Designing a New Drone — Part 1

Code Name: Magpie DS2 — The Objective

The Reefwing team have decided to design their own drone! The idea is that it will eventually utilise open source hardware and software can be used for STEM training in schools.

Figure 1. The Drone Prototype — partially assembled.

With this in mind, we have come up with the following criteria for our drone:

• The drone should be able to be constructed by students using a 3D printed airframe and a kit of parts provided.
• The drone should be modular, open source hardware and software and include an API to allow mission control.
• The design philosophy will be to provide the minimum functionality required to deliver the objectives.
• A secondary objective is to use a crowdsourcing campaign to help fund development and market the concept.

We will build a prototype based on commercially available parts and then design our own airframe and flight controller, once we have a design that flies. We want a modular design that we can add optional functionality to (e.g. FPV camera or GPS). The initial design will have space for these features but as we want to get something up and running as quickly as possible, it will only include the minimum components to get a flyable drone (i.e. air frame, battery, power distribution, ESC, flight controller, receiver, motors and propellers).

How to Write your own Flight Controller Software — Part 1

As part of the educational process we will document our design journey and explain the engineering choices that we make along the way.

Air Frame & Construction

For the prototype we will use a Martian II 220 mm frame design. This design is mostly used for racing quads but it is a nice light compact design and will provide a good starting point for us to iterate on.

Frame construction is pretty straight forward. As shown in Figure 1, we labelled the front of the drone and motor number locations using electrical tape. This helps keep you oriented. Even though we won’t mount a GPS…