First of all, lets learn some words so we know what the heck I'm talking about:

  • FPV: First Person Video
  • PWM: Pulse Width Modulation (Its a signal that controls the speed of a motor)
  • ESC: Electronic Speed Controller (These guys take the PWM signal and use it to control the motors)
  • IMU: ??? (A board with an accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, and maybe altitude sensor)

Goals:

The original goal was to make a drone out of standard FPV racing parts and to replace the control board with a Raspberry Pi and IMU. This has proven to be much more difficult then I previously anticipated. Nevertheless I'm slowly pushing onward and someday I'm gonna get this dang thing in the air.

For now here are the major stepping stones in this project:

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Now at this point I should have a complete working drone but I didn't use a Pi zero for nothing. Here are the things I plan to do afterwards. Keep in mind some of these things are pretty advanced. I'm not sure how far I'll get but I gotta try.

  • Buy IMU
  • Program IMU to modify PWM
  • Create some kind of machine learning program to recognize flight patterns
  • Buy Pi camera to record FPV
  • Setup slow motion for awesome slow-mo shots
  • Add WiFi dongle to Pi
  • Connect Pi to phone to quickly adjust settings
  • Use camera for computer vision

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Everything you seen in green is already completed. Currently I am gathering all my old photos, notes, code, etc. and soon I will be posting a great big update log to get this project page up to speed.