Building my own FPV Drone
Over the course of a few years I built and rebuilt more and more iterations and components of home made drones. Here are some videos and photos I took along the way.
Microcontroller
The center of a drone is a microcontroller. This integrates core components of a drone. Many microcontrollers have got accelerometers already integrated. Using open source tools, in my case BetaFlight, you can flash open source software onto the chips that controls the drone, and in my case, it also integrates with the BetaFlight configurator.
Putting some core components together
Some core components are as follows:
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Frame | The structure that holds all the components together. |
| Battery | Provides power to the drone. |
| Power Distribution Board | Takes power from the battery and creates circuits of different voltages. |
| Microcontroller | Sends Pulse Wave Modulation signals to Electronic Speed Controllers. |
| ESCs (Electronic Speed Controllers) | Control the speed of the motors. |
| Motors | Provide thrust to the drone. |
| Radio Receiver | Receives control signals from the remote control. |
| Remote Control | Used by the operator to control the drone. |
The Power distribution board takes power from the battery and creates circuits of different voltages. One for the microcontroller and one for the motors. The microcontroller sends Pulse Wave Modulation signals to Electronic Speed Controllers, which control the speed of the motors. The radio receiver is on the same power circuit as the microcontroller. The radio receiver receives signals from the remote control and sends them to the microcontroller.
Line of sight flying
Flying without the first person view (FPV) goggles is called line of sight flying.
Flying line-of-sight is risky
So we need to add first person view
Adding the Video Transmitter
The video transmitter is powered by the same circuit that powers the microcontroller but it does not need to send signals to the microcontroller. It takes a signal from a video camera and emits a signal that can be picked up by FPV goggles.
Flying an Action Camera around Meath
I wanted to fly an action camera around Meath. I had a cheap one that I wanted to strap to the top. Putting this onto my existing drone was too heavy. It was so hard to control and I wanted to fly high and above buildings so I could not risk it. So I needed to get bigger motors and propellers. These propellers would not fit on my existing drone from so I had to get a bigger frame. I got a second hand one from a nearby RC shop.
When this was built, I was able to fly my action camera. This is the video.
All of the videos that I took were in mp4 format. I converted all of these videos to mpeg-dash compatible files. This allows for dynamic adaptive streaming. This enabled me to put them into this blog without making it too demanding on the network. Thanks for checking out this page. God bless!