeds you with specific solutions such as obsolete CCD3D flight controller. 2. Same goes for fine-tuning of your aircraft. You won`t find any information regarding an actual understanding of the process. Instead of this you get "plug this, click here, set that" instructions working only for the specific solutions the author have chosen for the example. The basics of choosing right motos-props-frame-battery combination are simply missing. The author doesn't condescend to explain how to choose the right size of the props, the kV of the motors and battery capacity for given payload. And without the understanding of that, you won`t build any drone that actually can fly! 3. The worst part is accessories. I got a feeling that the author simply knows nothing about connecting a gimbal and FPV camera. You won't find any connection diagrams and algorithms for connecting gimbal to your receiver, or your vTX to FPV camera(just mounting). There is no explanation of how to control your gimbal from the transmitter, the purpose of using a current converter and so on. Why spend 40 pages of the book to explain how airplanes and helicopters fly and then just gloss over the most crucial part? This is an absolute waste of time. You'd better off check some famous YT-channels or read through Oscar Liang FPV blog to find out how to build, tune and fly your UAV.

This is good book and there were no issues with delivery. The book has good section on theory of flight. Drone building is described in detail, hopefully I can follow it through. I reduced by one star for several issues: 1. Continuous referral to book's web site for components list instead of teaching reader to select components on their own. 2. Electronics descriptions are rather sketchy, some info on using GPS with flight computer and RC protocols (SBus, etc.) would be useful. 3. Drone LiPo batteries are fire hazard. It would be nice to read how to store them safely.

When I ordered this book I thought it would be like the other evil genius books, where you get some interesting projects and learn some new concepts. I was shocked and thrilled that the first 30 pages are about how flight works. This book goes into such interesting detail for each of the projects. I have read the book, and now I am working on getting the parts to actually start building. I hope they come out with a second book on programming these drones, as I think that would be a big hit, as children love drones and if you can quickly build one and then they can look at programming it, that may attract more people. But, considering the topic, this book is incredible, and they are very thorough, as they also talk about how to get a drone license from the FAA, so your hobby won't land you in jail.