Greetings, my name is Spencer and I am one of the fools
trying to build a quadcopter. Richard, the other fool, has a blog that’s linked
in the side bar, or by clicking here, and he’ll probably have a lot of other information in the
building process. We’re doing this for a 20 Time project, which is where we get
one day out of the week to work on a project of our choice. We chose this
because it would be a challenge but also ridiculously cool. By the end of this
project we would, ideally, have a fully functional quadcopter.
Now neither of us have any prior experience with
quadcopters. Neither him nor I have built or piloted a quadcopter and obviously
we know very little about the function, mechanics, or programming besides the
very basics.
We’ve broken the process into several different steps:
>Research: Learn more about the
quadcopters than that they have 4 motors and propellers. Find the parts that we
want to use
>Design: Create a frame design
that works with all of the parts. Ideally efficient, compact, and aesthetically
pleasing.
>Build: Order and buy the parts
and assemble them. This would include any custom work that needs to be done.
>Test/Program: Work out bugs and
get it flying. Any programming that needs to be done will be done here.
>Extras/Add-ons/Learn how to
fly: Learn how to not hit things. If we decide to add things like a
camera or GPS we’d be doing that after the fact.
Everything that I’ve seen so far says explicitly “DO NOT TRY TO BUILD YOUR OWN” when
first getting into the hobby and to start off small and cheap. So naturally we’re going to build our own... and it's going to be big. Check back in weekly or more for updates as to the possible successes and probably failures of our venture. Wish
us luck!
