Member-only story

Building a Drone — Getting Started

Introduction to drone mechanics, components and design

Komal Venkatesh Ganesan
The Startup
6 min readAug 2, 2020

Drones are fascinating little machines that are taking over the world. Today, they are being applied in several critical areas such as surveying, shipping/delivery, emergency response, disaster relief, monitoring — crops and wildlife, aerial photography, geographic mapping and so on.

Learning drone-engineering will expose you to an amazing world of possibilities. Whether you are a software engineer or just a hobbyist wanting to fly, it is an immersive experience like no other. It will even enable you to develop Autonomous Drones with modern machine learning tools and RaspberryPIs.

This getting started guide will give you an overview of drone design and introduce you to the various components involved.

A quadcopter drone that I built recently. (Photo by Author: Komal Venkatesh Ganesan)

There are various types of drones — from fixed-wing RC planes to hexacopters and even more advanced designs. But as you might know, a quadcopter is easily the most famous of them all. It is a helicopter with 4 rotors that generally have two spinning in the clockwise(CW) direction and the other two in counter-clockwise(CCW) direction, bringing the total angular momentum to zero — allowing the drone hover in place.

Design outline

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

The Startup
The Startup

Published in The Startup

Get smarter at building your thing. Follow to join The Startup’s +8 million monthly readers & +772K followers.

Komal Venkatesh Ganesan
Komal Venkatesh Ganesan

Written by Komal Venkatesh Ganesan

Engineer — Software / AI / Electronics / Technology. In pursuit of fundamental understanding of elemental physics/science | LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/2DN8rfP

Responses (3)

Write a response

I can’t wait for the follow up!

Thanks, Komal. I love to build things.
Am watching carefully.

Where is the next article?