Drone Constructed from a PCB Almost Works

When you think of the word “prototype,” this normally means creating a smaller version of something that you’ll make later at full scale — perhaps a building, airplane, or automobile. Electronoobs’ latest quadcopter attempt, however, takes the opposite path. After getting a large-ish perfboard/Arduino Pro Mini quadcopter to fly, he decided to construct a smaller version, using a PCB to both transmit electricity and form the drone’s frame.

What he found is that while it works in theory, the weight of the components and PCB now makes up a larger portion of the drone itself, meaning it doesn’t have the thrust to properly lift off. You can see the design process, as well as it struggling to fly in the first video below. Since he knows that the design is fundamentally sound from his first version, he plans to use a thinner PCB and lighter components, allowing it to lift off as planned.

While it doesn’t yet do what he wanted, the build does show off some interesting techniques. Besides the PCB frame construction, one clever hack was to desolder the ATmega328 chip off the Pro Mini board. This meant that the microcontroller was already set up with a bootloader, and could be programmed via an FTDI interface without any extra steps.

We wish Electronoobs success with this design moving forward. For now, you can see the first drone flying in the second video!