Have you always wonder how to make a drone from A-Z?

This tutorial shows you how to do a 450mm quadcopter step-by-step from buying the parts to testing your aerial robot on his first flight.

Additionally, with a Raspberry Pi and a PiCamera you can stream a live video on your device and control your drone in first person view! The Raspberry Pi also offers the possibility to improve your drone even more and add features as person tracking, obstacle avoidance and a weather station.

The advantage of the Raspberry Pi is mainly that it can process some artificial vision algorithms for features that require the drone to be ''smart''.

In this instructable, you will learn:

• What tools/parts you need to buy
• How to fix all the parts on the frame
• How to make the connections for the propulsion system
• How to configure your micro-controller
• How to connect the receiver to the transmitter
• How to stream a video taken by the drone on your phone
• How to tune your PID for a better control

This tutorial aims to set the basics of how to build a customization drone, so if you're a complete beginner, you've come to the right place!

To build a quadcopter, we need 4 motors and 4 ESCs (Electronic Speed Controller) each one connected to a motor. A power distribution board is used to distribute the power from the battery to the 4 ESCs.

The ESC receives the command from the flight controller (here a MultiWii board) and transmits it to the motor.

This flight controller has a gyroscope, accelerometer and barometer. You can also add a bluetooth module and a GPS to it.

To do the connection between the Raspberry Pi and the flight controller, we use a FTDI adapter. Thus we can send commands to the controller from our Pi. Also, to do the PID calibration and to upload the firmware of the Mulltiwii on the flight controller, the FTDI will be very useful.

Finally, we control remotely the drone with a remote control that send commands to the receivers and sends them to the flight controller.

The Raspberry Pi also provides a stream that can be viewed on any browser from a device like a phone for example. This way we can view what the Pi Camera sees when it's in the air.