Drone Instructable: reglisse44 – “The Drone Pi” (Raspberry Pi 2 B)

The Drone Pi

Here is an interesting 8-step Instructable from reglisse44. A little warning though, it’s a French project, so the english is a little rough around the edges. This project combines a number of projects, including MultiWii and runs on the Raspberry Pi 2 B hardware. (If you’d like your very own Raspiberry Pi, you can purchase it from Amazon.) One of the biggest hurdles to overcome, using hardware like the Rapsberry Pi, is the weight, however reglisse44 and team were able to overcome that.

This project is a quadcopter powered by a MultiWii and controlled with a Raspberry Pi 2 B. This quadcopter has a particularity because he’s using 2 differents controller and he could be pilot with 2 differents devices : a remote control or a smartphone.

The Multiwii controller look after the 4 motors and distribute the power to supply them whereas the Raspberry Pi collect the informations who came from the smartphone and relay them to the Multiwii. You can also take pictures and Full HD video too !!! A Pi camera is places on the frontground of the Drone Pi. It ca recording or just take a picture to a USB key.

The frame of this quadcopter is constituating with different recycled elements and it was another challenge : create a quadcopter with sometimes heavy elements… But we did it !

The Drone Pi

Raspberry Pi Logo

About the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is the second generation Raspberry Pi. It replaced the original Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+ in February 2015. Compared to the Raspberry Pi 1 it has:

• A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU
• 1GB RAM
• 4 USB ports
• 40 GPIO pins
• Full HDMI port
• Ethernet port
• Combined 3.5mm audio jack and composite video
• Camera interface (CSI)
• Display interface (DSI)
• Micro SD card slot
• VideoCore IV 3D graphics core

Because it has an ARMv7 processor, it can run the full range of ARM GNU/Linux distributions, including Snappy Ubuntu Core, as well as Microsoft Windows 10.

MultiWii Logo

About MultiWii

MultiWii is a general purpose software to control a multirotor RC model. It can now use various sensors but was initially developed to support Nintendo Wii console gyroscopes and accelerometers. We can find these sensors in the extensions of the Nintendo WiiMote: Wii Motion Plus and Wii Nunchuk. This project was an opportunity to develop my own software on an Arduino platform. The achieved stability is excellent for FPV and allows any kind of acrobatics.

The software is for the moment able to control a tricopter, a quadcopter or a hexacopter.