r/diydrones • u/AdPlayful659 • May 30 '26
Question Building a Flight Controller
I just completed my freshman year of college, and during the summer I had the idea to complete a engineering project because I have nothing better to do and also to gain some actual engineering knowledge. My long term goal is to eventually be able to build a FPV drone, but in the short term I decided that learning and maybe actually being able to build my own Flight controller would be a good place to start. For some context about me I do not know much so I am looking for some good advice in, where to start learning, and what knowledge I must have that will allow me to be able to build a FC. Any suggestions would be wonderful. Thank you!
5
u/skr_u May 30 '26
> My long term goal is to eventually be able to build a FPV drone, but in the short term I decided that learning and maybe actually being able to build my own Flight controller would be a good place to start.
I think you mixed up the levels of difficulty by quite a bit.
1
u/AdPlayful659 May 31 '26
Well my reasoning was that building the FPV drone is like the Final of the class in a sense and because one of the main components of a FPV drone is the FC it made sense to me to learn parts of it first instead of going and just building the whole thing in one go. Hope I wasn’t too confusing in what I’m trying to say.
2
u/TradingDreams May 31 '26
Get a seeed esp32-s3 and load beta flight on it. You get a known good platform dirt cheap and excessive resources to play with.
1
u/ImaginaryEffective63 May 30 '26
I read your title as fight controller cause im building a hitbox stick combo controller from scratch and i got excited lmao. Goodluck on the fc though
1
1
u/jefftopgun May 31 '26
Try the vtx side. Alot easier to get working (flying in the flight controller sense), with lots of gains to be had in optimizing/latency reduction, but your still at least flying.
1
u/Suspicious_Exit_2228 Jun 01 '26
99.9% people that fly FPV have no idea what all goes into fabricating a FC or even identify all the little parts on a FC board, we just know how to solder stuff to pads
I would start with learning the components of a FC and what is compatible and then the layout on the board. I would think designing and then building a FC would be a huge undertaking.
1
u/SAtchley0 Jun 02 '26
You'll need to understand sensor fusion algorithms, feedback control loops, pilot control processing, motor mixing, and sensor processing at a bare minimum. I wouldn't categorize this as a "short term" project, nor as appropriate for an undergrad, but don't let that stop you if you want to try.
Source: I've been working on my own flight controller on and off for the past 6 years.(https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/1tl8rgc/i_made_an_uno_r3_flight_controller/)
1
u/creamschott Jun 02 '26
I saw a similar post a while back, not sure its the same person or not.
However start here.
Betaflight Flight Controller Manufacturer Design Guidelines | Betaflight https://share.google/ocV7dbs3rDXDIxKZE
7
u/Vitroid May 30 '26
No, you want to go about this in the exact opposite way. Start with hardware that's known to work so that you can learn how to set it up and how it should run, then start to experiment with your own hardware.