Skip to main content
more options

Conclusion

Although we built a working quadcopter, there is much room for many improvements. First of all, we can make it much more stable so that we could let it fly freely in an open place even with spectators around. We can improve the accuracy of our wireless protocol to make it possible to fly the quadcopter wirelessly from quite a distance.

  • Intellectual property considerations: We extensively used various libraries from Arduino. All of them are of open source and belong to the public domain, thus we do not violate intellectual property regulations.
  • Ethical considerations: We planned to publish the web site of our project on Cornell.edu website. Therefore, we were careful about following the IEEE Code of Ethics closely. Our number one concern was the safety of our team member, fellow classmates and any observers of our project throughout the entire course of the project and especially at the project demo. Our quadcopter is quite powerful (strong motors) and has four blades of propellers rotating fast. For this reason, we mainly tested the quadcopter zip-tied to a test stand and for wireless communication and flight testing, we used a spacious lab with much free space and only very few people around. As we obtained much help from other engineers who generously donated their source codes, in hopes of benefitting other fellow engineering students and hobbyists, we leave our project as an open source. Anyone who is interested in building their own quadcopter is welcome to use, modify or expand our project. We also seek constructive criticism from fellow engineers so that we could improve our project in the future. Throughout the project, we did not injure or bribe anyone. We believe we met our goal of adhering to the IEEE Code of Ethics.
  • Legal considerations: Our transmitter and receiver are always high when no data is being transmitted. This violates one of FCC’s legal restrictions that transmitters and receivers should be low when there is not data transmission. We can easily solve this problem by simply adding an inverter (that consists of a transistor and a resistor) to the transmitter and the receiver. We should have been more careful and thorough checking on FCC legal restrictions at the beginning of the project.

Appendix

To download the zip file of the source codes, click here.

Schematics of the IMU board

Project cost detail

Parts

Price
(4x) GWS EP Propeller (DD-4025 102x64mm) ($0.46 each) $1.85
M1818/25 Brushless motor KV3500 ($6.30 each) $25.20
RF Link Transmitter $3.95
RF Link Receiver $4.95
Triple Axis Accelerometer Breakout - ADXL335 free
Rhino 1050mAh 2S 7.4v 20C Lipoly Pack $4.63
AVR Atmega644 free
Logic Level Converter BOB-08745 $1.95
(34x)Single row header socket ($0.05 each) $1.70
Solder board $2
Xbox joystick free
Plastic board for chassis free
(4x) HobbyKing 10A ESC 1A UBEC motor controller ($6.73 each) $26.92
HobbyKing ESC Programming Card free
Total $73.15

Specific tasks in the project carried out by each team member

Tasks

Team member(s)
Sensor Interface Joao
Motor Control Joao
Wireless communication Thao & Joao
Test stand Terry
Soldering Joao & Terry
Chassis Joao
Report Thao & Terry & Joao

Back to top

References

Data sheets

Vendor sites

Code/designs borrowed from others

Background sites/paper

Back to top