Making an RC Airplane From the Ground Up!

Readers will certainly be familiar with RC aircraft, including so-called drones, fixed-wing airplanes, and more. Perhaps you’ve even built one yourself to fly. You might note, however, that “building” one means different things in different contexts, but for his plane, Dejan of How To Mechatronics created nearly every element of his fixed-wing flyer from scratch.

The Styrofoam fuselage and wing assembly was first designed in Fusion 360, then cut out on a hot wire CNC machine. The plane was manufactured in sections, which were glued together with the help of reinforcing barbecue sticks. The main wing assembly was fastened on using wooden studs and rubber bands, allowing access to an electronics compartment inside.

The system's controller is based an Arduino Pro Mini to take user input from a pair of joysticks, potentiometers, and buttons, and sends them to a receiver on the airplane via an nRF24L01 transceiver. Note that Dejan made this hot foam wire cutter, as well as the transmitter and receiver modules in other videos, further adding to airplane's DIY cred, and overall epicness of this build.

The process is laid out in the video below, and in the project write-up. Airplane testing starts at around the 21:40 mark. While the first try wasn’t successful, after several crashes and a lot of persistence/tape/glue, he does finally get it into the air!