This page covers the physical build — what parts to buy, in what order to assemble them, and what to check before the first powered test. It’s the analog of host PC setup but for the hardware side, and it’s the bridge between “everything works in simulation” and “the drone flies in your living room.”
Current status: in design. The physical drone is on the H2 2026 roadmap — the BOM is settled but the actual assembly is pending the parts arriving. This page will get filled out as the build happens, in the same dev-log style as the takeoff-node debugging walkthrough — including the things that go wrong, not just the steps that worked.
Bill of materials (planned)
The full BOM lives in the hardware section. High-level summary:
- Frame: 5-inch indoor quad, ~30 cm motor-to-motor, all-up weight target ~600 g.
- Flight controller: Matek H743 SLIM (or equivalent F7/H7 board with ArduCopter support).
- Motors / ESCs: brushless 1404 motors + 4-in-1 BLHeli_S ESC, 4S LiPo.
- Companion PC: Jetson Nano (or Orin Nano for serious inference workloads). See edge compute.
- Sensors: TF-Luna (1D ToF down), VL53L0X×6 (perimeter ToF), PMW3901 (optical flow). See the 3-rangefinder sensor stack.
Assembly sequence (planned)
- Frame build + motor mount — mechanical only, no power.
- ESC + motor wiring — bench-test motor spin direction before mounting props.
- FC mount + soldering — flight controller mounted on vibration-damping standoffs, power+telemetry wiring soldered.
- Sensor stack — TF-Luna and VL53L0X array on a custom carrier board; PMW3901 mounted with a clear optical path down.
- Companion PC — Jetson with serial-to-FC tether for MAVROS, separate power tap from the same battery.
- First powered bring-up — props off, motors spinning, basic STABILIZE-mode test via radio.
- First indoor hover — props on, in a safe enclosed space, manual control only.
Each step gets its own page when we actually do it. For now, the BOM and topology are the load-bearing details — they determine what the simulation needs to match, and they’re already in the hardware section.
Where to go next
- Hardware section — the BOM and component-by-component breakdown
- Sensor stack — the perception side
- Roadmap H2 2026 — when this work happens
- Pre-flight checklist — what to verify before every flight