Drone-from-scratch: First take-off

Around mid July of 2025, I was completely stressed out with reading Spiking Neural Networks theoretical papers, I had gotten stuck at nearly every step of the way with the mathematical models, the theoretical analysis these papers were detailing. And was wondering if I would ever be able to produce research work such rigorous as these top conference papers I was reading. Dr. Deng (whom I chatted with quite a bit about these) and asked if I wanted to “play with the drones”. And that he was exloring the prospect of doing autonomous drone research, and would use his own money to pay for the equipment I need to build a cheap drone for this purpose. I accepted the offer.

The showdown

After about 5 months of planning and building, walking around the KSU campus trying to find an eligible lab with a fumehood and that would be kind enough let us use the solder for 3 hours here and there on campus. The drone is finally ready. The only thing left to the first phase now is just to fly it.. right?

The first flight happened on Acro (the hardest flight mode)

If you don’t know, in FPV drone, there are by default 3 configurations of how your joysticks will control the quad copter, these are called flight modes. These are: 2) Angle: the flight controller utilizes builtin gyroscope to automatically level the quad, there are little the pilot needs to do to keep it in position 3) Horizon: the flight controller will still level the drone, but allows for flipping movements when the stick is pushed to the extreme, 1) Acro: The hardest mode, the tilting angle will not be automatically calibrated by the flight contraller, it’s all in the pilot to adjust “on-the-fly” just to stablize the thing.

You might have noticed that I have numbered these modes not in order, that was on purpose to reflect the default order of the flight modes on the controller. That means when you arm the drone, the default flight mode was “Acro”. The result? Well it’s best demonstrated by this clip here..

Angle mode is THE CHOICE

So after tinkering around a little bit, I decided that turning on angle was may be a good idea (yeah, that’s about how much I knew about these things before I gotten into it!). From there, after a couple of take off and reducing the sensibility of the thrust, we finally got in a decent flight.

The “show.. and tell”

We went through quite a few cheap autonomous drones before deciding to build one from scratch with FPV components. Some are bought, others’ are donated by ex-hobbyist who saw my bread board and ESP32 contraption (Yes, I was seriously considering building a drone from scratch!). Here is Caleb Wu, the department chair’s son. He visit my lab from time-to-time and play MineCraft on one of the computers in the room. In this occasion, I had him flown one of the cheap auto-loitering drone we had bought.

The reflection

Besides the enjoyment of exploring a new field of robotics research, it was extremely fun diving into the world of FPV drone, exploring the hobbyist community. It was also informative as ones who does these kinds of research often look into the reality of these technology being used for war and evil. For example, besides having close friends heavily and personally involved in the Ukraine war, the knowledge about the drone technology had given me a different angle of how to view this reality.

The pause

Sadly, the project had to be put on pause indefinitely, there were multiple reasons:

  1. Personnel barrier: I was about to graduate from the program, Madeline was working on two other research projects, Arlan was a Masters student and doesn’t have enough programming or ML background yet to plan such complicated project.
  2. Research infrastructure & funding barrier: As said, the project was being funded personally by Dr. Deng. And we all did this on the side here and there. The amount of
  3. Regulation barrier:

The last time I heard of the project, it was being downsized to an autonomous rover, and Arlan was in charge of it. Overall, despite the little progress we made working on-the-side on a completely new field, the show has been enjoyable, many things had been learned, memories had been made. A fun note in the Ph.D journey. And most imoportantly..

We shall be back!!..