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Build a Low-Cost Drone Using ESP32
- phoronixrly 2y agoWhat a great time for this article! The US is having a mass hysteria event and it turns out you can churn out DYI drones for the fat sum of $12-13 each? What a time to be alive! Edit: Hmm, considering that people are taking stars for UFOs lately, maybe a cheap drone is an overkill and a 20-pack of Chinese sky lanterns would be more than enough to keep the average US neighbourhood in a state of constant fear / see how long it takes for you to get to the front page of /r/UFOs...
- gitaarik 2y agoThe only way to cover up real sightings is with fake sighthings.
- abracadaniel 2y agoJudging from the posts I’ve seen, others have already started. Someone had a drone with a lit Roman candle going the other day. Or it was FAA compliant aliens. One of the two.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ok654321 2y ago[flagged]
- igor47 2y agoWelcome to hacker News! Yes, we find ignorance funny. I think people adding fuel to the fire are the ones freaking out about aliens or Iranian mother ships. Pointing out that the this is a hysteria event is more akin to pouring water on the flames.
- meaydinli 2y agoNo, it is not "Hacker News" to paint a large swath of people as "ignorant". The proper way would have been to publish a detailed, technical analysis and present your ideas along with your proof to the greater community and facilitate a discussion.
- omgwtfbyobbq 2y agoI think it's kinda both. Besides, everyone's ignorant about something. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- fc417fc802 2y ago[flagged]
- phoronixrly 2y agoMy guy, there are government officials that are sharing photos of the Orion constellation stating that it's a drone swarm just standing there over their property...
- stavros 2y agoI like your optimism. Personally, I have found that, if someone freaks out about "alien drones", trying to facilitate a discussion is almost futile.
- pjc50 2y agoLarge swathes of people are ignorant, though. It's just that now they can demonstrate that loudly on social media.
- lioeters 2y agoI want to live in this world, where we're all part of a larger collective endeavor to discover the truth, to be more informed, learn continuously, and evolve together. That's the old-school philosophy and mission of science for the betterment of humanity.
- asadalt 2y agoi see it as just accelerating normalizing cheap drones everywhere.
- croes 2y agohttps://x.com/ufoofinterest/status/1867668810171605394 https://x.com/ufoofinterest/status/1867668810171605394 https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1867763872465400226 https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1867763872465400226 https://x.com/TakeThatClouds/status/1867866332034932915 https://x.com/TakeThatClouds/status/1867866332034932915 https://x.com/MatthewCappucci/status/1868052013164134899 https://x.com/MatthewCappucci/status/1868052013164134899 It’s like throwing matches into a dumpster fire.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ActorNightly 2y agoThe interesting/scary part is that its not that hard to weaponise these drones. You can make one drop a home made explosive pretty easily, fully autonomous. and then dump itself into a body of water. All for way less cost than a gun.
- toynbee_cunt 2y ago[dead]
- bubaumba 2y ago> home made explosive With this a lot of damage can be done even without drone. As for weaponized it's not a future, it's a reality in Ukraine for years now. Defense against them is difficult to impossible. A bodyguard who can sacrifice himself may sometimes work.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoIt's not scary when it is just a hypothetical. If this were happening with some frequency it would be concerning. Until then I suspect there is something you are overlooking, oversimplifying. (EDIT: I'm assuming you are talking about non-military use.)
- ActorNightly 2y agoIts one of those things where once you can buy "kits" for it, you may see its use. Ukraine war videos popularized the idea of using drones to drop explosives. I could see Cartels using this to take out targets.
- hermitcrab 2y agoA rival cartel paid a British mercenary to drop 500lb bombs on Palbo Escobar in the 1990s. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/sep/14/colombia.world https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/sep/14/colombia.world So it isn't an entirely new concept.
- idunnoman1222 2y ago
- diggan 2y ago> The US is having a mass hysteria event What is this in reference to? The Chinese weather-balloon drama was years ago, wasn't it?
- mathgeek 2y agohttps://apnews.com/article/drones-new-jersey-what-to-know-e6f565f5d51d9d47ad140e7e7d131842 https://apnews.com/article/drones-new-jersey-what-to-know-e6...
- diggan 2y agoThanks! > Authorities say many of the drone sightings have actually been legal drones, manned aircraft, helicopters and even stars. > many state and municipal lawmakers have called for stricter rules about who can fly unmanned aircraft — and for the authority to shoot them down. Hard to find a more American article than this.
