from Hacker News

Build a Low-Cost Drone Using ESP32

by m3at on 12/24/24, 12:20 AM with 149 comments

• by the__alchemist on 12/24/24, 1:53 PM

  Note to anyone unafamiliar: There is a thriving "FPV" ecosystem of drones that can be DIYed. Example common setup, you can mix+match:

    - Small square PCB with the main flight control MCU (STM32), and some sensors
    - Smalls square PCB with motor drivers
    - Carbon fiber frame
    - Small PCB with a LoRa radio
    - Camera and video transmission system. (90s-security-cam style analog, or digital.
    - Brushless DC motors, props etc
  

  Uses Betaflight, ArduPilot, iNav, or PX4 firmware. Or, you could write your own.

  The PCB-frame in the article is neat and has obvious convenience advantages, but I speculate that it would not be stiff enough for desirable controllable characteristics under high accel situations.

• by curiousgeorgio on 12/24/24, 6:46 AM

  Is this just someone reposting espressif's esp-drone (https://github.com/espressif/esp-drone) and passing it off as their own (and DigiKey posting it on their site)? They talk about making a custom PCB, but it looks pretty much the same.

  The repository linked from the article (https://github.com/Circuit-Digest/ESP-Drone) has some issues claiming there's malware in it, and the commit history looks a little suspicious, but I could be wrong.

• by phoronixrly on 12/24/24, 1:32 AM

  What a great time for this article! The US is having a mass hysteria event and it turns out you can churn out DYI drones for the fat sum of $12-13 each? What a time to be alive!

  Edit: Hmm, considering that people are taking stars for UFOs lately, maybe a cheap drone is an overkill and a 20-pack of Chinese sky lanterns would be more than enough to keep the average US neighbourhood in a state of constant fear / see how long it takes for you to get to the front page of /r/UFOs...

• by ChuckMcM on 12/24/24, 7:30 AM

  Fun! I built a Crazyflie[1] back in the day which was bespoke 2.4GHz protocols (no ESP32 at the time) so this is a great upgrade to that. Also the use of a single low side MOSFET as the motor controller makes it simpler and cheaper at the expense of some moves that BLDC motors give you. All in all, at $10 - $15 that is a great deal and I'm wondering if one will show up in a Hackerbox[2] as that is exactly the kind of thing they do.

  I have had a lot of fun playing with the CF microdrones, I'm definitely going to build one of these too.

  [1] https://github.com/bitcraze/crazyflie-firmware

  [2] https://hackerboxes.com/

• by mrtksn on 12/24/24, 11:51 AM

  Fun. I'm looking into turning my old iPhone into a drone as it has great hardware already to do higher level tasks and use ESP32 for the more real time stuff like actually driving the motors based on sensor input.

  If you think about it, an old iPhone 6 comes with GPS, gyro, accelerometer, multiple cameras, pretty powerful processors, bluetooth + wifi + LTE, sound + light, ambient + proximity sensors. Get rid of the case, and you have a great mini computer that can be aware of its surroundings and communicate.

  On more modern iPhones, you can even use advanced tech like ARKit to have great spatial understanding of your drone and environment and do autonomous drones. With an iPhone 15, you can even get spatial video. How amazing would that be?

  I wish Apple provided a straightforward way to unlock(like remove restrictions on the OS level) old phones and use them for DIY projects.

• by anigbrowl on 12/24/24, 4:21 AM

  Or if you don't want to do it from scratch, you can get a programmable readymade for a little more: https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stamp-fly-with-m5stamps3...

  The included software stack is very basic, dig around on Japanese nerd Twitter for open source avionics.

• by teruakohatu on 12/24/24, 1:41 AM

  This is amazing. Even the landing gear (struts?) is part of the PCB. I hope the author considers selling kits or outsourcing kits to SeedStudio. I live in a country where digikey order shipping is quite pricey.

  The author estimates the BOM to be a little under US$13. At that price it would be fun to try create a swarm for DIY drone lights show.

  [1] https://circuitdigest.com/microcontroller-projects/DIY-wifi-...

• by jauntywundrkind on 12/24/24, 6:05 AM

  Feels like a poor fit, given the limited number of cores available.

  Would be awesome to see rp2350 or some such, where there are very low power io cores available that can do work whether the main core is on or not. Embedded really is one of the best places for many-core, but it's so so rare there are good offload architectures and puny Programmable IO systems.

  Should out to folks like Silego/Dialog/Renesas with their GreenPAK; ultra tiny but interesting mixed signal little bits of programmable logic with a healthy dollop of peripherals!

• by timonoko on 12/24/24, 5:29 AM

  I played with €25 foldable wifi drone from Lidl until EU started requiring €30 fee annual for a camera drone.

  I cannot think much practical use for drone without a camera. Fly-fishing might be one, but I need to program it so that it drops the line and returns home the moment it feels fish yanking.

• by frognumber on 12/24/24, 3:28 AM

  It's odd, considering this is digikey, that there isn't a "Buy now" button.

  I'd totally do that if I got everything shipped to me, and knew I wasn't forgetting something.

• by asadalt on 12/24/24, 2:38 AM

  this is amazing. on similar note, I have spent last few months trying to fit visual inertial odometry into esp32. Combining that with this would be insane (and so cheap!)

• by fitsumbelay on 12/24/24, 5:38 AM

  love everything here but I'm skeptical of real time control via wifi. for me there's always been a noticeable delay in video streaming and receiving control signal so I'm curious how this works?

• by no_time on 12/24/24, 3:02 PM

  I wonder what differs in the hardware (other than obviously using the newer esp32) compared to the implementation in this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n76iMTHXuE

  tldw: he experienced significant packet latency while the motors were spinning, making the drone uncontrollable.

• by AstroJetson on 12/24/24, 3:03 AM

  Is the custom circuit board something that mortals can get made? That seems to be the sticky point to me.

• by asadalt on 12/24/24, 4:54 AM

  i wish this didn’t use mpu6050 imu, which is obsolete and unavailable it seems.

  but i guess they used it due to existing code/drivers widely available for it and esp32.

• by amelius on 12/24/24, 9:52 AM

  With the power budget of a drone almost any board will do.

• by KennyBlanken on 12/25/24, 3:53 AM

  Does anyone know who at Digikey is responsible for their absurd adblock-blocking efforts?

  It's so goddamn tiresome that I'm headed to a site already with a list of things to buy and it blocks me because I've installed an extension that will block them from showing me ads trying to sell me even more stuff.

• by iandanforth on 12/24/24, 1:45 AM

  Meta: This has to be one of the most aggressively blocked pages I've encountered as it refuses to render any content if you have an adblocker on (uBlock at least) and resists several forms of archiving.

• by joshu on 12/24/24, 2:19 AM

  note: appears to use an outdated esp-idf. worth checking to see if esp-drone has been ported a newer esp-idf.