For a different take on drone building, check out this series of episodes that the Hak5 crew did ...

[G+_Donald Burr]

For a different take on drone building, check out this series of episodes that the Hak5 crew did back in the middle of last year.

 

Interestingly, they went with a different type of flight controller, the "Paparazzi"  It's very much an Open Source flight controller and takes a very Linux-like approach to flight control software; you literally download it and configure it with the various features, sensors, CPU/microcontroller type, etc. that your particular board has, then compile it into a binary firmware package that you upload to your board, the whole process is rather like building the Linux kernel.

 

So, carrying the analogy a bit further, proprietary flight controllers like the DJI Naza and Parrot are like the "Windows" of the multi rotor world (i.e. closed source, proprietary); boards like the KK and Flip are like the Ubuntus and the CentOS's (open, and more or less plug and play, sure you can tweak them but you start out with something that will more or less fly out of the box); and Paparazzi is like the multi rotor equivalent to Gentoo, where you have to pretty much do everything yourself. (but you get the most flexibility)

 

Anyway here is the link to all of their quadcopter episodes, as well as my notes as to what is discussed in each episode, and at what time in the video to fast forward to.

 

http://hak5.org/tag/drone

 

1611 - basic intro

1612 - 2:00 props, motors (brushed vs brushless), ESCs, frames

1615 - 4:50 flight controllers

1616 - flight controllers pt 2

1617 - 18:30 assembly, more on motors

1618 - assembly pt 2

1619 - 17:30 calibration

http://hak5.org/tag/drone

[G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ]

Well... the controllers I use on my builds (aside from the KKs which I recommend to beginners) are all Arduino-based.... sooooo... yeah.