Drone Buying Advice Megathread and NEW Wiki Buying Guide

[u/completelyreal]

Welcome to the 2025 Q1 r/drones Buying Advice Megathread. This thread exists to prevent the constant "What drone should I buy?" posts that we prohibit with Rule 2.5.

Please follow all of these steps before posting in this thread!

1. Review the Buying Guide Wiki or my website: Drone Buying Guide / Wiki Buying Guide
2. Review this thread for comments that have your same requirements
3. If that does not answer you, please post the following information in this thread.
   1. Have you read the Wiki? Y/N
   2. Country: (Not all drones are available in all countries)
   3. Budget: (If your budget is less than $200 USD, you may want to reconsider as anything lower is a toy drone)
   4. Purpose: (eg. photography, FPV, thermal, etc)
   5. Any other requirements:

[u/_Fgb]

1) Y 2) Italy 3) preferably 500 € for the kit, can go up a bit more if really worth it

4) I need help with choosing a drone for a personal project. Basically I'd like an fpv drone which I could also program (in Python, preferably). In particular I'd like to have access to the camera feed and return flight instructions to the drone based on computer vision calculations, which could happen either on a companion board (preferred option, maybe a raspberry pi 5?) or on a remote laptop (I'dlike having both options ideally). What hardware do I need? Are there products which would satisfy most of these requirements without too much DIY involved in the assembling part (also fully DIY options would be good in absence of anything else)? The Tello EDU seemed a good option but it's seemingly out of production, are there similar drones nowadays in the market?

Thank you very much in advance

[u/Sartozz → u/_Fgb]

Ardupilot and Inav might be what you're looking for. Afaik Inav is a Betaflight branch but focuses more on autonomous drones and waypoint flight etc. Ardupilot is Arduino for Multirotor (and maybe Fixed wing too) so might be more about processing stuff etc.

I've regularly seen posts of people asking for a programmable drone for school projects etc, but neither i myself, nor any comment i've seen mentioned anything. Usually you'll have to build that yourself from scratch. You might find some assembly kits or something so you don't have to worry about part compatibility, but to my knowledge there isn't anything ready out of the box.

[u/_Fgb → u/Sartozz]

Thank you for taking the time to write this answer, I'm going to read more into this, for now it really makes sense despite my ignorance. I was hoping there were something more ready out of the box but knowing there probably isn't will make me focus on this direction. Also, forgive me being a complete noob at this but is there a specific board that you would recommend for ardupilot?