My entry into DIY drone engineering using Arduino and LEGO blocks

After weeks of scanning online reviews, I finally purchased a DIY kit from FlyBrix that can be used to build a quadcopter, hexcopter, or octocopter.

My daughter received a standard toy quadcopter for Christmas last year, and while it was fun, it was difficult to control, rather bulky, and there was always the fear of crashing it and breaking it beyond repair. Its cost was nominal, but not insignificant, and her interest in it has waned to the point that it sits in a box on her bookshelf.

I wanted this for myself: the idea of building a flying device out of LEGOs is amazing, let alone some of my other ideas, like setting the hardware within a 2-liter soda bottle to make a R/C boat, or building a simple airfoil and making an actual aircraft.

The lift of each motor is minimal (16 grams of thrust), but in an octocopter configuration, its combined power becomes more interesting.

I will chronicle my work with it here for your reading pleasure. Rest assured there will be plenty of pictures of attempted designs, flights, and (very likely) crashes. No worries, there: it's LEGOs!

I purchased additional batteries so I will always have a ready power supply... and then learned after the order was placed that as a thank-you for posting about the company on social media, I was going to receive a free battery and a pair of extra props. Oh well.