Reflection

Hey Everyone. I just want to take this time to say thank you for following along and reading my blog. This may have been a school project, but I got into it more than any other school project before. I don't plan on stopping here. My friend and I plan on continuing building the drone even after school gets out if we have to (though hopefully we finish before then). I did manage to cut the bottom aluminum plate this weekend (No blood too!)

...Don't tell my mom I used the jig saw though... ;) 

Anyways, I just wanted to thank everyone for following my blog so far; I appreciate the support.

http://www.keyword-suggestions.com/dGhhbmsgeW91IHNtaWxleQ/

Flying Cats?

Hey, I apologize before hand for the short post, but I've been swamped with school work. I have a big semester project due Friday for my History of the Americas class, or HOA. Two thousand words complete with an annotated bibliography full of primary sources T^T. On top of everything, I've had lots of extracurricular activities after school and haven't gotten home till eight or nine at night. My friend and I decided to put the quadcopter on hold until next week, so I'll *hopefully* have something to talk about then.

As for now, here's a pic of a flying taxidermied cat!

http://makezine.com/2015/03/31/4-taxidermy-drones-yes-thats-thing/

Battery

Batteries are important. Without batteries the quadcopter wouldn't even be able to get off the ground. Now a battery is a battery right? Wrong. This is just a short description of the battery we're using and even this is complicated.

Floureon 11.1V 4500mAh 30C LiPo Battery

This is a battery. (In case you didn't read the caption)

ALWAYS READ CAPTIONS!!

Ok. So for those of you who don't know what the caption means - read the caption - here's the breakdown:

Floureon - Company name

11.1V - stands for 11.1 volts, never attach it to a 5 volt board

4500mAh - stands for 4500 milliamp hours, 

how much the battery holds (can supply 4500 milliamps for an hour)

30C - Continuous discharge rate, 30 * 4500 = 135,000, 

so this battery has a (maximum) continuous discharge rate of 135,000 mA or 135 A

LiPo Battery - A type of battery that uses lithium-ion technology (google it)

We had to take all of this into consideration when we were deciding on what sort of battery to use. You'd be surprised how many different batteries that are out there.

Flight Control Boards

Hey! Last time I said I'll be posting stuff on the different things on our parts list. We've had testing in school so I haven't been able to post for a bit. But enough of that. This post is all about

...wait for it...

!!!Flight Control Boards!!!

These are the brains of the drone. They are the ones with the magnetometers, the accelerometers, the barometers, and a bunch of other things no one's really sure how to pronounce.

Hobbyking

Isn't it beautiful?

After a LOT of research (including visiting dictionary.com multiple times) we finally decided to go with the MultiWii 328P Flight Control Board. It's small, affordable and surprisingly good quality.

Features:
• SMD component design with Atmega328P
• ITG3205 Triple Axis Gyro
• BMA180 Accelerometer
• BMP085 Barometer
• HMC5883L Magnetometer
• Servo output for camera pitch and roll control
• Separate 3.3v regulated power supply for the sensors
• On board logic level converter

And all for $35 on Amazon! 

(considering how high quality flight control boards go for hundreds and hundreds this is great!)

Part List

Hey, it's been a while and we've done a lot. We have finalized the part list and ordered some of the parts. Now we just have to wait two weeks for something being sent from New Zealand. Who the heck ships from New Zealand?!? Anyways here's the list.

1. Motors/ESC/Propellers (which I talked about last time) - T-Motor Air Gear 350 Combo
2. Battery - Floureon 11.1V 4500mAh High Power 3S 30C Lipo RC Battery
3. Power Distribution Board - Quadcopter Power Distribution Board XT60 XT-60
4. RC Transmitter/Reciever - 2.4G FS-CT6B 6 CH Radio Model RC Transmitter & Receiver
5. Flight Control Board/GPS/Bluetooth - Hobbypower MWC MultiWii SE V2.5 Flight Controller & GPS Bluetooth Module
6. Frame  - Original

I hope to explain everything in their own separate posts (like I did with the motors) and *hopefully* start building soon.

Motors

From now on, I'm just going jump right into the project. If you still don't understand anything too bad. That's on you.

One of the most important parts of any machine is it's motors and we're prepared to spend a good chunk of our budget on them. (Though that has more to do with the fact that they're so freakin' expensive) The motors were looking at are the Air Gear 350 combo from RC Tiger-Motor. They're a bit more expensive than some others, but we figured to go for some nicer quality than you might find on a pre-ordered drone.

(click here to learn more)

Spencer was supposed to be done with the CAD model, but his computer threw a fit and everything was unrecoverable. His words not mine. Luckily he had backed it up recently so it wasn't too bad. Though we did have a mini panic since he overestimated the weight by 500 grams. When the whole quad copter only weighs between 1000 ~ 1500 grams adding 500 grams is a big deal. Hopefully we'll have the CAD done by next week. We're almost done with the parts list and getting close ordering the stuff. It's coming along well and we should be on track. Until next time!

What's A Quadcopter?

Ok, so I realized that most people have no clue what a quadcopter even is. That’s sad. Really sad. Quadcopters are a type of multi-copters, which are a type of drone that is similar to helicopter but with multiple rotors. Get it… MULTI-copters. Yeah we’re great at naming things. Things like quadcopters which are multi-copters with FOUR rotors. Bet you never saw that coming.

WMCH Drone, a DJI Phantom 1

These are just small consumer products that are just fun to fly about. Nothing military-grade here. Though imagine what you could do with something like that…