Member-only story
Building a Drone — Getting Started
Introduction to drone mechanics, components and design
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.


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.