Drone Gyro Controller Prototype

(Harry Potter Wand)

Jun 2024 - Jul 2024

Snitch drone which the controller was built for

PCB Adapter

Standard Drone PCB

Summary & Goal:

What I designed was a PCB adapter which would plug into an existing drone controller and give it gyro control functionality on the pitch and roll axes.

While volunteering at the Adaptive Aerostructures and Aircraft Design Laboratories headed by Dr. Barrett, I took initiative to offer some of my skills to design a prototype for a drone controller they were interested in making. The lab had just recently obtained the rights to sell Harry Potter branded snitch drones, and one of the students had also patented a design to have a wand to control the drones. This project serves as a first functional prototype for that idea, to prove the concept to investors.

Flowchart:

Technical Description:

The standard drone controller relays the user's inputs via a potentiometer (in the form of a joystick). By intercepting this signal, we can inject our own voltage to remotely control the radio.

Arduino reads acceleration data from the accelerometer
Arduino calculates pitch and roll of the controller
Arduino outputs PWM signal
Low-pass filter turns PWM signal into analog voltage from 0-3V
Drone controller reads voltage as input from user

First Prototype

This is the breadboard prototype. It was functional but it was very large and wires easily came disconnected. Because of this I decided to design a PCB to solve these issues.

PCB Prototype:

This 2-layer PCB required aligning both joystick footprints with sub-millimeter precision to ensure that the adapter could plug straight into the original drone controller.

Skills Learned

Precision placement of footprints in KiCAD (to ensure alignment of joysticks)
Basic footprint and symbol creation and editing in KiCAD
Analog low pass filter basics

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