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A project log for ESP32 Drone

I wanted to make a low cost drone with all the bells and whistles, so people working with a small budget can get into the drone game. ~$50

jon-vbJon VB 03/04/2023 at 19:480 Comments

Been pretty busy with redesigning the drones frame to fit the Dev kit board of the ESP32 along with the MPU and Camera. This redesign helped to reduce weight over all for the drone. The weight went from about 70-80 grams down to about 50 grams. Also added some wiring routes for the motors to try and help keep the wiring cleaned up. 

The Camera module can now be slid into place easily and removed just the same with no screws. the MPU and MCU are attached to the frame via mounting posts. No, screws should be used here just a bit of hot glue. The MCU also helps to keep the frame ridge to help reduce the frame weight. No, glue on post will make the structure flimsy.

There were some problems trying to get the propellers to print with out errors. I completely redesigned the props to make contact with the print bed along with giving them more surface area at middle and extending a bit more to the tip of the blade.

I started to use a 60C lipo battery and noticed the ESP32 was freezing up when throttle was added to the motors. Took me a bit to figure out the mistake that I had made. with the old battery that was being used the voltage was closer to 3.3V, the newer battery was a good bit higher at 4.2V the pull up resister was placing about 3.8V to the GPIO of the ESP32. After some looking I noticed this and needed to place a TTL logic level N-Channel MOSFET to allow the circuit to function correctly. 

Along the way, I also noted that the custom blit_image() function that I was using need to be pulled from the rawdraw project and placed into the projects GUI's *.c and *.h files respectively. This was something that barryjoehawkes had caught. I thank him for that, since I didn't even notice it when I was uploading the project to GitHub.

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