Tiny Arduino Drone Even Has An FPV Camera

April 29, 2024 by Lewin Day 15 Comments

In the turmoil of today’s world, drones are getting bigger, badder, and angrier. [Max Imagination] has gone the other way with his work, though, building a teeny Arduino drone that can fit in the palm of your hand. Even if you have a small hand!

The drone is based around an Arduino Pro Mini, and uses an MPU6050 IMU for motion sensing and flight control. Communication with the drone is via an NRF24L01. Four small coreless motors are used for propulsion, driven by tiny MOSFETs, and the whole assembly is run via a teeny 220 mAh lithium-polymer battery. Oh, and there’s an FPV camera so you can put on some goggles and see where it’s going!

Control is via MultiWii software, written specifically for building multirotor craft. [Max] flies the craft using a controller of his own creation, again using an NRF24L01 for communication.

It’s a neat build, and a titchy one too! Tiny drones have a character all their own, even if they can’t really stand up to windier outdoor environments. Video after the break.

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Amazon Ends California Drone Deliveries While Expanding To Arizona

April 23, 2024 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

The outgoing MK27 drone used by Amazon today for deliveries. (Credit: Amazon)

When Amazon started its Prime Air drone delivery service in 2022, it had picked College Station (Texas) and Lockeford (California) as its the first areas where the service would be offered. Two years later, Amazon has now announced that it will be expanding to the West Valley of the Phoenix Metro area in Arizona from a new Tolleson center, while casually mentioning buried in the press release that the Lockeford area will no longer be serviced. No reason for this closure was provided, but as a quite experimental service drastic shifts can be expected as Amazon figures out what does and does not work.

Amazon Prime Air features custom drones that can transport packages up to 5 lbs (~2.27 kg) to its destination within an hour, if the item is listed as Prime Air capable for your area. Along with the change in service areas, Amazon is also testing its new MK30 drone (pictured, top), which should be much quieter due to a new propeller design and have twice the range of the old MK27 as well.

Even if flying drone delivery isn’t quite a blow-away success yet, Amazon doesn’t seem to be letting up on investing in it, and it could be argued that for certain items like medication or perishables, it does make a certain sense over traditional delivery and pick-up methods.

ESP-Drone: Building An ESP32-Based Quadcopter For Not Much Cash

March 31, 2024 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

What’s the cheapest quadcopter you can build? As [Circuit Digest] demonstrates with their variant of the ESP-Drone project by Espressif, you only need a minimum of parts: an ESP32 MCU, an inertial measurement unit (IMU) such as the MPU6050, and four MOSFETs to drive the brushless DC motors. As the PCB also forms the structural frame and landing struts for the quadcopter, not even a 3D printer is needed. All told, [Circuit Digest] figures the total BOM comes in at around 1,000 Indian Rupees, or about $12 USD.

The fully assembled ESP-Drone flying around. (Credit: Circuit Digest)

While this [Circuit Digest] project provides basic IMU functionality, the Espressif project also has a few expansion boards detailed on its hardware page, depending on the base model of the mainboard you pick. The [Circuit Digest] project follows the ESPlane-V2-S2 version with no expansion boards, but the ESP32-S2-Drone V1.2 mainboard can be extended with position-hold, pressure and compass modules, as well as custom boards.

As a derivative of the Bitcraze Crazyflie project, the ESP-Drone firmware also supports the rather nifty cfclient software for remote monitoring, logging and control. This may also be in the [Circuit Digest] firmware, but wasn’t listed among the features.

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Fastest FPV drone, pending official confirmation. (Credit: Luke Maximo Bell)

Got To Go Fast: The Rise Of Super-Fast FPV Drones

March 10, 2024 by Maya Posch 27 Comments

Generally when one considers quadcopter drones, the term ‘fast’ doesn’t come to mind, but with the rise of FPV (First Person View) drones, they have increasingly been designed to go as fast as possible. This can be for competitive reasons, to dodge enemy fire on a battlefield, or in the case of [Luke Maximo Bell] to break the world speed record. Over the course of months he set out to design the fastest FPV drone, involving multiple prototypes, many test runs and one failed official speed run.

