Necessary Hardware

All hardware with the exception of the quadcopter control board is off-the-shelf. Hopefully in the near future the board will be available in kit form as well.

Estimated Total Cost is a thousand dollars

We used the linked vendors.

(1 * $75) Hoverthings 450x Frame (Hoverthings)
(2 * $20) Extra 450x Centerplate (Hoverthings)
(2) Terminal Blocks for 12AWG power/ground
(1) Quadcopter Control Board

(1 * $100) 9DOF Sensor Stick (Sparkfun)
(1 * $28) Sonar Sensor (Sparkfun)
(1 * $14) Short-range IR Sensor (Sparkfun)

(2 * $41) XBee Pro (Sparkfun)
(1 * $25) XBee USB Dongle (Sparkfun)
(2 * $8) 2.4GHz Antenna (Sparkfun

(4 * $45) Park 400 Brushless Outrunner Motor (E-Flite)
(4 * 67) Brushless Motor Controllers (Mikrocontroller)
(4) Compatible Propellers

(2 * $35) 2200mAh 3S 11.1V 30C LiPo Batteries (E-Flite)
(1 * $66) Compatible Battery Charger (ProPeak)

Quadcopter Control Board

The quadcopter control board is a custom printed circuit board that takes 5V off a mini-USB connector and provides 3.3V to a mounted XBee, PWM signals to the motors, and a mounted 9DOF Sensor Stick. There are a handful of GPIO pins brought out on right-angle headers and there's a serial/FTDI header. An ISP connector is available for access to program the bootloader on the LPC1343 microprocessor. Two buttons trigger a reset and the ISP mode.

We plan to make kits available in the near future.

» Schema and Layout