Tutorial: Building a Drone, From Scratch
summary
A complete build of a low-cost four-wheel-drive ground drone with modular boards, per-wheel closed‑loop speed control using cheap DC motors plus optical encoders per wheel, and an I2C backbone connecting AVR microcontrollers running ChibiOS. Debugging uses AVR Dragon, Bus Pirate, a cheap logic analyzer and sigrok, and a Python/Tk high‑level protocol tool. Power glitches get fixed by a current-limiting motor regulator instead of separate batteries. Eight sonar proximity sensors are wired in staggered pairs. Drive, steering and remote control work; camera vision and full obstacle avoidance remain work in progress.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Summary
- 2:49Setting the Goals
- 4:32Requirements
- 5:21Constraints to Development
- 7:47Single Board vs Multiple Boards Comparison
- 11:04Considerations
- 13:45Power Distribution - 1 Battery
- 16:02Motors - options
- 17:48Choice: DC Motor
- 19:19Optical Coupler
- 21:44Motors Drivers - options
- 26:39Proximity Sensor
- 31:08Running the microController
- 32:36RTOS selection
- 34:44Overall System Architecture
- 35:5512C Development and Debugging
- 38:2512C High Level Protocol debugging
- 39:29Main Board Selection
