I'm still a bit unclear here; I'll have to give examples.
I have "several" quadcopters. I don't actually know how many I have at the moment, but in addition to enough components to fill a couple of five-gallon buckets, the three I use most regularly are:
* an Autel Evo 2 Pro
* a 5" FPV quad
* a 3" FPV quad
The Autel is a dedicated photo/video quad. It's stupidly easy to fly, to the point that I can put the controller down and come back 20 minutes later to find that it hasn't moved.
I use the 5" for fun, mostly freestyle stuff. The 3" has enclosed props and is intended for videography. Neither of these have GPS. While they do have flight controllers, they are optimized for minimal input latency and do not attempt to automatically keep themselves upright whatsoever. Flying them is much like balancing a dinner plate on top of a broomstick; it requires constant input adjustments. That's difficult at first, but after ~20 hours of practice it starts to become unconscious. I've been doing it for a few years now and really don't even think about it anymore.
Prior to the availability of ARM STM32-based flight controllers, I believe there were some fully analogue solutions out there that allowed similar flight characteristics.
At the most detailed level, all of them are sending a PWM signal to each individual motor. Controller input is translated from 4 axes (pitch, roll, yaw, throttle) to the appropriate changes in the PWM signal for each motor.
I _think_ I could probably set up a fully manual quadcopter and get it to fly predictably without a flight controller, by using the radio receiver on the quad to output PWM directly to the individual motors. I'd have to set up the controller so that input on each axis is "mixed" appropriately to the respective per-engine output channels. The result should be (barely) controllable. I bet wind and the dynamics of lift would be much more difficult to deal with, but I think it'd be doable.
I have "several" quadcopters. I don't actually know how many I have at the moment, but in addition to enough components to fill a couple of five-gallon buckets, the three I use most regularly are:
* an Autel Evo 2 Pro * a 5" FPV quad * a 3" FPV quad
The Autel is a dedicated photo/video quad. It's stupidly easy to fly, to the point that I can put the controller down and come back 20 minutes later to find that it hasn't moved.
I use the 5" for fun, mostly freestyle stuff. The 3" has enclosed props and is intended for videography. Neither of these have GPS. While they do have flight controllers, they are optimized for minimal input latency and do not attempt to automatically keep themselves upright whatsoever. Flying them is much like balancing a dinner plate on top of a broomstick; it requires constant input adjustments. That's difficult at first, but after ~20 hours of practice it starts to become unconscious. I've been doing it for a few years now and really don't even think about it anymore.
Prior to the availability of ARM STM32-based flight controllers, I believe there were some fully analogue solutions out there that allowed similar flight characteristics.
At the most detailed level, all of them are sending a PWM signal to each individual motor. Controller input is translated from 4 axes (pitch, roll, yaw, throttle) to the appropriate changes in the PWM signal for each motor.
I _think_ I could probably set up a fully manual quadcopter and get it to fly predictably without a flight controller, by using the radio receiver on the quad to output PWM directly to the individual motors. I'd have to set up the controller so that input on each axis is "mixed" appropriately to the respective per-engine output channels. The result should be (barely) controllable. I bet wind and the dynamics of lift would be much more difficult to deal with, but I think it'd be doable.
Is that "manual" by your definition?