I have some concerns about larger PCB quadcopter designs because I can imagine that fatigue due to flexing on the PCB over long-term use could cause issues with the PCB delaminating or solder joints failing. On the ArduBee particularly, you can see a lot of surface-mount components mounted on the arms. I'd love to read more about any lifetime testing they've done on the PCB.
Of course there's always the risk of just crashing your drone and breaking it, but that's no different than other drone designs!
However, carbon fiber is also electrically conductive, vs fiberglass which is insulating, so that might be just a bit of a problem for a circuit board base... (perhaps solvable, but not the usual near-drop-in upgrade)
Back in 2014 as a senior project in college we built a quadcopter for the BeagleBone: https://github.com/Rose-Hulman-ROBO4xx/1314-BeagleBone-Quadc...
We considered building the entire thing as a PCB, but it was pretty expensive to build one that size, plus we had concerns about its ability to take abuse (we broke a lot of quadcopters, even with our hastily jury rigged test stand.
Our main constraint was price: I think we set a total of $100 (including the BeagbeBone) for all the components, which included the IMU, a cheap VGA camera, motors, battery, etc. Super proud of the laser cut frame as well, though I bet if we had better access to 3D printers back then we could have printed a frame fairly easily.
Which is not a complaint, by the way! The crazyflie is so small that it becomes quite the limitation in a few ways. Really curious how the slightly larger size of the ArduBee compares in practice - probably has a bit more stability and power.
https://twitter.com/M5Stack/status/1244209693045567488?s=20
the m5stack atom is a little esp32 in a box.
https://m5stack.com/products/atom-lite-esp32-development-kit...
The actual ultrawideband devices (decawave) are available on digikey for $10-20 each so if a good open source implementation exists, that would be very exciting for hobby robotic makers.
And yes, it is not very robust, I broke one PCB arm but could fix it without affecting the balance too much.
The bigger problem was encountered when it flew out of reach. I had an xbox 360 controller connected to a xbox wireless dongle on my laptop, running crazyflie SW, connected to crazyfly via another dongle. Tested it in a city park (somebody attended to the laptop).
I moved a bit away from the laptop setup while trying to learn to fly it (manual leveling is hard). I don't know which wireless connection failed first. But the result was, it just kept running the last instruction, and flying up, up and away. Luckily the battery failed when it was up about 50-100 meters, and had drifted away about 100m horizontally due to wind.
I was sweating like hell, picturing scenarios of it coming down on a car windshield and causing a surprised driver to crash, etc. Luckily it came down within the same park. Without new damage to drone, or third parties!
Lessons learned: Don't fly an indoor drone outdoors, it's not built to resist wind and doesn't have SW safe for it. And never, ever fly any drone outdoors without model plane liability insurance.
Or be able to run fast ... ;-)
A lot of the time ArduPilot is installed with a flight computer (separate from the flight controller) which sends control signals inline with the RC receiver and can be retrofit onto an existing drone.
You can also pick up pretty inexpensive kits to retrofit any DIY quadcopter or RC aircraft with autopilot capability. Two examples are the older APM2.8 hardware (no longer supported, dirt cheap) and the Pixhawk PX4 (actively supported, more expensive but still <$200.)
A small <250g drone is in the $70-$100 price range, although you will also need a $70+ radio transmitter or some heavy hacking to control it. Most of the (hundreds) of supported control boards are not open hardware in the schematics sense, but some are.
The all-in-one PCB integration strategy is cute, but I really don't think it's a great approach from a crash-recovery point of view.
Isn't the entire point of these things that they fly themselves? That's why we call them drones and not R/C helis, right?
Why can't I just click "go" on my GUI, and never purchase a TX? Or can I and the distinction just isn't explained in a place that I've found it?
Spot on.
However, it's a nice way to lure you into building a quad: just put some motors on, and you're good to go.
Fly once, crash, and then go actually build a proper quad.
What is impressive it the integration on this drone : that give a good flight time with low weight. That is a big advantage against current weight based regulation in numerous country. And of course ArduPilot integration give hight capabilities !
I wish this had a bit more processing power (or a raspberry pi add on) so that it could run ROS but that would definitely hurt the flight time.
Couple of years ago there was a prototyping board Snaodragon Flight that came with built-in cameras for optical flow: https://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/ardubee-a-ready-to-fly-micro.... I think some people here might find it interesting.
With great excitement we follow the feeback here on HN and we are happy to answer all your questions!
Besides posting here you're all also very much invited to submit your feedback via this google form and contribute with your ideas to the final version of ArduBee before starting the kickstarter: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfSv-mjhigMYmZsG03N...
