oh hi everyone didn't see you there you're probably wondering what I'm trying to do with this tiny drone and the answer is very simple I'm going to throw it [Music] away oh look and he also came back okay so what you just saw in the silly intro is my new DIY autonomous drone project in action this tiny thing weighs less than 250 g it runs on powerful alop pilot software and it even has fully functional maving Telemetry over Express lrs and besides that I recently took this project to the biggest drone competition in Poland and guess what it won the first place so now in this video I'm going to show you step by step how I build it and how you can build it too seems interesting if yes keep watching and let's get started all right so first we have to choose some Hardware I want this drone to be not only light but also easy on the wallet so that it can be a great entry level ardupilot quadcopter for everyone and that's why the main star of this build is the speb f405 mini stack and to go along with it I got four small Darvin fpv Motors they are like six bucks per motor which is a pretty good deal if you ask me we also have GPS units Express lrs receivers batteries and some other stuff that we'll talk about later in the video but for now we have to focus on the most important part which is the frame I wanted to make it myself to keep it light and also to have enough room for future upgrades something I thought would be a straightforward process actually took me a few different designs until I got right at first the frames I designed and printed from ptg were way too big and thus too heavy they also used MRE screws which in the sub 250 g category is a big no no next I tried with smaller 160 mm frame but the ptg one turned out to be a bit too flexible pla too brittle and laser cut plywood was the lightest I give it that but the flex on that thing was way too big the one filament I tested and actually got great results with is carbon fiber nylon which I printed using my University science team bambula printers frames printed from this material are surprisingly light but also really durable but to be honest no plastic can even match the wonders of pure carbon fiber and luckily I know a company that specializes in making such Parts pcbway which is the sponsor of today's video has a great service for making custom pcbs in all shapes and sizes but did you know that they can also 3D print or even better CNC machine Any Part you want and they have wide range of materials too you can choose aluminium for lightness stainless steel for strength or carbon fiber for both so to get the frame I uploaded a flat version of my design to the pcda website and submitted a request then after waiting just a few days I received my package and now take a look at this beauty it's clean it's shiny the dimensions are correct and the whole part is just Flawless now when set side to side with a plastic counterpart the carbon is a few grams heavier but the difference in stiffness is just night and day so I'm definitely using it for this drone and now if you also have a project that could use some carbon fiber don't wait and go check out pcba website at pcb.com and we are back to the video now is the time to put all the parts together first we got to screw in all the motors but the problem with those Darin fpv 114s is that the screws they came with are very thin and just too short to work with our frame so what I did is I pre-drilled the mounting holes and then threaded it for M2 screws it's a delicate process but it can be done and you only need two screws for each motor next thing to do is attach the GPS in the front which I did by using double sided phone tape and on the back I taped the express lrs receiver antenna after that I placed the ESC on four long M2 screws and started soldering all the motor wires following that I soldered the xd30 connector at the back along with included capacitor to smooth out the voltage spikes now it's a good moment to add our flight controller so I stacked it on top of the ASC and connected them both with the wires that came in the Box normally I would now proceed with installation of ardu pilot but while making this video I found out a bug that prevents you from changing ESC settings if you do have it installed so if you just bought a fresh flight controller with default beta flight installed connect to it and check every motor spin Direction if it's wrong then you can use BL hel software to reprogram ESC with the correct one once you make sure it's all good we can download the hex file from the AR pilot website and then open stm32 Cube programmer remember to get the Drone into the dfu mode by pressing the side button make sure your PC recognizes it as STM 32b loader and if it's it does you can simply press connect open the hex file and click download and after a while just like that we got the fresh arop pilot install running on our speb flight controller Mission planner up shows it works great so now let's solder remaining components and start the configuration process here I only needed to solder Express LS receiver wires as well as both GPS and Compass to the right ports and of course all the connection diagrams will be there in the description now after securing the stack with self-locking nuts and adding a velcro strap the whole drone weits just about 73 G not bad and by strapping my homemade frees lithium battery the weight increases to 216 G which means we are still way below 250 now the last thing we have to do before jumping to arop Pilot is setting up Express lrs radio control to do this we use Express L configurator app in which you can build firmware for your chosen transmitter and receiver important thing is to pick a release version greater than 3.3 and also to choose the Wi-Fi flashing method by doing so the app will generate you two files that you need to transfer to your mobile device then by waiting 60 seconds or