A Quadcopter Flight Controller

Abstract

The thesis was made for learning and hobby purposes. It can be used as a reference what things should be considered when building and programming a quadcopter. The thesis also covers what limitations and possibilities LoRa technology introduces to controlling a drone. The scope of the thesis was to design and build a quadcopter and a joystick, implement a flight controller on Arduino systems and use LoRa technology to establish communication between the quadcopter and the joystick. A custom circuit board was built to connect the microcontrollers, sensors and other devices together and to provide them a supply voltage.

The flight controller is a program that reads user input and sensor measurements to calculate the current and target orientation of the quadcopter. It uses a PID controller to calculate the control orientation of the quadcopter and controls the motor speed accordingly. The joystick communicates to the quadcopter using LoRa technology and one element of the thesis was to find out if it is a suitable technology for this use case.

The current implementation of the flight controller is incomplete. The hardware, communication and most of the flight controller's features are working, but the flight controller is not able to stabilize the quadcopter properly.