If your daughter is a smaller child, like under 13 years old, a cheap drone from Alibaba isn’t a horrible choice since kids just want to have some fun flying a thing around the house or in the backyard. And if it does crash and break, it’s not too much to get upset by because it was so cheap and your expectations are lower. You can get these for very cheap, as little as $5 from Chinese websites or $20 on Amazon. I wouldn’t recommend spending anything over $60 for one of these types of toy drones, though. Some don’t have cameras, and others that do will have very poor quality and the camera will be static, meaning you can’t move it around to see other directions while flying.

Then there is another category which is more classified as quadcopters… Most people use these for racing or doing stunts.

She’s 5, LOL. Also, she seemed primarily interested in it as a camera platform rather than racing or stunts.

Any opinions on this? I nearly impulse-bought it for about $40 just before Black Friday, but (aside from coming to my senses about a drone for a 5-year-old) I was a bit leery of the “smartphone app” control scheme, especially since I’m pretty militant about avoiding proprietary Android apps in general (and that goes double for ones for controlling weird off-brand hardware). I guess what they describe as “manual adjustable camera” is the “static” camera thing you’re warning me about? I can see how it’d be inconvenient to not be able to look both ahead and at the ground without having to tilt the whole aircraft/fly forward.

You can buy kits or the quadcopter preassembled and then also buy the battery and remote separately, which is nice, kind of like building a computer where you can take your time and spend money on a longer period of time. Buy the board or even 3D print one, then buy the controller board, the motors, the blades, etc. and assemble it for flying.

I have to admit, being a big fan of Free Software and somebody who fancies myself a bit of a DIYer, the idea of building it myself appeals to me. Of course, I’m also cheap and I doubt I’d be able to compete with a preassembled Chinese toy drone on price (unless I disqualify all the app-controlled ones, maybe), so I’m not sure. Any advice re: controller boards and software, and other components? I ran across this article from 2019 just now, but for all I know it might be obsolete/incomplete/written by somebody with weird opinions.

The biggest other concern I have is crashes, since I can only assume a small child pilot will be bad at it. Do drones often, you know, survive, or should I expect to be replacing parts and/or the whole thing relatively often? Should I lean towards DIY and 3D-printing because of the repairability factor?

I think I might be coalescing on something like “a very cheap 1080p or better camera drone (as opposed to FPV racing quad) DIY kit, but controlled with a proper standalone transmitter, or at least a Free Software Android app.” Not sure such a thing exists, but I think it’s what I want. (Do they make open-source flight controller PCBs with extra channel(s) to support controlling a [(maybe) pan - tilt - (maybe) zoom] camera, or would that kick me into the start-from-scratch-with-an-Arduino realm? For that matter, can a movable drone camera even be had as an off-the-shelf part?)