by manually switching the Wi-Fi on you can connect to others devices by choosing them on your phone you will be then transported to the page where you can simply upload the files generated before and that's all if everything is right and you set the same password on both devices you will get a connected message on your transmitter and solid light on the receiver it means that both modules are now linked and we can proceed to our the pilot stuff all right first let's make sure that the frame type is set to X and that the HRS orientation parameter is set to zero because our flight controller is facing forward next in the initial tune parameter tab we are going to set it up for 3in propellers and 3s lay on battery pack after that we have to perform accelerometer calibration by placing the drone on each axis second thing we need to calibrate is the compass and it's basically just about rotating the drone on each axis until the green bar reaches the end best results can be achieved by doing it outside far from magnetic interference when the calibration has finished we need to reboot the flight controller and set up the GPS serial Port if it's set up right we'll see no GPS status change to no fix next there are a few parameters that have to be set in order to make Express lrs work with arop pilot all of them will be listed in the description and after changing them we should see our radio input in the radio calibration tab now we simply have to move all the sticks switches and potentiometers to let arop pilot know their Max mean and middle position and after it's done I recommend setting one of your fre position switches to flight mode Channel and then pick stabilize alt hold and loiter for the first time flight make sure it works and if yes we can proceed further you also need to assign one two position switch for arming the quad and if you have more you can set additional one for landing don't forget about fail safe tab which tells the autopilot what to do if the battery is low or the transmitter signal is lost now we are almost at the Finish Line the last thing to do is tell the flight controller which pwm Channel controls which motor in the servo output tab you can then check if your settings are correct in the motor test toop motor a should be front right motor B the rear right C the rear left and D the front left and if your Motors rotate at different speeds it's good idea to perform ESC calibration for my ESC I set up dshot 300 and it seems to work pretty fine last thing to do is attach the propellers here I went with 3in triple blade props to make the first flight more stable but for efficiency we'll definitely want to swap them for two bladed ones finally check is to see if each one of them generates downwards thrust and if they do we can strap the battery and go test this baby out [Applause] [Music] stabilize and Al hold modes were working pretty well out of the box but loer initially was quite [Music] unstable however once the GPS acquired more satellites the Drone was able to firmly stay in place [Music] all right so now we are in loer mode and let's let's lift it up a bit and at the end of the flight I also tried the land mode which without surprises successfully descended our quad to the ground so it's pretty high right now and now let's turn the land mode so we are now Landing [Music] and we landed okay so our drone flies and that's great but to take full advantage of many autopilot features we need a Telemetry many air ceilings such as mine have limited Telemetry options where they can for example display battery status on your radio but to achieve full Ming Telemetry which is basically wireless USB connection to Mission planner you need to use one of those big heavy and usually pricey radio modules and that's just not going to cut it on our drone but what if I told you there is another way you see for the past few months I was testing a new Express AES feature called airport and what it does is transform your receiver and transmitter into bidirectional transparent serial data link which as I said before is like wireless USB so let's set it up the entire process is quite simple first you got to connect to your T and ERX just like when updating the firmware then you need to check the used airport box and set the same U Bo on both modules next we need to change arop pilot serial port settings so we locate the parameters for our receiver and change its protocol from airc to mavlink and also change the B rate to the one that airport is currently using now you can connect the lrs transmitter to your mobile device via USB but make sure the backside switches are all set in the flashing position or it won't work in Mission planner choose the USB device and the same bow rate click connect and if it start downloading the parameters the Telemetry is up and running and as you can see we have all the sensors live data on the left and we can also calibrate or change any parameter on the go and that's really handy however you might notice a tiny little problem now if our air ceiling is used as Telemetry how do we actually control the Drone and well there are solutions you can for example hook up a game pad to the mission planner and control the Drone with it I did it once and it was fine but it's far from ideal so instead I simply bought another pair of Express lrs modules but this time the 868 MHz version to avoid any interference I soldered the new receiver to the U number three and taped it to the bottom of the frame then I configured it the same way as we set up the old air ceiling before and while we are at adding things I also designed a 3D printed stack cover to which I taped a 5vt RGB strip it will make the quad more visible but it can also inform you if the Drone is armed or Not by changing the color and on top of that I added am mount for rankam camera to record all the flights from the Drone perspective now when put all together