Building a Drone Flight Controller FROM SCRATCH! - Trying MultiWii in 2022
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ม.ค. 2025
- Shawn has done it again! Flight controllers nowadays are very well made and widely available. But that wasn't always the case! Back in the day, some flight controllers had to be hacked together from spare parts. But what if we tried to build our own flight controller today, with all our other modern drone hardware?
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FPV Freestyle Pilots / Hosts -
Drew Camden [Le Drib]
/ ledribfpv
Alex Vanover [CaptainVanover]
/ @captainvanover
Shawn Morrison [Let's Fly RC]
/ letsflyrc
Caleb Wright [BubbyFPV]
/ bubbyfpv
Production Team
Drew Camden - Producer
Christian Kapper - Editor / Camera
MUSIC BY:
7db
/ 7decibels
Outro Song - Above Ground from Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
(Composed by Koji Kondo)
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I built a MultiWii quad for my research project at university 2 years ago. It was fun searching through old forums trying to get as much information as possible. I also built my own frame out of aluminum...which was a mistake, cuz if I landed hard, an arm would bend and never bend back into the original position...so PID tuning became a hell of a thing to do each time. Still got a grade A in it lol.
I would LOVE to see a video building an OG drone with the KK board (not KK2), generic airplane motors and ESC's, and an OG radio like the DX6i!
The Kaveman Kwad episode was close to that.
You don't get more OG than multiwii
The old kk board with turn pots.. I have a tri still flying with one
Have a few unused kk2 boards, and some cc3ds
KK, APM 2.5, Naze32 All in the "history" box.
Best part was the armadillo. The armadillo is now the new Rotor Riot mascot.
ye
@@rickyohara1081 rickyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
Armadillo is the state bird of Tx. 😜
13:50 - They figured out i-Term for yaw baby. It is king.
15:00 - KISS PID gains. "It's sooo good". 😀
Love the adhd outro
The outro was amazing lol, the best so far
Awesome video! I started flying fpv in 2017 and i didnt know it was so hard to fly them back in the day..... respect to you guys who did fly that way!!!
Love learning about the history of quadcopters and especially FPV just as much as love the energy and excited this quartet of characters always provides. Shaun's creations rule!! So fun watching y'all fly!
I'm so impressed, you rock Shawn,
This was freaking awesome!!! I was waiting for you guys to tell Bubby that our quads used to be made out of wood! He wouldn't have believed any of you. Shawn, this was seriously cool, nice job. Are you going to make the code available anywhere? This is a project I would like to try. And thanks to everyone for the great time at Kwad Camp this past weekend. It was amazing!
Multiwii is open source.
I got in 2018 so this is something I can't relate with but looks really cool to see how much the community made it work to set the motion and make possible what we have today.
Interesting episode guys. I enjoyed the look into the past, it was pretty sketchy.
Certainly glad I got into FPV after all that; grateful for all those advances.
I still have all my ancient early multiwii boards tucked away on one of my spare tool boxes properly prrserved in an anti static bag like they ancient relics 😅
It's wild thinking about the early days of Multiwii compared to now 😯 I feel spoiled as fuck now, roughly ~10 years later, rocking shit like 128khz 32 bit 4in1 esc's, ~470mhz H7 FC's, toothpick aio builds, micros, elrs, fucking digital video & the list goes on & on 🔥🙃 we went hard on this drone shit frfrfr
fax. i was lucky to get into it on a 3s KISS 1.03 FC alien rr5. i thought that was the bees knees. still have that old.
alien and i think i'm gonna put a fettec osd on it and fly it again. i know i wasnt really "ruffin it" but im proud of myself for getting into the hobby with relatively limited resources. fpv has come a long way over the last 5 years. let alone 10!
Best content, from anyone, than I’ve seen in a long while!
That was the best outro! Please finish all episodes with an armadillo
Paris v4 on a frame with aluminium arms, Plush 30A ESCs with an external configurator card... I don't miss those times.
I still have a self-made MultiWii flight controller, I just ran across it the other day and chuckled to myself. It's in the same box with a KK board (which actually flew pretty well in comparison....)
Wow Shawn is amazing 👏 bravo brother your smarts and personality are an integral part for Rotor Roit!
Loved the episode! Fun stuff!
Impressive engineering skills Shawn!
I loved this episode!! Man Shawn is a mad scientist genius!!
One of the main reasons why yaw sucked was because we were using airplane motors and escs which they didn’t have any kind of break. Good memories tho thanks for the video
i stopped watching rotor riot for a while... but im back in now! this was fun to watch! thanxs
Cool stuff! I built the flight controller for a drone for my uni project last year using a PIC18F4321. I managed to get it to fly and level itself running the code at 50Hz haha.
It was a little easier because I used a GY-25 chip which outputs angle rather than having to address the gyro and accelerometer directly, but even still it was a difficult feat to get that bird in the air!
For comparison, my Microcontroller had a 32MHz clock, 512 Bytes of Flash memory and 256 Bytes of RAM whereas a modern F7 FC runs at 216MHz, with 512KB of Flash memory and 256KB of RAM!
Hey man! I'm a software developer and i want to learn how to build drones from scratch can u please guide me or provide me with links of resources from where i can learn
Man, this is what I have always wanted to do. Definitely brings things back to the days of Kaptain Kook and the multiwii stuff. Love the stress test. Great to see how far we have come.
now this, is AWESOME!!
respect for the work done, the hours of late nights in which you search for information and program and adjust the parameters to make some pieces of metal and plastic and some magnets fly where you want.
