Hi everyone,
We get a self-designed sensor (weighted 100-200g) that can communicate with arduino boards. What we want to do is to integrate this sensor on a drone and take some measurements outside, maybe 30 feet or higher from the ground, in urban region where there are buildings, trees and people walking around. Also we still want a camera on board, but not taking images very often, just taking one or two images when the camera receive commands from the arduino.
Now we want to decide between two options: 1) we buy a prebuilt model, e.g. Iris from 3DR or Phantom from DJI; 2) we buy parts and do DIY totally by ourselves.
We have some considerations about these two options:
Option 1: The pro is the tuning process of the flight may be easier. We really don't want to spend so much time tuning the flight controller. At first, we just want to use RC to control the flight. But in the future, we want to use an arduino board (or even an on-board linux system) to replace the RC to send commands to the flight controller board. Is this feasible using a prebuilt model like Iris or Phantom. If so, which model should we choose?
a) What we know is that models from 3DR are using arducopter controller on APM 2.x or Pixhawk board. What we are not sure is whether we can directly integrate our sensor on these boards, or whether we can add another arduino board on the drones and link this arduino with the flight control board? If we choose the Phantom model, can we do above stuff on Phantom? We heard that DJI is using closed-source Naza controller.
b) Another concern to use a prebuilt model is we may transform the frame a little to integrate our sensor, additional arduino board, etc. Will this affect the flight performance a lot? If the flight performance is affected, is it easy to tune the flight controller to achieve nice performance?
Option 2: We consider DIY is because we think this may be cheaper. We are expecting the total cost around 300-400 bucks. But the official DIY kit from 3DR is 550 bucks. Are there some alternatives on the market cheaper as we expected? Also, our main concern is if it is easy to tune the flight using these DIY kits, e.g. the DIY Quad Kit from 3DR (https://store.3drobotics.com/products/diy-quad-kit?taxon_id=33). We really don't want to spend a lot of time on calibration and tuning PID.
We have some experience with APM2.5 boards. We tried to design the frame by ourselves but the calibration and tuning is not easy for us and the flight doesn't seem well. So we are extremely caring about the ease of flight feature and the open to custom sensor feature.
Appreciate your patience and any suggestions are more than welcomed! Hoping everybody have fun here with their drones!
Yan
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