- teruakohatu 2y agoThis is amazing. Even the landing gear (struts?) is part of the PCB. I hope the author considers selling kits or outsourcing kits to SeedStudio. I live in a country where digikey order shipping is quite pricey. The author estimates the BOM to be a little under US$13. At that price it would be fun to try create a swarm for DIY drone lights show. [1] https://circuitdigest.com/microcontroller-projects/DIY-wifi-controlled-drone https://circuitdigest.com/microcontroller-projects/DIY-wifi-...
- jdboyd 2y agoFWIW, making just 10 might drive that $13 price down quite a bit. Although, it looks like 1 unit might be closer to $50 (at least for the suppliers I might use), but $150 for 10. I think costs could be cut somewhat though. The USB->serial chip is nearly $6, but differently packaged it can be $4.40 for 1 or $3.99/ea for 10, and alternative chips that seem like they should be good enough can be cheaper still. The voltage regulator they chose is $1/ea for 500ma, while the one I would normally go to is $0.22/ea for 1000ma (dropping down to $0.13/ea for 10).
- awestroke 2y agoWhich is your go-to voltage regulator?
- pjc50 2y agoIf you're making lots, you could uncouple the programming interface which isn't needed while in flight, thereby saving both BOM and weight.
- numpad0 2y agoDoes it need a regulator at all? ESP32 should be able to run on raw battery voltage, assuming the ESP is necessary. RealTek TX2/RX2 + PIC10/ATTiny10/CH32V003 could be even cheaper if user is okay with a dedicated transmitter.
- sweetjuly 2y agoThe entire BOM is crazy. The USB to UART chip is wholly unnecessary if you simply pick a better (at an equal or lower price) ESP32-S3 module which has a USB interface. I suspect this was designed based on things the author had in their cupboard as opposed to something that's reasonable for new designs.
- iandanforth 2y agoMeta: This has to be one of the most aggressively blocked pages I've encountered as it refuses to render any content if you have an adblocker on (uBlock at least) and resists several forms of archiving.
- macrocosmos 2y agoI'm able to access the site with uBlock Origin.
- downrightmike 2y agoSame here
- prmoustache 2y agoSame here on firefox/linux. Is that IP dependent?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- moepstar 2y agouBlock on, pihole on the net - not sure what it dislikes more. I see a screen (light grey on white) which reads something along to "Press & hold" some button to confirm i'm human. Which does nothing, because of adblocking? Well, f* you then - let me find something different to read :)
- stavros 2y agoThis will work (make sure you check the video at the bottom): https://circuitdigest.com/microcontroller-projects/DIY-wifi-controlled-drone https://circuitdigest.com/microcontroller-projects/DIY-wifi-...
- ElectRabbit 2y agoEven with uBlock and Cookie AutoDelete disabled it doesn't work. OK. Then I'll order my stuff from Mouser in the future.
- joshu 2y agonote: appears to use an outdated esp-idf. worth checking to see if esp-drone has been ported a newer esp-idf.
- asadalt 2y agothis is amazing. on similar note, I have spent last few months trying to fit visual inertial odometry into esp32. Combining that with this would be insane (and so cheap!)
- timschmidt 2y agoI've had similar thoughts and have been working on firmwares for the esp32. My contact info is in my profile. Hollar at me and lets compare notes.
- asadalt 2y agoi don’t see your contact info.
- timschmidt 2y agoMy mistake. Updated.
- joshmarinacci 2y agoWhat do you mean by this? Do you mean using an onboard camera for navigation and/or orientation? I’m very interested.
- AstroJetson 2y agoIs the custom circuit board something that mortals can get made? That seems to be the sticky point to me.
- asadalt 2y agojust upload it to jlcpcb and get it delivered with components soldered.
- wiml 2y agoYup. About fifteen years ago there was an explosion in small-run PCB services that cater to hobbyists (and cottage-scale professionals). If you don't need them overnight you can get good quality PCBs made at a very reasonable price.
- ElectRabbit 2y ago99% of hobbyist PCBs are can be ordered from JLCPCB nowadays. As long the PCBs have no components on them it's very cheap.
