quadrotor

Inspiration

• I wanted a quadcopter!

How it works

• Plug in the battery!
• Turn on the radio controller!
• Twiddle some levers!
• Crash!

Challenges I ran into

• Shipping speeds out of Hong Kong are completely unpredictable!
• Design before you build!
• No magnetometer! Yaw-axis measurements are, consequently, comically wrong.
• If you're not careful, interrupts can rewrite your data halfway through a read!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• Actually built and programmed a quadcopter in high school

What I learned

• Basic control theory! Copter control code implements a naive PID loop for motor output
• volatile keyword in C!
• Experience with interrupts and hardware-level programming! PWM, I2C, all that good stuff.
• Implementation experience with circuits and sensors!
• Making sense of hardware schematics!
• Sparkfun is rad!

What's next for quadrotor

• 3D-printed MKII that will hopefully enable aerial photography!

Built With

• arduino