DIY Quadrocopter

He is flying! OK a couple of things are to do...

• Adding GPS
• Adding fail safe (at the moment the copter flies away if I turn out the remote control)

The stand is soldered from alloy profile.

The next thing was to add an LED backlight because the display is difficult to read in the sun.

Unfortunately the firmware is not the best choice. But since it has an AVR Mega as main controller, there are a couple of alternative firmware projects for this remote control. I decided to put "er9x" on it. All I have to do is to solder an ISP plug on the right pins of the controller and take my AVR JTAG ICE3.

The FlySky TH9X is a relative cheap 8 channel 2,4GHz remote control. I payed 80 Euros for a brand new couple of a receiver and the transmitter.

The 9CH 2,4Ghz ReceiverSensors...

The ESC´s and the discovery are connected to the strip board which is also the power distribution board.

One of the brushless motors

The MPU-6000 IMU (inertial measurement unit) board was not to get for a reasonable price.

Instead, I got an MPU-6050 breakout board for 2,55 € in China.

Unfortunately, the MPU-6000 and MPU-6050 are not 100% compatible. Thus, the MPU-6050, for example, no SPI but only I²C. With a small change at the Aero quad source is also not a problem.

#define MPU6000_I2C
#include <Platform_MPU6000.h>
#include <Gyroscope_MPU6000.h>
#include <Accelerometer_MPU6000.h>

I've found it here

Setting up for the MPU-6050

How to compile the Aero Quad-source code is shown here:

Compilation AeroQuad

The Discovery board is connected to the "AeroQuad Configurator" through the USB/serial interface. With that software you can do several configurations and tests.

First of all I tried to simulate the remote control by my little frequency generator and looked what the motor output shows on the oscilloscope.

Fortunately by accident I found the the AEROQUAD Project. They developed an open source flight control for multicopter, running also on the STM32F4Discovery board!

Because i had a STM32F4Discovery board laying around, I wanted to use it as the flight controller for the quadrocopter.

The frame is ready.

These parts should be the start