30/7/2014 Bench Talk | Build Your Own Personal Drone

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Build Your Own Personal Drone

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On July 29, 2014 in Low Power by John Donovan

When I was a boy I loved flying model airplanes. I’d laboriously build them from balsawood kits; cover them with tissue; Blog Categories
and add a noisy .049 gas engine. Then I’d go to the neighborhood schoolyard and get dizzy flying them in endless
Audio (1)
circles at the end of control cables. Today for under $100 you can buy a Styrofoam plane with a battery-powered engine
and wireless remote control—a cheap radio-controlled (RC) aircraft. Circuit Protection (3)

Connectors (1)
I bought one recently and took it to the neighborhood schoolyard where my son and I had a lot of fun with it. The noisy
gas engine had been replaced by a small MCU-controlled BLDC motor running off a 7.2V/1000 mAh NiMH battery. I General (26)
could easily add a small camera and transmitter and our inexpensive model airplane would suddenly become an Lighting (7)
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)—also known as a drone!
Low Power (4)
Open Source (13)

Power (4)
Quality (5)
RF (6)

Sensors (1)
Wide Bandgap (1)

Authors
Erik Smith (8)

Kelly Casey (3)

It turns out that a lot of engineering creativity is going into these things. The web site DIYDrones claims to be “the Barry Manz (7)
leading community for personal UAVs.” A very active site, it’s sort of a cross between SourceForge and Home Depot.
Lynnette Reese (11)
You can download and/or buy just about all the hardware and software you’d ever need to create your own backyard
drone. Landa Culbertson (4)

The tiniest of the lot is the CrazyFlie Nano Quadcopter that can sit in the palm of your hand but zoom around like a Caroline Storm (8)
crazed hummingbird, controlled from your PC or Android phone. The CrazyFlie is controlled by a 32-bit STMicro MCU
Paul Golata (8)
and includes a 3-axis MEMS gyro, 3-axis accelerometer, an altimeter, sensors for heading measurement, and a 0 dBm
(1 mW) 2.4 GHz transceiver. Weighing in at just 19 gm it can only carry a payload of 10 gm, so it would be hard pressed Chuck Amsden (5)
to carry a camera—though it’s possible—but it can pack an array of LEDs so you can chase the cat around in the dark. If
you want to get creative, the software is open source, and expansion headers let you trick out the hardware, too. Base Justin Risedorf (3)

price is about $600. Mike Parks (7)

If you want the real deal, the ArduCopter 3.0—built around the venerable Arduino platform—claims to be “more than your
John Donovan (4)
average quadcopter” (whatever that might be). It’s an open-source multi-rotor UAV. This bad dog includes:
David Whittle (1)
• Automatic takeoff and landing
David Fambrough (1)
• Auto-level and auto-altitude control
Ian Chen (1)
• ArduPilot, which can automatically pilot the copter to up to 35 waypoints and return it to the launch point (GPS module
required, of course) Gijs Werner (1)

• A complete Robot Operating System that can enable multi-UAV swarming (hopefully that’s an option you can turn off)

• MissionPlanner software, which lets you click on waypoints on a map, to which the Arducopter will then fly View Blogs by Date
• Fully scriptable camera controls that can be preset for each waypoint—or you can control them in real time
July 2014
Since the ArduCopter is a kit, it can take a number of configurations, with lots of options. If you want one ready to fly, the
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base price is $600—though it goes up quickly from there.
1 2 3 4 5
If fixed wing is your cup of tea—and you don’t care about keeping a camera pointed at one place—there’s the
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
ArduPlane, which won the 2012 Outback Challenge UAV competition. Base price is $550, but the extra goodies can add
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up.
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Finally, if you already have an RC plane you can buy APM 2.5 autopilot with GPS ($179)—well, and maybe an optional
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telemetry kit ($75)—and convert your RC airplane into a fully autonomous UAV. But don’t forget the 5.8 GHz video

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30/7/2014 Bench Talk | Build Your Own Personal Drone
transmitter and receiver ($190). Suddenly my $95 plastic plane costs 5x as much as I first put into it.
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Maybe I’m not that interested in seeing what’s in my neighbor’s yard after all.
2014

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John Donovan is editor/publisher of www.low-powerdesign.com and ex-Editor-in-Chief of Portable April (13)
Design, Managing Editor of EDN Asia, and Asian editor of Circuits Assembly and Printed Circuit
May (11)
Fabrication. He has 30 years experience as a technical writer, editor and semiconductor PR flack,
having survived earlier careers as a C programmer and microwave technician. June (14)
July (5)

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