- stavros 2y agoEven if they have components on them, that's only $1-$2 extra per board (depending on the components), JLCPCB will assemble all the common components (resistors, capacitors, some more exotic ones) for very cheap, and you can solder the rest yourself. Their PCB assembly saves so much time, I don't want to waste half an hour soldering 20 0805 resistors to save $0.30 any more.
- nick__m 2y agoJLCPCB assembly services are so cheap as long as you don't use components marked as extended! I don't solder passive components anymore and now mostly use 0402 (that i am not able to solder reliably) instead of the bigger 0805. If you value your time and don't derive pleasure from soldering passive components, try the assembly services!
- frognumber 2y agoIt's odd, considering this is digikey, that there isn't a "Buy now" button. I'd totally do that if I got everything shipped to me, and knew I wasn't forgetting something.
- wat10000 2y agoThere’s a small link at the bottom to “Add all DigiKey Parts to Cart.” But one of the parts is apparently already obsolete and unavailable, and two more have minimum quantities above what’s needed here, so it’s not great.
- rkagerer 2y agoBut one of the parts is apparently already obsolete and unavailable I love Digikey, but unfortunately this is not uncommon at all.
- toynbee_cunt 2y ago[dead]
- CamperBob2 2y agoTo answer the question asked by the [dead] commenter: because every other electronic component distributor site (with the exception of Mouser, which is basically DigiKey with a different stylesheet) is much worse.
- fitsumbelay 2y agolove everything here but I'm skeptical of real time control via wifi. for me there's always been a noticeable delay in video streaming and receiving control signal so I'm curious how this works?
- m00x 2y agoThere's no video feed on this drone
- fitsumbelay 2y agoif that's true then that might be helpful as your visual feedback comes directly from your eyes and not latent video plus latency for control signals is probably less. thanks for pointing this out
- mciancia 2y agoWell, given how well game streaming can work (local, not cloud), I think low latency for drones should be possible :)
- fitsumbelay 2y agoif you've ever streamed video on a local network over web sockets you'll notice latency. no matter how fast sending text based control messages may be, latency in the video stream will cause users to send controls with the same latency which makes control impossible as far as I know.
- anigbrowl 2y agoOr if you don't want to do it from scratch, you can get a programmable readymade for a little more: https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stamp-fly-with-m5stamps3?variant=45470601707777 https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stamp-fly-with-m5stamps3... The included software stack is very basic, dig around on Japanese nerd Twitter for open source avionics.
- rahimnathwani 2y agoRight, but it's 3x the price and out of stock :(
- ok654321 2y ago[dead]
- Onawa 2y ago> Do you guys find this funny? Adding fuel to the fire? If you can't beat them, join them it seems?
- picture 2y agoI just saw the two comments in question and find it to be absolutely hilarious. A serious answer to your question - no, these are in the "whoop" weight-class. Warhead carrying drones for anti-personnel and anti-armor are usually 10 inch and up, meaning they are using "10 inch" frames and likely 3115 motors, with 6S battery packs. Of course, there's endless variation, but that seems to be a optimum combination
- zeroCalories 2y agoUkrainians and Russians use 7" drones for dropping grenades and suicide charges. This does not seem too far off?
- stavros 2y agoWhoops and 7" drones are pretty far apart (depending on what you consider "far", I guess). Whoops can barely lift their own weight, 7" drones can carry maybe a kilo.
- fullspectrumdev 2y agoA 7” drone can happily carry about 1.5kg which is more than sufficient to carry a RPG shell.
- lazide 2y agoMost RPG warheads are pretty heavy.
- asadalt 2y agoi wish this didn’t use mpu6050 imu, which is obsolete and unavailable it seems. but i guess they used it due to existing code/drivers widely available for it and esp32.
- Neywiny 2y agoAgreed. I'm in the market for an imu and thought "ah the MPU 6050, I've heard of this one a lot even recently" and it's obsolete. This is typical of consumer to adafruit/sparkfun/aliexpress levels where they have countless old stock of cheapy proto boards to buy from, but if you're designing a whole new thing from scratch, that's inexcusable.
- timonoko 2y agoI played with €25 foldable wifi drone from Lidl until EU started requiring €30 fee annual for a camera drone. I cannot think much practical use for drone without a camera. Fly-fishing might be one, but I need to program it so that it drops the line and returns home the moment it feels fish yanking.
- eptcyka 2y agoHow much lift can a 30€ drone produce? A 600 gram trout could easily drag the drone underwater unless it is ridiculously overpowered.
