Weight and Thrust Considerations

To make sure the copter can achieve flight, motors must be able to achieve thrust greater than the force of gravity acting on the copter.  Assuming a goal of maximum thrust being twice the force from gravity, each motor must be able to achieve enough thrust to lift one quarter of twice the mass of the vehicle.

Battery Mass: 370.5g
Frame, ESC, Motor, Pi, Crius AIOP Mass: 750g
Kinnect Mass: 390.5g

Total Vehicle Mass: 1.511Kg
Mass/motor: 378g

Therefore each motor should be capable of enough thrust to lift 750g.

Current Schedule

• Cut out (Sept 8, 2016)
• Order Board from OSHPARK (Sept 8, 2016)
• Order Parts from Mouser (Sept 8, 2016)
• API setup for Multiwii (Sept 8, 2016)
• Kinect Depth Data Reading (Sept 8, 2016)
• Basic Automatic Flight Software Framework (Sept 15, 2016)
• Custom PCB Wired Up (Sept 22, 2016)
• Motor Test, No props (Sept 22, 2016)
• Hand Guided Flight Simulation   (Sept 27, 2016)
• First Flight Test (October 6, 2016)

Battery Regulator

The Kinect for the Xbox 360 uses two power sources: +5V from the USB and 12V 1.2A from an AC adaptor or the Xbox 360 itself.  In order to use the Kinect for our SLAM drone, we needed to provide the second power source independently.  Since the copter is running on 14.4V LiPo, we needed to create a power regulator circuit to step the voltage down and limit the current to 1 amp.

We decided to use TI's LM2675, a 12V 1A buck regulator in a small IC package:

LM2675 12V 1A Voltage Regulator

Copper pour for our first layout.

First layout for our 12V 1A Regulator

We ordered the first prototype for the board on 9-5:

OSHPark PCB Visualization

Acrylic Mount

To secure the devices to the copter's body, we created a custom mount cut from acrylic:

Designs for Acrylic Mount

The center slats connect directly to the bottom of our frame, on the top mount we attached the Pi and Flight Controller, then under the second mount we attached the Kinect:

Original plan to mount components to quadcopter.  The 3D model for the Kinect and Pi were found on Sketchup's 3D Warehouse.