Guide to building a Drone using Pixhawk 2.4.8 — Part 1

In this first part, we’ll look into all the parts we’ll be using and what they do for the function of the drone

1. The Control Board:

This is the main brain of the Drone and controls all the parts of the drone and ensures everything is in sync to make it fly. In this project we’ll use Pixhawk as our control board(specifically version 2.4.8)

2. Motors:

These are the 4 motors that help in providing thrust to lift the drone of the ground, just remember two motors rotate clockwise while the other two rotate counter-clockwise for the same.

3. Propellors:

Here we observe we have two types of propellors and those are pusher props and the normal props, pusher props which have the R symbol on them are used for clockwise movement and the normal ones are used for counter-clockwise movement

4. Electronic Speed Controllers:

These help in sending and recieving signals between the motor and the control board. Each ESC has three wires(Red, black, white) which pertain to (vcc, gnd, signal) respectively.

For this build, we’ll be removing the vcc cable and connecting the ESCs to the following ports:

5. GPS Module:

The GPS module which contains the GPS module and other extra miscellaneous instruments help in maintaining the stability of the drone in terms of altitude and other various aspects.

6. Battery and Battery Level Indicator:

A lipo battery is used to control the parts of the drone and is connected to a power connector which routes the power to the motors, and the pixhawk board simultaneously. You might need one depending on your build.

And please buy a Battery level indicator if you don’t trust your batteries. Batteries fail a lot with me personally and so I used to have this which used to inform me whenever the batter level falls below a level after which I used to charge them.

7. Receiver and Transmitter:

For this you can use any RC modules but if you need to use more than 6 channels you probably would have to buy a PPM sum module too