We tell you how to make your own homemade drone! -Talent Republic

In this article we will explain how to make a simple drone from home.

In this quarantine, not being able to leave the house, it is possible that you have been bored at least once. So in this article we will give you a great project: make a cheap homemade drone, you do not need to have previous knowledge.

To make this drone we will base ourselves on a super cool electronics channel, which I admire a lot: ELECTRONOOBS in Spanish. This channel has other very interesting projects, such as: how to make your electric longboard, make a homemade LIDAR sensor, a 3D tetris table, among many great projects.

Although we will base ourselves on the ELECTRONOOBS channel in Spanish, in this article I will provide you with several tips and suggestions, this in order to make the drone cheaper and easier to carry out.

The project is divided into three parts; the first is about how to make the flight controller, the second is about making the transmit and receive system, and the third is about how to build the drone.

Materials list

Optional for radio control

Tip: The ELECTRONOOBS channel in Spanish provides us with the following link to buy materials on eBay; It's just that some of the links are already broken and you won't complete the list. Therefore, I highly recommend that you buy them, or complete them, in AliExpress since many of the sellers are manufacturers and therefore, the components will be much cheaper than buying them elsewhere.

The flight controller

The flight controller is the most important part of the drone since it could be considered as its central processing unit. It is in charge of receiving the instructions from the remote control and transforming them into movement in the motors, reporting the data that the sensors throw (barometers, gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers, etc.).

An example would be the following: You want your drone to move forward, you move the joystick of your remote control, this instruction is received by the receiver and passed to the microcontroller, which interprets it and sends more energy to the rear motors and less to the front engines, something similar happens with the movement of reverse and to go to the sides.

In this tutorial you will learn how to assemble the circuit, once you put it together we see that they use the MultiWii program to load the programming code and most importantly: insert a PID controller in your flight controller, but you will ask yourself:

What is a PID controller and why is it so important?

The answer is simple, it serves to keep the position balanced and stable in the drone.

The initials PID are for: Proportional, Integrative and Derivative, I will make a brief explanation; This means that if an air current hits your drone and its position goes from being horizontal with respect to the ground to being inclined and you have only the Proportional part, your drone will send proportionally more energy to the motors that are lower down, these will go up to the drone, only that due to the power the drone will be oscillating and will never stabilize (similar to when you lose your balance and move your body to the opposite side proportionally).

Let's move on to the Derivative, giving the example of when you lose your balance, and you are moving to the opposite side to avoid falling, it usually happens that you move and you go too far and now you have to move again where you were (like a pendulum) for that your goal is to be in the center, so now you have to react to the speed with which you move that is calculated by a derivative of distance over time (don't worry we won't do math here).

The Integrative part aims to decrease the error once you've stopped, making sure you're in the center.

Transmitter and Receiver

In this part the transmitter and receiver will be made, you can get the “old” flight controller online or assemble it, on the same ELECTRONOOBS channel in Spanish there is a video about how to make a cheap one

Suggestion: If you don't want to spend on all the components to assemble the control, I recommend that you download the MultiWiiConf application and buy an HC-05 Bluetooth module and with that you can control your drone from your cell phone.

Construction of the Drone

In this part you can print in 3D the design that ELECTRONOOBS en Español provides or glue the sheets with the design on light wood or if you want to save more money do it with 2 or 3 layers of cardboard and cut it with a cutter.

And voila

This project is excellent to improve your robotics skills and have fun, in the future you can add an FPV camera, sensors, led lights, etc.