Is It a Plane? Is It a Car? Neither, It's the EjoWerks Two-Channel FPV Speeder Drone

Pseudonymous maker "EjoWerks" has put together a speedy drone for first-person view (FPV) racing, but with a difference: the Speeder is built to use only two radio channels and controlled from a simple pistol-style radio control unit.

"Sometime in late 2020 I decided it was time to see if I could build something that could merge the thrill of flying a FPV quadcopter and the ease of driving a FPV RC car. If I got the basic engineering hurdles down, I imagined I'd design a quadcopter with an off-road car-like appearance and the ability to be "driven" with a two channel RC car radio. It would automatically hover at a fixed low altitude at perhaps half a meter, while being very reactive to the ground underneath it like a futuristic off-road racing speeder," EjoWerks writes of the project. "A CarCopter? Quadcarpter? Let's call it a Speeder."

While designed like a quadcopter, the Speeder is in fact a five-rotor aircraft: In addition to the four usual rotors providing downward thrust, a fifth rotor on the rear — "like an airboat straight out of the Florida Everglades," EjoWerks explains — provides forward thrust without the need to tilt the body of the drone. It's this flying-flat approach, which simplified the control to the point that it could be handled with the sort of pistol-style controller associated with simple toy cars.

"To make this happen I needed to mix roll and yaw together via a single input, the steering wheel. The problem was I needed a car radio with a steering wheel, a throttle trigger, and lotsa other channels for PID adjustments and other nonsense," EjoWerks writes. "I hacked together an Arduino radio of sorts from an abandoned el-cheapo RC car controller and interfaced it to my Taranis trainer port over the airwaves because I always trip on wires. Flip the trainer switch to give control to the pistol radio and wow, it was such a different experience than flying with the copter radio! It was just like driving an airboat on land. My 5 year old son drove it around effortlessly and I had a hard time getting the controller back from him."

With the core concept proven, EjoWerks set about scaling things up from the compact prototypes: Various design iterations, including frames created from cardboard and foamboard, followed before the maker settled on an H-frame carbon fiber design with 3D-printed Batmobile-esque body. "This H-frame concept flew amazing and emphatically marked the point where I had reached nearly all my original goals: It flew nice and fast, had a reasonable flight time of 8-10 minutes, was light and quite crash-proof," EjoWerks explains.

"It also sported a few safety features in the code to keep it from going to the moon or tearing itself up upon crashing. It was this frame that finally got the PMW3901 optical flow sensor for position hold, which kept it from wandering off after take-off prior to punching the throttle."

While the Speeder is now impressively functional — including the ability to adjust the roll/yaw mix to change the handling, altitude adjustment for the automatic hover from 0.8-2.5 feet, automatic landing on low battery, auto-disarm on crash, and anti-"skid" controls — EjoWerks is planning to continue development, creating a new carbon plate frame with vacuum-formed polycarbonate body and side guards.

The full project write-up is available on EjoWerks' website.