Build Your Own Quadcopter: Getting Started
Learning how a quadcopter actually works, and eventually designing and building my own flight controller and drone airframe from scratch, was a steep climb for me. This project, Full Stack Flight, is what I wish I had on along the way: every layer of the system opened up and explained so anyone curious enough can learn and understand how a quadcopter really works by building one. I made this for people like me!
- 1 Read the Series Start at the beginning and work through the chapters. Learn how every piece of the system works before you spend a dollar. Browse the chapters
- 2 Gather the Parts The complete hardware list for the quadcopter and the transmitter, with links to everything you'll need. Print the airframe while your parts ship. View the parts list
- 3 Join the Community Build alongside others. Ask questions, get unstuck, and share your progress with makers working on the very same thing. Join us on Discord
- 4 Build and Fly! Assemble your airframe, grab the code, flash the microcontroller, and take it up! Get the code
Want to build Centauri together? I'm putting together a small, fully virtual cohort to build Centauri together, start to finish. It isn't open yet, but you can share your interest and help shape it.
Meet Centauri
Centauri is the quadcopter system at the center of Full Stack Flight, a complete flight ecosystem built from scratch in Python for under $150, including:
- The Centauri Quadcopter
- The Pilot's Transmitter
- Wireless Communication Protocol
- Tooling for unpacking and analyzing flight telemetry
My goal in designing Centauri was to make every part of it understandable, so anyone curious enough to look under the hood can learn how a real quadcopter works, and build one themselves.
View the full parts list →Educational Series
A comprehensive breakdown of how Centauri was designed, built, and tested from the ground up. It walks through the full system in a practical way, covering the architecture, hardware, software, transmitter, communication protocol, and telemetry analysis, with the goal of making the engineering behind it understandable enough for anyone to learn from and build on.
Building a Quadcopter Ecosystem from Scratch
Chapter 1: The Centauri Ecosystem
Chapter 2: Defining a Communication Protocol
Chapter 3: Designing a 3D-Printed Airframe
Chapter 4: Hardware and Electronics Package
Chapter 5: The Flight Controller
Chapter 6: Transceiver Platform
Chapter 7: The Pilot's Control Interface
Chapter 8: Unpacking Flight Telemetry for Analysis
Chapter 9: Closing Thoughts
Join the Community
Join our community of makers learning from and building Centauri, sharing their progress, swapping ideas, and helping each other out along the way. Whether you're deep into your own build or just getting started, you'll find people happy to help!
Join us on Discord
Hi, I'm Tim!
I work in software by day and in my free time I love building crazy robotics projects and sharing them with like-minded people. Coming from the software world, I started in robotics with zero hardware know-how. Everything I know about motors, sensors, and flight came from teaching myself, piece by piece, mistake by mistake.
Building a quadcopter flight controller from scratch was my engineering Mount Everest for years. I finally got there in 2023 with Scout, and then rebuilt the whole thing, top to bottom, as Centauri.
Getting there was harder than it should have been. Nearly everything I found online was either a black-box product or a wall of complex mathematical theory. I built Full Stack Flight to share this the joy of robotics and flight with people like me! Curious makers that want to build and understand what they're building.
If you're building something, I'd genuinely love to hear about it. Come say hi in the Discord!