Drone
Drone
The real aircraft — assembly, safety, calibration and the first flight outdoors.
Everything on this page is about a machine with spinning blades in a room full of people. Read the safety page before the assembly page, even if you have built one before.
What the aircraft is
A small ducted quadcopter, built from 74 components and 82 screws, designed to be taken apart and put back together by students rather than sealed at a factory.
Two carbon plates sandwich everything of consequence between them. Underneath sits the flight controller — on rubber dampers, because it is the thing measuring how the aircraft moves — along with a companion computer, an optical-flow and LiDAR sensor board, and two FPV cameras, one looking forward and one looking down. Above and around them are the four-in-one speed controller, the receiver, the power supply, and four brushless motors whose rotors run inside carbon ducts.
The ducts are the reason this aircraft is plausible in a classroom at all. They are not a reason to relax about propellers; see Safety.
What is in the box
| Airframe | Two carbon plates, 6 landing feet, 18 inter-frame spacers, the forward-camera bracket |
| Standoffs | 4 standing on the bottom plate, 4 carrying the companion computer, 4 hanging beneath the top plate for the speed controller, 5 on the camera bracket |
| Flight electronics | Flight controller on 4 vibration dampers, a 35 A four-in-one ESC, the receiver |
| Companion computer | The CM5 board, its top mount with the USB-C board already soldered to it, and its power supply |
| Sensing | Optical-flow and LiDAR board with its mount, a forward FPV camera, a downward FPV camera |
| Power | Battery lead (XT30), four motor connectors (MR30), the battery mount |
| Propulsion | 4 brushless motors, 4 propellers |
| Radio | The antenna holder |
| Fasteners | 82 M3 × 5 button-head screws — one size for the entire aircraft |
That the whole build takes one screw size is worth knowing before you start: one driver does the entire aircraft, and a screw left over at the end is never a spare.
Build it on screen before you build it on a bench
The app carries the same aircraft as an interactive workbench, at Robotics → Drone Assembly Workbench. It will replay the build a part at a time, or hand you the parts and ask you to place them yourself.
For a class, this is worth doing first and is worth doing twice: it costs nothing, it cannot be assembled in the wrong order without saying so, and a student who has already placed the boards on screen knows what they are looking at when the real ones are in front of them.
Where to start
Read these two in order. The first one changes how you do the second.