The real drone is a small indoor quadcopter — about 30 cm motor-to-motor, ~600 g all-up weight, four brushless motors driven by a 4-in-1 ESC at 2-4S. The job of this section is to document everything below the autopilot abstraction: which specific components we picked, how they’re wired, what firmware they run, and what gotchas we hit along the way. If you can answer “why this part and not the cheaper one?” from this section, it’s doing its job.
There are four sub-areas. Flight controller covers the autopilot itself — ArduCopter parameters, fence configuration, PID tuning. MAVLink is the wire protocol between the flight controller and everything else; this is where MAVROS, MAVProxy, and our custom messages sit. Sensors is the deepest tree on the whole site — three layers down to specific models (lidar/tf-luna/wiring, imu/bno085/fusion, optical-flow/pmw3901/description) because component-level documentation is what readers actually look for. Power management covers ESC calibration, battery selection, and the small but real safety practices around lipo handling.
A note on sensor selection: most of the cost and most of the failure modes on an indoor drone live in the sensor stack, not the flight controller. A TF-Luna ($45, single-beam ToF, 8 m range) is genuinely different from a VL53L0X ($5, single-beam ToF, 2 m range) is genuinely different from a 2D scanning lidar ($300+). We’ve layered three rangefinders deliberately so that no single failure mode (dark carpet, glass, narrow FoV) takes out the whole perception stack. The reasoning for that layering lives in sensor selection.
If you’re sourcing parts to build your own, start with the BOM (TODO — not yet written; see the Articles section for what’s currently published). Otherwise, flight controller parameters is the most universally useful page in this section — most of the values transfer to any small ArduCopter build, not just ours.
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