The components of the third FPV drone attempt, as used with the world record attempt. (Credit: Luke Maximo Bell)

The basic design of these designed-for-speed FPV drones is more reminiscent of a rocket than a quadcopter, with the upside-down propellers requiring the operator first lifting the drone into the air from an elevated position. After this the drone transitions into a level flight profile by rotating with the propellers pointing to the back. This gives the maximum thrust, while the body provides lift.

Although this seems simple, flying this type of drone is very hard, as it’s hard to tell what is happening, even when landing. [Luke] ended up installing a camera in the nose which can rotate to provide him with different angles. Tweaking the flight computer to deal with the control issues that occur at speeds above 300 km/h.

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A screenshot of the drone monitoring application, showing spoofed drones and their coordinates

Can’t Disable DJI Drone ID? Spoof It With An ESP!

March 4, 2024 by Arya Voronova 20 Comments

We have been alerted to a fun tool, a DJI DroneID spoofer software for ESP8266/ESP32 and some other popular MCUs. Last year, we’ve told you about DJI DroneID — a technology DJI added to their drones, which broadcasts data including the drone operator’s GPS position, which, in turn, appears to have resulted in Ukrainian casualties in the Ukraine war. The announcement tweet states that DJI has added mechanisms from downgrading firmware. Hence, the spoofer.

There’s no other hardware needed, well other than an ESP8266 or ESP32 devboard, anyway. After the break you can find a video tutorial from [Joshua Bardwell] that shows you how to upload the code using Arduino IDE, and even going through coordinate tweaks. If you ever reminisced about the concept of throwies and were wondering what kind of useful, well, there’s your answer: clone the Git repo, compile it, program some interesting coordinates in, and witness the imaginary drones fly.

All in all, we get a lovely addition to our shenanigan toolkits. Surely, someone could use a neural network to distinguish real drones from fake ones, but it’s nothing that can’t be solved with a bit of code. Looking for a less daring hack? Well, you can always add some automation to your DJI drone by poking at the RGB LED signals.

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Extreme Waterproof 3D Prints

February 18, 2024 by Al Williams 21 Comments

Since the crew at [CPSdrone] likes to build underwater drones — submarines, in other words — they need to 3D print waterproof hulls. At first, they thought there were several reasons for water entering the hulls, but the real reason was that water tends to soak through the print surface. They’ve worked it all out in the video below.

Since the printer is an FDM printer, it isn’t surprising that the surface has tiny pores; even the tiniest pores will let water in at high pressure. They tried using epoxy to seal the prints, which worked to some degree. They did tests using an example submersible hull that you can try yourself if you like.

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A Deep Dive Into Quadcopter Controls

January 1, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 3 Comments

In the old days, building a quadcopter or drone required a lot of hacking together of various components from the motors to the batteries and even the control software. Not so much anymore, with quadcopters of all sizes ready to go literally out-of-the-box. While this has resulted in a number of knock-on effects such as FAA regulations for drone pilots, it’s also let us disconnect a little bit from the more interesting control systems these unique aircraft have. A group at Cornell wanted to take a closer look into the control systems for drones and built this one-dimensional quadcopter to experiment with.

The drone is only capable of flying in one dimension to allow the project to more easily fit into the four-week schedule of the class, so it’s restricted to travel along a vertical rod (which also improves the safety of the lab). The drone knows its current position using an on-board IMU and can be commanded to move to a different position, but it first has to calculate the movements it needs to make as well as making use of a PID control system to make its movements as smooth as possible. The movements are translated into commands to the individual propellers which get their power from a circuit designed from scratch for this build.

All of the components of the project were built specifically for this drone, including the drone platform itself which was 3D printed to hold the microcontroller, motors, and accommodate the rod that allows it to travel up and down. There were some challenges such as having to move the microcontroller off of the platform and boosting the current-handling capacity of the power supply to the motors. Controlling quadcopters, even in just one dimension, is a complex topic when building everything from the ground up, but this guide goes some more of the details of PID controllers and how they help quadcopters maintain their position.

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