Making Autonomous drone

Hello fellas today, I know this blog is late but today we are making sure that you should learn something really practical that can take you to competitions and make more even probably you'll win.

In this blog, we are going to learn how to make a drone.

Let me clarify we ain't making an ordinary drone that needs instructions from a remote controller to fly and decide, in this era we are going to make a drone that can fly on its own, yea we are making a smart drone.

Okay, let’s be practical you’ll say that these drones are way expensive to afford how can we make such expensive things in tight pockets yes we are going to make it cheap, How cheap? even less than 2000-3000 INR and what if we don’t know how to code for machine learning modules or which microcontroller we should use so that it can process the heavy modules, Stick with me this blog got your back.

Let's get one thing straight in our head that we are on a short budget and make it clear what our specialty is.

Since we don’t know how to make a Machine learning module and also we can not afford a heavy power consumption power microcontroller on our drone. So we are going to make our drone using Arduino and sensors and with specific, we can use this drone in many fields like transportation, logistics, surveys, rescue operations, and much more.

Let’s start with selecting our microcontroller which is less power consuming and more efficient for this atMega328 is the best processer for the requirement, we choose this microcontroller instead of the atTiny series because it has enough PWM pins and analog pins for controlling and monitoring.

Now moving further on the chassis of the drone and motor, the perfect fit for our requirement is QX90 and coreless DC motor.

To sense the surroundings and obstacles we are going to use an IR sensor.

Next, the most important thing we need is an L293d motor driver IC or L9110s motor driver IC, We need these motor driver IC ( 1 L293d IC or 2 L9110s ICs). I will recommend using L9110s as I have tried both the IC and recommend the better one. Motor driver IC is required as it increases the RPM of the motor as atMega328 is not capable enough to achieve the required RPM.

Other passive components needed apart from these we need are 16MHz crystal 16 mf ceramic capacitor.

Since we covered our checklist let's move on to the work, first we have to program atMega328 to give output from its PWM pins. These outputs from atMeg328 occur to be the input signal for not driver IC.

The sequence and intensity of the output of atMega328 depend on the surrounding of the drone sensed by the IR sensor.

Since we are using QX90 and coreless motors weight is the issue here, our QX90 can’t carry weight over 100-120 grams, so keeping that in mind and with intentions of achieving maximum efficiency of the drone we will try to keep the overall weight of the drone less than 100 grams, for that using SMD components and designing own PCB instead of generic/Zero PCB in order to reduce extra and unnecessary weight.

Use Autodesk Eagle to design your PCB and assemble the components, Power up your drone, and now it is ready to fly.

Congratulations you have successfully designed and built an autonomous drone, Show this to your teachers and friends and flex your intelligence.

See you soon in next blog.