Build your own Drone
Why pay lots of money for a toy you KNOW you are going to break? Instead let’s build our own so we know we can repair it easily and cheaply, plus we’ll get to choose our own components, and later on when we want to scale up we can just remove the brains, build a new frame, place brains inside, and attach bigger motors! Moar power! Mwahahahahahahah!
Pilot Software
Let’s start with the brains of the matter, there are quite a few choices out there, I’m going to stick to the open source stuff so we can hack on it.
Ardupilot is a nice place to start, take a robot add an arduino and you got yourself an autonomous pet to do your bidding. They also made the Mission Planner software you’ll see everywhere. They are related to diydrones who claim to be the largest community of UAV amateurs, and by all means its a great place to discuss these things
pixhawk seems to be a popular choice albeit with dedicated hardware and bit higher of a price this seems to be an up and coming feature rich option
AeroQuad This project includes some hardware designs as well as software which you can find on github
NG-UAVP Autonomous flight with an emphasis on aerial photography
Paparazzi has been around for awhile, it’s focus is on autonomous flying.
DroneCode is a consortium with an impressive memeber list this project is composed of many smaller projects, some of which I have already mentioned, you can find them all here
Open Pilot is yet another open software group dedicated to drone pilot software and hardware. The CC3D is one of the cheaper pieces of hardware available to pilot your drone. And is my recommendation for your first drone
Radio TX
Every RC enthusiast needs a big honking Radio Controller to shout to the world about their nerdliness. Beware of the ultra cheap stuff, like this Hobby King 4ch TX and RX. That will not drive all the channels necessary for our flight apparatus. But you also don’t need an expensive Futaba 18MZH You can find some really cool retro stuff out there like this Taranis X9E That thing looks great and is expandable to 32 channels, has speech output, telemetry, all the bells and whistles The Taranis X9D is a step down but comes with the receiver module
9XR
But I wanted open source so we can hack with the code. Looking around I found that the turnigy 9x series had an open source firmware out there: Turnigy 9X open source firmware Even better this had evolved into the 9XR and now has multiple different open source firmwares for it, here’s the radio:
And now there is a 9XR Pro
Ok so this looks like the platform of choice to enter open source control
Note that with this platform you still need a TX module to stick in the controller that actually does the transmissions OpenLRS seems to be the leader in this field. They have a great hardware list on their site. Here is a few suggestions on:
Radio RX
Then you’ll need a module inside your UAV to receive your transmissions to control the craft. Again OpenLRS seems to be the leader in this field. They have a great hardware list on their site. You can find the hawkeye on amazon there, or the OrangeRx at hobbyking there
UAV Frame, batteries, motors, and ESPs
Now we need the drone itself, I’m a big fan of starting small and going big later so let’s look at a few of the ‘200’ class (200 mm that is), there is a sub$20 frame here, you will also need at least four motors (start with a quad as hexcopters are more complicated), four electronic speed controllers (ESPs), one battery (2s - for 2 cells in series, you can break your equipment later by trying a 3s) don’t forget propellors!
or there are whole kits on amazon and that one is eligible for Amazon prime meaning you can get 2-day shipping for free, just in time for Christmas! That one is the cheapest, there are a few more on there as well that come with bigger frames etc that you can find here
notice that any of those still need the radio like the 9XR Pro that I mentioned above.
###Highlights from HobbyKing 2015 Beer Lift Challenge
HobbyKing has some great challenges where they ask RC operators to do some pretty cool stuff, here are the highlights from the 2015 Beer Lift Challenge.
Taking it Further with FPV
The next step is to get yourself a tiny camera attach it to your drone and connect it’s output to a tiny transmitter on your drone. From which you’ll broadcast a live video feed of your drone flying around, I’m going to shop these systems and post at a later date my conclusions
for now check out GetFPV and HobbyKing both for large selections of equipment
Eventually I want to hook a flight stick up instead of having to use the little RC sticks forum topic talking about USB input
I’m setting up an amazon store with a bunch of this collected in one location. Mainly so I can help others do the same thing with their blogs. Happy Droning folks!