TL;DR

The goal has been to make a cheap do-it-yourself drone with resources easily obtainable rather than fancy 3D or PCB printing. Almost all these components are available from major distributors, the battery was difficult to find with transportation laws, and acrylic sheet was purchased online at Scamazon.

Design

An acrylic sheet was cut to shape for the frame using .DWG printouts as templating. There are three designs in total, a quadcopter and two revisions of a hexacopter, one of which is seen above.

The header and SD card might be a give away, that board is the Raspberry Pi running the software responsible for communications and motor speeds. Its software was written in Node.JS with two dependencies: Gamepad API and Socket.IO module. A client webapp interprets the controller (i.e., DS4) then wirelessly sends those values for calculations. Predefined constants define power (or speed) distribution to motors, these constants are selected on overall physical characteristics (e.g., propeller pitch, weight distribution, lift threshold, etc.).

There are two through-hole prototype boards. The right contains two linear regulators supplied by two batteries; a fixed for Raspberry Pi and an adjustable for motors to accommodate different voltages. Beside that board is another containing a series of transistors connecting to motors, Raspberry Pi header, and ground.

The quadcopter is in-progress, a battery and entire prototype board was removed to reduce weight, I have planned to either arrange BJT transistors as Darlington pairs or replace with MOSFET relays. That will reduce voltage drops and heat dissipation, in return allowing more current to the motors and battery longevity.

Parts List