What is a companion computer? While they are a very important element of a drone build, they are by no means required. Why is this? Companion computers only give you the capability of designing higher level drone applications. They don’t actually directly control any of the onboard drone hardware. The board that is responsible for…
So what is a flight controller you ask? You’ve come to the right place. Think of the flight controller as the brains of the drone. All of the drone’s hardware will plug into the flight controller, including the motors/escs, gps, compass, lidar, rc receiver, telemetry etc. With all the drone’s hardware plugged into this central…
With the advent of the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller in early 2021, it was only a matter of time before Pi Pico Drone projects surfaced. Sure, we’ve seen larger raspberry pi drones before, but the micro form factor would be a new invention. But first, what is the Raspberry Pi Pico, and how is it different…
The Navio2 shield can make any raspberry pi into a flyable drone. It was the first of its kind, starting out under the name Navio+, then later releasing the second version Navio2. Emlid is the company behind the Navio2 shield, and they carved out quite a niche which served as the foundation of their business. While…
If you want to build a Jetson Nano drone, you’ve come to the right place. Jetson Nano Drones are great for CPU intensive applications and computer vision scripts. Now, can you fly a Jetson Nano drone with just the board and no other processors? Well, no. Most advanced DIY drones consist of a flight controller…
The PXFMini is a flight controller shield that sits on top of the Raspberry Pi zero, making it an easy drone solution for micro based drones. This shield was developed my Erle Robotics and was the first of its kind. Many projects have come from the PXFmini shield. Unfortunately, the company Erle Robotics was bought…
So far in the Dojo, we have shown how to build normal sized drones with the regular sized raspberry pi. In this post, we will show you how to scale down your builds into the micro form factor with a pi zero drone. With the former PXFMini Pi Shield solution now discontinued, this guide helps…
This guide will show you how to take a fresh install of raspbian (latest Buster and legacy Buster) and enable to work with the dronekit-python API to control the pixhawk vehicle from a python script (and without an RC controller). I got tired of running through this install on every YouTube tutorial video, so now…
An essential part of becoming a competent builder, programmer and flyer of drones is doing so safely. It is said there are two types of multirotor pilots: those that have crashed and those that will. Many of us have had close calls – a vehicle out of control flying away or into a tree. Now…
The following guide is a comprehensive checklist of things to do when you have connection issues between your flight controller and your companion computer on an ArduPilot drone. If you are experiencing errors like “link timeout” “link 1 down” “no link”, then read this guide. These issues can be seen when attempting to start MAVProxy,…
