Introduction

This documentation will help you in building a good foundation of a drone network with which you can implement various swarm control algorithms(specific to drones). This will be an easy guide to wireless control of drones and bit of manupulation of low level network bindings.

For testing and demonstration I will be using a FC(flight controller) which will be supported by cleanflight configurator so that we needn’t worry about atleast control part. The idea here is to first setup the usual drone in the flight state and then tear bit by bit and include more custom code. For example there’s a very good tutorial on to fly a drone a drone using an android app.

If you somehow missed to follow the above mentioned link, I can help you with the few of the details here. The controller being used is SPRACINGF3EVO and please make sure that you opt controllers for brushed motor rather than brusless motor. In case of brushless motors you required to have ESCs(Electronic Speed Controllers) and bigger batteries so just to make it more safe and stable let’s opt for brushed controller. Anyway all the methodologydicussed in the documentation will work on both brushed and brushless controllers.

Once you get the FC board in your hand, you need to fash it will some kind of progrm which can take care of control signals to drive the motor and also the various sensors value like accelerometer and gyro. In case if you don’t have prior knowledge in flight control algorithms and ARM M series MCUs, cleanflight is a good solution for getting your flight ready with few clicks.

Details regarding WiFi module would be discussed in detail in upcoming posts, once we are done with setting up the WiFi, we can very well control drone with anything that can send signal over WiFi be it an android phone or a PC.

Hardware Specification

• FC(flight controller) - SPRACINGF3EVO
• WiFi module - ESP8285 or ESP8266
• Barometer - BMP280
• Magnetometer - QMC5883L