Building Your Own Drones: A Beginners' Guide to Drones, UAVs, and ROVs

Absolutely no experience needed!
Build your drone, step-by-step, with this full-color, hands-on guide!

 

You’ve heard about drones. You’ve seen drones. Now, build your own—it’s a lot easier than you think!

 

Drones are the newest frontier for the DIY/maker community, and you don’t need to be a technical expert to build one. John Baichtal, the #1 author of hardware hacking books for beginners, will teach you all the skills you need.

 

First, Baichtal shows you the amazing drones others have built. Then, he walks you through several complete projects: quadcopters, UAVs, ROVs, and more. Not ready to start from scratch? No problem: Baichtal helps you choose from today’s best new kits.

 

Hundreds of full-color step-by-step photos teach you every step, every skill. When you’re ready for more advanced concepts, Baichtal explains them in plain English.

• Discover what drones are and why they’re so exciting
• Explore today’s most imaginative projects, from 3D-printed mini quadcopters to floating robot armies
• Compare kits, from $200 up: Parallax ELEV-8, DJI Phantom 2 Vision+, OpenROV, Actobotics Nomad, Brooklyn Aerodrome Flack, and more
• Create your own practical Drone Builder’s Workbench
• Build complete rocket, blimp, waterborne, and automotive drones
• Construct both fully autonomous and radio-controlled drones
• Choose and assemble your chassis (airframe), motor, props, flight control, power system, accessories, and software
• Integrate Arduino to make radio-controlled drones operate autonomously
• Teach a drone to navigate via RFID tags
• Learn all the basic electronics and programming you’ll need

John Baichtal has written or edited over a dozen books, including the award-winning Cult of LEGO (No Starch Press, 2011), LEGO hacker bible Make: LEGO and Arduino Projects (Maker Media, 2012) with Adam Wolf and Matthew Beckler, Robot Builder (Que, 2014), and Basic Robot Building with LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 (Que, 2012). His most recent book is Maker Pro (Maker Media, 2014), a collection of essays and interviews describing life as a professional maker. John lives in Minneapolis with his wife and three children.