Looking for a flight controller for our drone project

[hoshanaeckhart]

Hello everyone.

A mate and I are building a drone for our school project. The drone is Arduino R4 WiFi based and the goal is to make it fly (first of all) and have it detect obstacles and make it fly around them. We've been messing around with an MPU6050 gyro/accelerometer but we've encountered some issues with it. For one the measurements aren't accurate and it's very hard to program with, we also can't get any yaw values from it as you'd need a magnetic field sensor with it additionaly.

We're mounting our components on the Plastic Beast from Thingiverse, a 3D-printed frame with an X-configuration. The motors we're using are the Emax RS2205's controlled with 20A brushless ESCs on BLheli_s interface. This is all powered by a 3S LiPo battery which we're directing through our power distribution board. The obstacle detecting will be done with HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor.

With the MPU acting up and the deadline getting closer and closer, we've opted for going with a flight controller, saving us a lot of work and allowing us to focus on our actual goal. We are however rather inexperienced when it comes to flight controllers, programming and finding good components. We're situated in Europe, looking for something compatible with Arduino and it can't be too expensive. We've seen controllers ranging from €15 to €150, we'd like that number to be on the lower side of the spectrum, anywhere around 20-30 would be optimal.

 

[hoshanaeckhart]

Hello everyone.

A mate and I are building a drone for our school project. The drone is Arduino R4 WiFi based and the goal is to make it fly (first of all) and have it detect obstacles and make it fly around them. We've been messing around with an MPU6050 gyro/accelerometer but we've encountered some issues with it. For one the measurements aren't accurate and it's very hard to program with, we also can't get any yaw values from it as you'd need a magnetic field sensor with it additionaly.

We're mounting our components on the Plastic Beast from Thingiverse, a 3D-printed frame with an X-configuration. The motors we're using are the Emax RS2205's controlled with 20A brushless ESCs on BLheli_s interface. This is all powered by a 3S LiPo battery which we're directing through our power distribution board. The obstacle detecting will be done with HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor.

With the MPU acting up and the deadline getting closer and closer, we've opted for going with a flight controller, saving us a lot of work and allowing us to focus on our actual goal. We are however rather inexperienced when it comes to flight controllers, programming and finding good components. We're situated in Europe, looking for something compatible with Arduino and it can't be too expensive drone flight controller. We've seen controllers ranging from €15 to €150, we'd like that number to be on the lower side of the spectrum, anywhere around 20-30 would be optimal.

We are looking forward to hearing your suggestions, and thank you in advance.

 

[CappyAmeric]

Most quadcopter hobbiests use BetaFlight compatible flight controllers Most online resources are geared toward BetaFlight compatible. Arduino is kind of old school for drones these days.

Hopefully someone who has used Arduino can help.

 

[LitterBug]

You might want to look at the Matek or SpeedyBee F405-Wing flight controllers running ArduPilot. You may find a lot of the functionality you want already baked in to ardupilot. Ardupilot also started based on arduino, hence the "Ardu".

LitterBug

 

[telnar1236]

Like litterbug said, ardupilot is a great option. It isn't fun, but you can also get betaflight compatible hardware to talk to an arduino. Given your time crunch, I wouldn't recommend it though.

 

[LitterBug]

The F405-wing boards can run ardupilot, betaflight, inav, and plausibly more. Should be more than enough open source code to look through if you are writing your own Aurduino code.