Racing Drone Builds

Key Skills: Electronics, Fabrication, 3D Printing

Building and flying racing drones has been one of my favorite hobbies since 8th grade - it has the parts of engineering that I enjoy most.

Sometimes people think of drones as slow moving, clumsy machines. That’s because they’re thinking of drones meant for aerial photography. In contrast, racing drones are nimble, fast, and wildly powerful. A typical 5” prop diameter racing drone weighs around 500g and can fly at up to 80mph. They’re stripped down to only their essential components in order to do so, and while these drones are extremely robust, every pilot knows that crashes are inevitable.

There is only one way to master the art of building drones: crashing, rebuilding, and repeating. The hobby is a perpetual trial by fire that guides you to soldering, wire routing, component placement, and mounting perfection. As you build and rebuild your drone, your technique adapts to consider the failure modes of the system, which are predominantly electrical failures (voltage spikes, overheating) and physical impact/mechanical failures (seized motors or dislodged components).

A challenge with building drones is the need to work within numerous constraints (cost, size, weight, power). I find that there is a surprising correlation between the number of good engineering principles applied and the amount of fun you end up having in the hobby. Flight characteristics improve as you minimize sources of vibration and electrical noise, durability improves when you mount components correctly and incorporate compliance into the right places, and video and control range improve when antennas are placed both securely, safely, and far away from noisy components.