FPV
Six years of racing, freestyle, and builds. Ages 11-17. Paused, not closed — the rig is still in the garage.
How it started
Discovered FPV in elementary school via YouTube. Three pilots set the vocabulary: Charpu (Carlos Puertolas) for cinematic freestyle, Skitzo FPV for flow freestyle, Mr Steele for the more insane end of freestyle — the archetype I most directly modeled. Met Steele in person years later at Flite Fest West.
First public videos were age 11 — QAV210 builds, school-field flights, "A new perspective." Banner: a shot I took of the Great Wall.
Open Grove + Ventura County FPV Racers
Permanent drone race track in Oxnard, between orchards off Santa Clara Avenue. Owned by Joe Friedrich, part of the Ventura County FPV Racers club — MultiGP-affiliated, AMA-listed. Race events 1st + 3rd Sundays. My dad and I drove out for years.
Joe's shop was an airplane-hangar-esque dome, full of drones and tech. Track changed frequently. There was an orange grove next to the course we'd freestyle in after races. The drive, the trees, the smell — the chapter that survives the sharpest in memory.
Calidrone + Rainbow Road
Found the Rainbow Road track via Facebook Marketplace and got tight with Jeff "Calidrone" through the meets. Format: late-night parking-lot setups, light-up gates run through a drive-through bank — natural gate architecture, no foot traffic at 2am. I was 11-12 at these. The trust I was given to be there as a peer (not a kid) is something I think about now.
Ashton "Drobot Racer" Gamble
Childhood FPV friend who has stayed with the sport into pro racing. Reserve Champion 2023 MultiGP Drone Racing Championship, Reserve Champion 2024 World Cup. Races worldwide — Liechtenstein parliament-building track, Dubai amphitheater track — ~100mph through 7×6ft fabric gates. Same circuit ecosystem we both came up in.
Bob "Kabab" Roogi — KababFPV
Dentist by profession; designs and sells micro/toothpick frames through his shop, FPVCycle. Channel: KababFPV.
The only FPV friend I had on the westside of LA. The smartest one I knew — I went to him for the advanced technical questions. He once gave me prototype frames to test, for free. The exchange was real both ways: he wanted ground-truth flight feedback, I wanted access to someone who knew the craft cold. Still respect him.
Pyrodrone — Serge + Andy "DolmaFPV" Marachilian
Serge Marachilian is CEO and founder of Pyrodrone. Andy is his son and a Team Pyrodrone pilot — DolmaFPV on YouTube. I shopped at Pyrodrone enough that I eventually got back-of-shop access and would fly with the team in the alley behind the building. Classic scene-formation: show up, show up again, get recognized, get trusted.
Roberto Velozzi — Spidey Tek
CEO and co-founder of Spidey Tek, the synthetic-spider-silk biotech company. ARACHNO — 10× the tensile strength of natural spider silk, 100× carbon fiber. Spidey Tek even built a lightweight VTOL drone using their fiber-reinforced resin. He's also CEO of Velozzi hypercar.
Roberto was a client of my dad's. He encouraged the engineering pathway and bought me a Connex ProSight — Amimon's bleeding-edge HD digital FPV system, the premier digital option for cinematic FPV before DJI Digital and HDZero. Not beginner gear. A "this kid is serious, give him the real tool" gift.
Builds
Across the chapter I ran hundreds of motors and frames — multiple categories, iterative, crash-driven replacements, lots of experimentation. The skill is intact; SKU-level recall isn't, and shouldn't be after this much time. Categories that survive:
- Long-range frame — flew over the canyon at home in LA. Got cool footage of the city's wild green parrots once.
- ImpulseRC Alien — the era-defining 5" freestyle frame, ~2016-17. ImpulseRC also shipped a Mr Steele Edition. I don't remember which specific version I ran.
- HyperLite Floss — Pyrodrone-distributed racing frame line. My primary racing platform.
- Connex ProSight — the HD digital setup Roberto bought me. Cinematic shoots, occasional races.
- Tripod analog receiver — diversity setup for goggle-antenna positioning. State-of-the-art at the time.
Race record
Never got 1st place. Got podium multiple times. Was pretty fast. We were all very serious about it and extremely competitive. Indoor and outdoor. Lots of races, not just Open Grove. My single fastest race lives on a Facebook post lost to time.
Race prep
Standard shape: PID and rate tuning per airframe, battery prep, gate practice, mental prep, race-day morning routine. Packing was a huge part of the prep — that's what separates "I can compete today" from "I left the spare props at home."
China — Great Wall and Shanghai
Tagged along on a business trip with my dad. Shot FPV at the Great Wall (the channel banner is mine), and again in Shanghai — video titled "(mini)Vlog #1 - Flying buildings in ShangHai". Multiple pieces of content from the trip. Travel as craft expansion, not tourist-with-drone.
Programming origin — flight-controller firmware
My earliest real programming exposure was configuring FPV flight-controller firmware. I started on Cleanflight (early enough that it was still the default), made Betaflight my main once it took over, and experimented with Raceflight and KISS along the way. PID loop tuning, failsafe configuration, receiver setup, OSD layout, occasional firmware flashing. Most peers learned to code through Hour-of-Code or Khan Academy — syntax-first paths. I learned through "tune the system until the vehicle does what you want." Outcome-first.
That instinct shows up in the work I do now — AILedger's tamper-evident audit chain, edge-compute proxy work, cross-system signaling. It's the same control-system tuning, in software.
Fly Abstract — the FPV → revenue chapter
After the public-uploads phase paused, I started a company called Fly Abstract: real-estate FPV work — aerial property tours, listing footage, marketing reels. Generated actual revenue. Used the FPV skill stack commercially.
Made some money, then got bored because real-estate work is boring. Exited. The instinct to leave revenue-generating work that doesn't engage me intellectually is calibrated; I'd rather pick the harder problem. AILedger gets the hours now.
Where it is now
Paused, not closed. The rig is in the garage. The skill, the muscle memory, the build experience are all still there. AILedger is the work that gets the hours. If the right shoot or moment surfaced, the kit and the chops come back online.