Overview

While taking ME 100, we were tasked with creating a device that utilized IoT and included actuators and sensors. My groupmate and I decided to build a phone controlled Arduino quadcopter.

My personal contribution was manufacturing, electrical component selection and design and writing the Arduino code to control the motors and read IMU data.

Drone Design

For the design of our drone we estimated the weight of our drone and selected our motor and propellor based off the required trust for take off with a healthy safety factor. Our frame design was constrained by the bed size of my 3D printer and prioritized compactly housing all electrical components. Maintaining center of mass alignment in plane with motors was critical to limiting yaw rotation while flying which influenced the tiered design. In retrospect the battery should have been mounted lower to increase stability.

Control and Lessons Learned

Integrating Blynk IoT software enabled three-dimensional control and IMU data readouts on the Blynk phone app via WiFi connection with the onboard Arduino. The latency of this method was relatively low and undecidable in our testing. Control was purely open loop which made flying it incredibly difficult. Since this course was taken prior to our controls course we were blissfully unaware of how crucial a closed loop was.

In a later course I would get to program a smaller drone with PID control and a rudimentary state estimation algorithm, which performed much better.

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