How To build a quad for flying at night

Currently where I live it is winter and so it gets dark early meaning I don't have as much time to fly my quad. On the other side of the world it is too hot to be outdoors during daylight hours. Should this limit us to simulators? Nope. I've got a build here that will allow you to see better at night and is very quiet so as not to upset the neighbours.

First of all the build needs to be based around a very light micro quad; 3 inches or smaller. This is because anything larger will make too much noise and will be travelling too fast to fly in you local neighbourhood and to avoid objects at night. Lightness (and the right choice of props) is key to making this quiet but more on that later.

How to see in the dark

Without putting to fine a point on it, it is the improvement in cameras that have made this build possible and practical: it used to be that the only good night cameras light the runcam owl were very large, even the more recent runcam eagle micro was too big for a lightweight quad. However now that we have the foxeer toothless nano 2 (and to a lesser extent the caddx baby ratel) we have MUCH better night vision. There are many good review on the toothless 2 nano at night, particularly the one by Nick Burns that I based this choice on. I've also included DVR from a day flight to show that even though you gain performance in low-light, it doesn't sacrifice daytime performance.

DVR Runcam nano 3 night

DVR Foxeer Toothless nano 2 night

DVR Foxeer Toothless nano 2 during an overcast day

You can simply slap this cam on an existing build and have a night flier as is but to really make it discrete to fly at anytime read on...

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