As soon as i seen a video of people racing a couple of quadcopters using First Person View (FPV) kits which allow the to fly the quad as if they where sat inside it i knew i needed to get me one. But there was no way i could afford £500-£1000 for a ready made one and where is the fun in getting something ready made.
So i first set out to find what the minimum amount of parts i would need to get started, the main bones of a quad are Frame, 4x Brushless Motors, 4x Propellers, 4x Electronic Speed Controllers (ESC) , Flight Controller, Transmitter/Recevier and battery’s. At first i thought this lot would cost a small fortune until i hit ebay and found i could get
F450 Quad-copter Frame Kit ,£7.09
4x A2212 1000Kv Motors + 4x 10×45 Propellers ,£20.29
4x Brushless speed controller ESC 30A 40A Burst ,£14.19
CC3D Openpilot Open Source Flight Controller 32 Bit ,£9.24
Turnigy 6X FHSS 2.4ghz Transmitter and Receiver ,£19.14 from hobby king
11.1V 2200mAh Lipo Battery ,£8.46
Total £78.41
Which is very cheap but still a bit much for me and the cheapest transmitter/receiver kit was a bit limited for what i wanted to do. I worked out i could build a frame from bits i have laying about also i could use old laptop battery’s while i getting it working and i am currently working on something that is using a transceiver that has a line of sight range of up to 15KM so why not build my own transmitter/receiver using them with a couple of arduino pro mini`s and a couple of RC joysticks i have laid about from a joblot i bought on ebay a few years ago. So now the cost of getting started is down to £43.72 + a bit more work but once again thats part of the fun
Now i had a few hours spare this weekend and i just wanted to get motors turning so i sat down with some blu-tack and PVC tape and stuck everything to the side of my pc that has been off so i could clean inside it and this is what i ended up with below.
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- The CC3D Flight Controller is open source and come with some excellent software to help you configure it
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- The open pilot software is also a full ground control station with many features which i will discuse later
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- The is my basic Transmitter/Receiver emulator set up wired direct to the flight controller to allow me to test the motors
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- I used a full size arduino to allow easy connection to the flight controller and choose to use PWM to control the motors
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- The CC3D controller is an excellent bit of kit, the reason i choose it over the KK and APM was that it is running a 32bit microcontroller and it was a lot cheaper than the APM.
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- The Blue LED flashes at different speeds and patterns to indicate what it is doing.
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- For testing i set up 2x 5A buck/boost convertors powered by a 24v 10A PSU to power the motors which also allows me so see what kind of power the quad will require.
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- This is the cheapest ESC i could find on ebay and i am currently using it with the stock firmware but because almost all the cheap ESC`s use a ATmega328 to control them i should be able to upgrade the firmware to the ubiquitous Simon K firmware.
This is the test of the controls
and a quick test of the Gyro, Accelerometer and Compass