Me and four others decided it would be fun to build our own drone. Naturally, such a complex project will take quite some time. We began by looking at dimensions and weight specifications, and quickly decided that it should be able to lift up a camera such as a GoPro. This means that we needed quite powerful motors. Trying to find said motors and matching propellors proofed a bit more of challenge than we had anicipated, and therefore we decided to go with a DJI propusion set (F450 Flame Wheel) (image below). This is a set of motors and propellors that will work together very well. However, this set does not include a battery, flight controller, communication chips, controller and so forth. We had bought all these parts separtely and program them ourselves.
When the parts began to arrive we quickly started to try to read data from the sensors (image below). This fairly doable and we could very quickly get all the sensors to work. For controlling the drone we decided to go with a standard issue XBOX 360 Controller, which is generally regarded as the best, most ergonomic game controller. It is easy to reprogram and, even more importantly, is very intuitive and easy to use. We had all components working, but the only thing that kept us from flying was the battery, or rather its absence... It had not shipped with the other parts and caused some pretty big delays
After the parts were in we first started to extensively test the drone attached to a number of installations to ensure safety and to avoid breaking things. We started off with two long wooden planks which allowed us to test stabilty in one axis at the time.
The first test flight captured on video. The result: some broken parts, but nothing we could not fix.