Franken-drone Lives! Part 1

Often, when I get excited about a project it leads to a lot of half-informed eBay purchases in the first several hours. Even when I take the time to really educate myself on a subject, there's usually one little detail I'll miss in the initial process of ordering parts. If something requires motors, I'll end up with the wrong size shaft. It it needs a camera, I'll buy the wrong field-of-view measurement. Antennas will wind one way when they need to wind the other.

The result is, I end up with a lot of extra parts. When I got into drone building, this was especially true. What is pictured here is a rainy day effort to clear out and combine some stuff I had sitting around which wouldn't work in my main project into a working model...and it does fly. After cobbling everything together and making the requisite tweaks to the flight controller. it successfully hovered in my apartment living room for fifteen seconds or so. Then I put in a box and forgot about it until I moved.

Flash forward to a few weeks ago. I'm working with a friend who is learning to fly his DJI Phantom. It's a Cadillac among drones. Full GPS tracking and control. Automated return. All the bells and whistles. Very nice. It starts me thinking. None of that stuff will fit on my racing drones..but it would fit on this thing.

So, that's another summer project. Retrofit Franken-drone with the hardware GPS capabilities supported by the Betaflight software it runs...and maybe a camera gimble if the weight works out.

In the meantime, though, I'll probably just fly it around the backyard and give the dogs something to bark at.