DIY Drone with Arduino

While I am still waiting for the pieces for my alarm clock to arrive, I’m continuing to develop my long-term project that I am going to present on this article.

Last summer I decided to build myself a drone : a quadcopter to be precise. My main goal is to create my own flight controller with an arduino card. Here is what it looks like now :

General view of the drone

I didn’t want to spent much time choosing the motors or propellers so I bought a kit on Hobbyking with the frame, the motors and ESC (motor controllers) so I knew that there would be no dimension problem.

As long as electronics components are concerned, I chose to have a cheap alternate of the Arduino Uno (I know shame on me), and the MPU9150 as “attitude sensor”. I already had a Remote Controller (RX/TX).

The MPU9150 is 9 degrees of liberty sensor that is in fact composed of 3 sensors :

• a 3-axis accelerometer
• a 3-axis gyroscope
• a 3-axis magnetometer, which is the equivalent of a compass

Zoom on the MPU9150 which is the IMU used in my project

My goal with this project is to program and understand the process of flight stabilisation. The first step will be to change the data from IMU into a pitch, roll and yaw indication.