I've actually intended building one from scratch as much as possible (buying only a frame, motors and battery) and then build custom flight controller and custom 3-phase motor controllers, but eventually decided just buy ready-made ESC and focus more on the flight controller.

The first iteration of the flight controller consisted of an Arduino nano, MPU9250 breakout board and ESP8266 for WiFi communication (I've intended to use an Android app for control): http://imgur.com/NyHABh7 (the Arduino nano and the MPU9250 breakout board are missing because I'm using them in the new board)

This setup never took off because of two main things: 1. The Arduino proved to be very slow. (8 bit without FPU) 2. The Android controllers on the touch screen made it very to control the drone.

So, I decided to "gut" a toy drone controller put an Arudino + nRF24 in it. And since I now needed to replace ESP8266 with an nRF24 and replace the Arduino nano with something more powerful, I built a new flight controller with both the nRF24 and a Teensy 3.5 (which is an ARM with Ardunio compatible libraries): http://imgur.com/XtaDUPi The controller: http://imgur.com/8Br1cMs http://imgur.com/cY1FupV http://imgur.com/sJyS0EJ

And this time the drone actually took off! And after a lot of PID tuning and messing around with the algorithms it actually stayed in the air! (I'll upload a video later, I can't take one now because it's 1am...)

But the controlls were still pretty bad. They we're very sensitive and noisy. Since I enjoyed this project (both building/coding and flying) so much, I decided to take it to the next level. I bought a real flight controller (Taranis X9D) with a compatible receiver, and instead of building another new flight-controller on a proto-board again, I made a PCB: http://imgur.com/08oFkGW

Here's the PCB actually sitting on the drone right now: http://imgur.com/KqvGPd5 http://imgur.com/Svjz61w http://imgur.com/jerlNHB

Currently I'm working on the next version of the PCB with a few fixes, and additional magnetomter and a barometer: http://imgur.com/nqLHzKc

If there's an interest I'll make the source code and PCB layout+schematic open source. Sorry for the poor quality of the pictures, and a lack of video of the thing actually flying :). I'll take some more pictures and videos tommorow hopefully :)

user:	untrade
created:	May 10, 2017
karma:	1