- timonoko 2y ago"drops the line" == does not even try, me myself reel the fish in.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wyan 2y agoEU doesn't require a €30 annual fee for a camera drone, though. Your country might. Mine surely doesn't.
- VagabundoP 2y agoDrone reg here in Ireland (over 250g or with a camera its required) €38 for two years. https://www.iaa.ie/general-aviation/drones/drone-register https://www.iaa.ie/general-aviation/drones/drone-register
- mig39 2y agoI'm registered as an operator in Ireland. This isn't per drone fee. It's a per-operator fee.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 2y agoi did this with my drone. I just used a small sideways chip clip i glued to the bottom of my drone. Fly fast enough so when the line goes taunt, the line will slip out of the clip and drop.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoFeels like a poor fit, given the limited number of cores available. Would be awesome to see rp2350 or some such, where there are very low power io cores available that can do work whether the main core is on or not. Embedded really is one of the best places for many-core, but it's so so rare there are good offload architectures and puny Programmable IO systems. Should out to folks like Silego/Dialog/Renesas with their GreenPAK; ultra tiny but interesting mixed signal little bits of programmable logic with a healthy dollop of peripherals!
- not_the_fda 2y agoYou don't need more cores. Ardupilot runs on much less capable hardware https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-autopilots.html#common-autopilots https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-autopilots.html#com..., we've sent people to the moon with less capable hardware. More cores just make things more complicated.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoI agree that we have a wealth of capabilities available. The modern Cortex M7 cores are fantastically powerful. Still, cramming everything into a main core had tradeoffs. It's a big core to wake up & run, with significant power draw. If you start running a bunch of stuff, it can be hard to meet realtime constraints, to provide reliable processing where needed. The blanket statement that more cores is more complicated feels too broad. There's times when io cores are much simpler cinceptually, such as when you have realtime needs such as drones might. Subdivision of responsibility & dedicated cores is a powerful way to de-complect concerns. And it can bring huge energy savings. Multi-core is also the chip making strategy that actually makes sense. We can cram so many transistors onto a tiny tiny chip, but what do we use the transistors for? We can keep trying to build bigger faster single cores, but there's only so much instruction level parallelism and caching we can actually effectively utilize. Having tiny io cores dedicated to specific tasks can use an incredibly tiny amount of extra die space, while providing incredibly low power dedicated processing for specific subsystems. Seems like a win. Let's resist making broad statements like "you don't need". What's "needed" might not be what's best. We should have open minds to consider advantages & disadvantages. I for one think tiny io cores can later in amazing possibilities, have seen the rp2040 as a huge leap in capabilities (throwback to the Parallax Propeller with wide SMT like behavior) that's enabled a ton of interesting flexibility & novel low power embedded creations to get off the ground.
- curiousgeorgio 2y agoIs this just someone reposting espressif's esp-drone (https://github.com/espressif/esp-drone https://github.com/espressif/esp-drone) and passing it off as their own (and DigiKey posting it on their site)? They talk about making a custom PCB, but it looks pretty much the same. The repository linked from the article (https://github.com/Circuit-Digest/ESP-Drone https://github.com/Circuit-Digest/ESP-Drone) has some issues claiming there's malware in it, and the commit history looks a little suspicious, but I could be wrong.
- asadalt 2y agodamn you are right!
- stavros 2y agoWow, yeah, I thought Espressif just wrote the firmware, but this drone is really really similar to the one posted, PCB struts and all.
- nick__m 2y agoSince those who filed the issue did not even stated which file is affected this is pure speculation but the virus issue really look like a false positive. The pre-built firmware checked into a repo could easily trigger an anti-virus. The repo is mostly made of plain text files, the zip and the bin don't look required for anything so if your feeling paranoid delete them before building!
