drone

When I assembled my quadcopter, I always intended it to become a drone, that is to say, with autonomous features. The typical use case for the hobbyist is intelligent failsafe, specifically return-to-home or "RTH" capability. As I've assembled the parts to accomplish this, it's made me consider how to achieve the same thing for my plane.

Well, I finally built me a drone so's I could fit in with all the cool kids. What follows is a short description of my experience with helpful links for someone else who would like to build a substantially similar quad. I built basically the cheapest quadcopter you could use for anything more than just crashing into stuff, a SK450 whose parts were primarily sourced from eBay — and usually with the very cheapest parts.