My *truly* DIY drone

Hi eveyone,

I received my first order from Batch PCB yesterday, it was my first foray into an actual drone. I designed the PCB myself, from scratch, so I was pretty proud when I plugged it in and it started working. It has been designed around the ArduIMU+ V2, the Locosys LS20031, an OpenLog, and of course, an Xbee.

The board is just a small step up from the Proto-Shield (SparkFun) version I built a while ago, except it has some capacitors, filtering the 5V power supply, and a voltage monitoring circuit.

I built it in the late hours of the night, and had it running my home-made auto-pilot code by 2am. Right now it has the same functionality as the proto-shield v1 I built before, except that the GPS is fully functional, and it is correcting the aileron and elevator values, with gains, to the required roll and pitch angles.

BTW if anyone has any constructive critisism, feel free!

I have already learned a few lessons from making this board, and V2 is already on the way.

Tell me what you think!

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Comments

Knuckles904 January 16, 2011 at 9:26am

Hey, looks great
Scotty January 15, 2011 at 2:12pm

I was thinking about that, but this is a science fair project, so I couldn't to use a commercially available product (and code) to start with. Besides that it was a real learning experience, so i'll have a little bit more knowlege for my next project.
Sebastian Gralla January 15, 2011 at 2:05pm

maybe I'm wrong, but why don't you just use APM?

Arduino Mega is heavy and not really optimized for drones.
Scotty January 15, 2011 at 12:17pm

Decoupling and ceramic disk capacitors on the 3.3V and 5V sides. Some 10k, 16k and assorted other resistors for the voltage dividers. Those are the only components on the board at the moment.
Ron Jacobs January 15, 2011 at 12:10pm

How about some info on components on the boards.

This reply was deleted.

Blogs

My truly DIY drone

Comments