Arduino Drone

Building the Arduino drone was one of the most stressful moments in Middle school. I built this for the 2016 MakerFaire when I was just 11. I designed and made everything from scratch, buying all the parts seperately after thorough research and a lot of failure. The aim of the project was to build something completely new for me, and demonstrate the capabilities of an Arduino 101. Due to many delays, especcially with ordering the parts, I only had a week to build the actual drone. Delays with 3d printing the frame led to me having to lasercut it out of MDF, which is not nearly the ideal material for a drone due to its immense weight. In the end, I finished building the drone in under 4 days, with 2 days left. But as all projects go, something goes wrong, and in this case, a shrapnel of metal hit a motor while testing and all the motors and ESCs fried. This lead to me having to buy all the parts on the night of the maker faire and rebuild everything in a single night.

For this project, I used an Arduino 101 with an Intel Curie chip with bluetooth, which is what I used to communicate with a mobile app I made in MIT App Inventor. The drone was designed as a quadcopter with 4 motors, 4 ESCs, a power distribution board, an Arduino 101 and a large battery.