- m00x 2y agoYeah, he took the code straight from esp-drone which is copyrighted. https://github.com/Circuit-Digest/ESP-Drone/blob/main/Firmware/esp-drone/main/main.c https://github.com/Circuit-Digest/ESP-Drone/blob/main/Firmwa... I believe this is a violation of the license. Very poor form of Digikey to hire these people.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 2y agoboth project source crazy flie as their inspiration and may be the cause of the similarities. https://www.bitcraze.io/products/old-products/crazyflie-2-0/ https://www.bitcraze.io/products/old-products/crazyflie-2-0/
- ChuckMcM 2y agoFun! I built a Crazyflie[1] back in the day which was bespoke 2.4GHz protocols (no ESP32 at the time) so this is a great upgrade to that. Also the use of a single low side MOSFET as the motor controller makes it simpler and cheaper at the expense of some moves that BLDC motors give you. All in all, at $10 - $15 that is a great deal and I'm wondering if one will show up in a Hackerbox[2] as that is exactly the kind of thing they do. I have had a lot of fun playing with the CF microdrones, I'm definitely going to build one of these too. [1] https://github.com/bitcraze/crazyflie-firmware https://github.com/bitcraze/crazyflie-firmware [2] https://hackerboxes.com/ https://hackerboxes.com/
- amelius 2y agoWith the power budget of a drone almost any board will do.
- mrtksn 2y agoFun. I'm looking into turning my old iPhone into a drone as it has great hardware already to do higher level tasks and use ESP32 for the more real time stuff like actually driving the motors based on sensor input. If you think about it, an old iPhone 6 comes with GPS, gyro, accelerometer, multiple cameras, pretty powerful processors, bluetooth + wifi + LTE, sound + light, ambient + proximity sensors. Get rid of the case, and you have a great mini computer that can be aware of its surroundings and communicate. On more modern iPhones, you can even use advanced tech like ARKit to have great spatial understanding of your drone and environment and do autonomous drones. With an iPhone 15, you can even get spatial video. How amazing would that be? I wish Apple provided a straightforward way to unlock(like remove restrictions on the OS level) old phones and use them for DIY projects.
- szundi 2y agoNot a realtime os though
- mrtksn 2y agoTrue but, IMHO, a lot of the higher level task should be able to handle it. I guess you can have a simple real time IC to handle the flight envelope to provide stable flight and then use the iPhone to do the advanced operations. For example, if you are building a drone that is mapping the environment and follows you through a bike ride, does it really matter if the 3D environment it creates for autonomous navigation is slightly off? You can continuously compensate for it, stick with moving averages and avoid extreme moves.
- the__alchemist 2y agoNote to anyone unafamiliar: There is a thriving "FPV" ecosystem of drones that can be DIYed. Example common setup, you can mix+match: - Small square PCB with the main flight control MCU (STM32), and some sensors - Smalls square PCB with motor drivers - Carbon fiber frame - Small PCB with a LoRa radio - Camera and video transmission system. (90s-security-cam style analog, or digital. - Brushless DC motors, props etc Uses Betaflight, ArduPilot, iNav, or PX4 firmware. Or, you could write your own. The PCB-frame in the article is neat and has obvious convenience advantages, but I speculate that it would not be stiff enough for desirable controllable characteristics under high accel situations.
- hylaride 2y agoAnd a lot of it is all open source! ESC software: - https://github.com/am32-firmware https://github.com/am32-firmware - https://github.com/mathiasvr/bluejay https://github.com/mathiasvr/bluejay Flight controller (you mentioned these): - https://github.com/betaflight https://github.com/betaflight - https://github.com/ArduPilot https://github.com/ArduPilot - https://github.com/iNavFlight https://github.com/iNavFlight Control link: - https://github.com/ExpressLRS https://github.com/ExpressLRS (also uses ESP32/ESP82 chips) Radio Controllers: - https://github.com/EdgeTX https://github.com/EdgeTX 5+ years ago the vast majority of this stuff was proprietary-only and getting into the hobby cost thousands of dollars. Now you could start at ~$500 (big price factor for FPV is the goggles, but cheap analog ones can be had for ~$100).
- nullstyle 2y agoWith luck the OpenIPC cameras that are starting to come on the market will find traction and the entire hardware stack will run on open source firmware. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdjI3ZQsmCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdjI3ZQsmCA
- the__alchemist 2y agoThis is so cool; LFTI!
- 2y ago
- no_time 2y agoI wonder what differs in the hardware (other than obviously using the newer esp32) compared to the implementation in this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n76iMTHXuE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n76iMTHXuE tldw: he experienced significant packet latency while the motors were spinning, making the drone uncontrollable.
- KennyBlanken 2y agoDoes anyone know who at Digikey is responsible for their absurd adblock-blocking efforts? It's so goddamn tiresome that I'm headed to a site already with a list of things to buy and it blocks me because I've installed an extension that will block them from showing me ads trying to sell me even more stuff.