FPV Camera Drone
currentA custom FPV quadcopter designed, built, and flown to film ultimate frisbee — three full iterations from hand sketches through Onshape CAD, 3D-printed frames, and hand-soldered electronics to controlled flight with 30-minute endurance.
- Onshape
- CAD
- 3D Printing
- Embedded
- PID
- FPV
I wanted aerial footage of ultimate frisbee games. Buying a drone would have solved that. Building one taught me considerably more.
Three full iterations over two years, each one a rebuild rather than a patch: hand sketches → full Onshape CAD → 3D-printed frame → every wire and joint soldered by hand.
v1 — the one that didn’t fly
A high-school attempt that never got airborne. Worth listing, because everything the third build got right came from understanding why the first two didn’t.
v2 — airborne, uncontrolled
Version two flew. It did not fly where I pointed it. Getting a multirotor off the ground is a solved problem you can buy in a kit; getting one to hold an attitude you commanded is a control problem, and that’s where the actual engineering starts.
v3 — the rebuild
Version three was re-engineered from the ground up against the specific failures of the first two:
| Change | Why |
|---|---|
| Airfoiled arms | Reduce drag through the frame instead of treating the airframe as dead weight |
| Rainproof enclosures | It is used outdoors, at fields, in the Pacific Northwest and in London |
| Working battery cooling | Thermal headroom is what turns a short flight into a long one |
| 100 g lighter | Every gram is thrust budget and flight time |
| Stronger motors | Authority to actually execute a commanded correction |
| Bluetooth PID tuning | Retune gains at the field without tethering to a laptop |
That last one changed how fast I could iterate more than anything else on the list. Tuning a PID loop is empirical — you fly, you watch the oscillation, you adjust. Doing that over a USB cable means a full landing and teardown per attempt. Doing it over Bluetooth means adjusting between throws.
Result: fully controlled flight, 30-minute battery life, and automatic return-to-sideline so it brings itself back for a battery swap instead of being walked down.
Why this project
It sits at the intersection of most of what I do — CAD and fabrication, embedded control, computer vision, and the sport I’d be at the field for anyway. It’s also the project where nobody handed me a spec: the requirements came from the footage I wanted, and every constraint after that was mine to discover.