the quad looks like this I also designed a special fre printed mounts that attach to the back of my radio and hold both Express lrs modules together with a 10-in tablet for running Mission planner loading up the parameters takes about 30 seconds which is not bad and after that we can for example go to the radio Tab and see that both rirc control as well as Telemetry works as intended we can also change flight modes straight from the mission planner or do it as usual using radio switches but one of the most useful things is actually checking and modifying the mission in the plant TB speaking about the mission here is the plan first I drove a geofence around an empty field which should keep the Drone contained in that area next I created a set of way points which the quad should follow at about 40 m altit VI then at the end of the mission the Drone will come back to the starting point and perform a landing to make it more interesting our quad will start the mission with the same trick from the intro which is of course throwing to make it work we have to set two parameters throw next mode to Auto and throw type to zero now once we have it all set up we can write both parameters ad mission to the U pilot and give it a test so now we are going to start the mission using the throw mode so what we have to do is first of all set the throw mode as you can see right here probably it's set to throw and now we can check our arming and it's not arming why GPS glitching two very boring minutes later all right so now it's red so it's armed and uh let's just start recording the camera is recording so let's throw it out after I throw it it should instantly go to the auto mode and start doing the mission all by itself so let's see if it works I'm going to get here and one two 3 Let's Go one two three let's go and it went [Music] n n I don't deny there's some strange evolutionary process going on but mankind won't be destroyed the fact that you and I are working here today evidence that [Music] [Music] and it came back granted I think I lost a signal for a while with the Telemetry but it still did its mission right so the flight went quite well and the Geo fense hasn't been bridged once but I also wanted to know what would happen if we crossed the line [Music] so in lighter mode it just won't allow the quad to pass defense but if you switch to Al hold and now do it again the Drone will go there and activate RTL by itself so it climbs up and it's going to come back so setting up a geofence is a good way to ensure safety if you are flying in tight spaces or if you are just learning how to fly and don't want to lose your quad at the end of the flight I also tried a fun flight mode called Circle which does exactly what it sounds like by getting the Drone high and stabilizing the footage in gof flow I could get a pretty good look at my neighborhood next day I went to the park from the intro to do some more flying here I used the circle mode to orbit around myself and it worked fairly [Music] [Music] well another fun flight mode is the one called flip when when you put your drone in Al hold and then switch to flip mode the Drone will do the trick all by itself pretty cool and the last thing I wanted to show you is the guided mode this mode can only work with Ming Telemetry which is something we have on board by using this mode we can simply Point anywhere on the map and our drone will fly there by itself quite useful if you are doing some kind of inspection or video recording or if you are too lazy to touch the controller okay so now we are on the data Tab and as you can see the Drone is currently in this single position it's not moving because it's in loer and uh because we have the full maving Telemetry we can just tap anywhere on the screen for example here and we can give it a command to fly there oh wait wait wait a moment here let's say fly to here we have the altitude 40 m and let's go and now we have our Waypoint and the Drone all by itself flies to that Waypoint and it's back there and now we can try and get it back to us let's just switch out to pan off let's get it here fly to here and it's coming back as you can see on the tempet screen and it's currently hovering above us and we can just enter for example RTL uh right here and it will descend all the way down to the point where it started so probably somewhere around here that's the power of smart RTL pretty cool right all right so that's all for this video I'm really happy with how this drone has turned out having a quad that is soup 250 g allows you to fly safely in most places without breaking a law so it's a perfect machine to learn how to fly to test some autonomy stuff on and also to just have fun drone components are getting smaller and lighter every year recently for example kadak released some ultra light fpv gimbals so who knows maybe for part two I will try to make a mavic mini killer out of this drone I even tested it with my walks nail once and it is promising also Express ERS developers are constantly cooking new exciting updates so Telemetry will probably be much better in the future if you are interested I have some additional tips and thoughts about this project but I'm just too lazy to add them to this video so you can check description or my patreon page for more by the way I will also try to upload there some footage from the Drone competition because it's pretty crazy what we did there it will be public of course but you can also support me if you enjoy my work also after this competition I have like four of these drones so I'm thinking about testing some cool artop pilot stuff like following or swarming would you like to see a video about that if yes leave me a comment and share your thoughts about this project but for now I'm out thank you all for watching thanks pcba for sponsoring this video congratulations on 10 anniversary by the way and we'll see you all soon bye