Over the past few months I've been building a Quadcopter. Here are a couple pictures of it:
Originally I didn't want to spend a lot of money so I just bought the basic parts that I needed to get going. Of course once I started I always wanted to make it better and better. So over time I replaced a lot of the parts to get to the final product (what see you above).
I've had quite a few requests from my YouTube channel on what parts I used and what I recommend. So I decided that I should blog about it (since I haven't blogged in over 2 years). I will only go into the details of what the final product is. I will not cover all the parts that I started off with.
Current Parts:
- DJI F450 Frame 44$
- NTM Prop Drive Series 28-30A 750kv / 140w Motors 15$ x4 = 60$
- NTM Prop Drive 28 Series Accessory Pack 2$ x4 = 8$
- 9 Inch X 4.7 Propellars 4$ x 2= 8
- Turnigy Plush 30 amp Speed Controller (ESC) 12$ x4 = 48$
- Turnigy 3000 mAh 3S 40C LiPo Battery 25$
- MAX B6 Balance Charger 30$
- Hobby King Battery Monitor 4$
- MultiWii Pro 2.0 with GPS/Bluetooth + Cables - Flight Controller 87$
- DX6i DSMX 6 Channel Radio + Receiver 180$
This totals out to be around 494$. NOTE that the NTM Motors didn't fit 100% onto the frame. I only used 2 screws to mount them instead of 4. If I had to do it again, I'd suggest the following:
This totals out to be around 516$ but then everything will fit.
Keep in mind that with this you will have to solder and put it all together yourself. For me this is the fun part. Putting it all together and making the software work. I'm not sure exactly how much time I spent on it, but it was quite a bit because I kept improving my setup. If you don't want to build this all yourself you can always purchase pre-built Quadcopters or get the DJI Phantom for 680$.
Also, if you dont want the GPS features, then you can reduce the cost of the flight controller to about 40$ and you can get a 4-channel remote.
Next I want to cover the features that the MultWii Flight Controller offers.
Features:
- Acro / Gyro Mode - Allows you to flip the Quadcopter (I haven't tried this)
- Stable / Level / Acc/ Angle - Basically holds the pitch/roll based on the absolute angel of the input stick.
- HeadFree - Fixes the control direction to the heading it had on arming. So you can change the yaw direction and it will still move forwards if you pitch forwards. You can see me demonstrate it here at around 2:05.
- Altitude Hold - Holds Altitude
- GPS Position Hold - Holds Position based on GPS (watch this for demo).
- GPS Return to Home (RTH) - Returns the copter to the position it was armed (watch this for demo).
- Bluetooth Telemetry
Thats basically all for this post. If there is interest, please post in the comments and I'll make another post on what it takes to configure it all.