They need to make a drone that is contrôles by a wii remote. Like in wii resort dogfights.
that armadillo was too calm did yous check for a collar?
Shawn you are awesome bro!! Props!!🤜🤜💯
i started with cc3d crazy how far its come
Them "good" ol days... I buried that hassle a long time ago, thanks for digging it up...
Up down up down left right left right b a start hilarious
Armadillos are blind af, but they can hear well. I've never seen an armadillo not run like hell as soon as it heard anything close. I see them almost daily in Texas. Good episode!
All he heard was a bunch of good guys, so he didn't took off...
@@13FPV lol, What does that make me?
@@RCOverKill A scary sounding good guy... 😉
Awesome episode! There had to be a lot of input from the legendary Kapper Clan!
I've just started with the high powered gear we have now. I have a whole new level of appreciation of the progress made
I just had a dillo come up the porch on me last night. Scared the crap out of me. 😂
Trippy spin was so off tap you guys started seeing armadillos haha
Back in the day I started flying with a push button remote. Beat that you kids ! LOL. That was cool, when I finally got into quads, we where using clean flight, I was lucky enough to start late in the Hobby of drones. Thanks for the video.
Yep, I started with a multiwi and then went CC3d in 2014. It is amazing how far flight controllers have come. We use to have a separate osd as well the first ones however there was no way to know your voltage except by feel and time. I remember flying new packs one after another timing them and inching up the timer till I got the flight time close.
We all used to use the tape to mount everything and Velcro straps for batteries that always ejected in a crash.
Alright Shawn’s a genius
Sweet video I love this stuff it's so cool where we are now! U guys should build one with a cc3d board
Awesome bro💥💥🥂
This was such a fun video! I love seeing how far the hobby has come
Bubbys reaction to zero throttle had me laughing hard 😆
Pfft he started on Radix on BF 3.5.7 (butter fw btw, still use it) most of us have been around way before that - born in the darkness 😉
Fact that there is a min throttle setting in the code that you can keep the motors spinning at low throttle.
I've been fiddling with kicad designing a f7 FC for fun. It's definitely a pretty interesting idea. I just think it would be cool as hell to have a quad I built with my own electronics I also built.
Shawn, can we try this with an ESP32 and a faster gyro? I'm down to help port the code over! I'd love to see you guys fly something like that. I'd give it a go, but I don't fly (yet...but I've been learning a ton from y'all!)
I was thinking a Feather, just to give it some extra flying juju since the firmware seems to just do what it feels like lol
I'm so glad you made this video! Been trying to explain to people how awsome our gear is now! 7 year fpv pilot here and Noone believes me! Lol
I'd like to see a gyro attached to a momentary switch so when you push your bumper or what ever switch you place it on it'll turn off stability mode.
Basically a momentary acro mode with stability after releasing the momentary switch or vice versa.
+ the Armidillo just walking up to you guys like that is awesome, think he wants to be part of the crew. 😅
I think you mean Tactical Assault Possum* xD
This was the best video from rotorroit
you can literty still buy multiwii's from readytoflyquads
Funny. I looked that up, also. 😂
Amazing outro 🤣
So good started years ago with Multiwii. My first drone with Multiwii still works great😅
lol. I junked a whole box of that crap a few weeks ago. The amount of time we spent getting that stuff working. Wow.
@@r3beatty yea just crazy 😅 but it was fun too and the feeling when everything works was awesome 😁
its crazy how fast flight controllers evolved. while I havent flew a wii FC, I did start out with the kk2.1 back in 2012-2013 on my 250 hobby king frame. I was more into microdrones though so I was using a lot of hubsan and walkera FC with brushed motors. The very first configurable FC I did build with was the AlienWii with dsm2 satelite RX. They were $50 for a fully configurable FC in MultiWii. I didnt get into 200+ size drones until I built a NAZE32 drone.
i just got into fpv this year properly and didnt know this about wii gyros.. i have several wii's and wii u's! bit of a collector.
What a cool video.
Have y’all ever tried flying with Axial Flux motors? Would love to see how they impact quads
Bubby Freaking out with old technology was the best part. Young people are very lucky of the technology that we have now.
There was a lot of very interesting builds on that picnic table. I'm excited to see those videos
That looked fun. I've been at FPV drones since 2018. They were pretty well sussed out by the time I got to 'em. I was into r/c in the late 70s, building 1/12th-scale Tamiya kits, and using a 2-channel radio, before taking a three-and-a-half decade break. I never dreamed of the kit we have today back then. Even 2018 gear is literally Buck Rogers stuff compared to what was on offer in the late 1970s. And much, much cheaper, relatively speaking.
Oh man poor Bubby was too young to get the contra code joke I loved it though. 😂
hey so whats up with the xair antenna on those goggles?? i see the coax running through a hole in the goggles instead of to the sma??
That is a custom antenna setup that Hugo made for me. Hoping he starts making them for everyone.
The cable bypasses the rp-sma and goes straight to the ufl on the pcb of the goggles. Eliminating the potential for loss at the connector. And it looks way cleaner and fits in my backpack better. :)
this was really interesting, im 40 but never experienced the beginnnings of this. only started fpv quads in last year
There is no way Drew is this exciting when he flys off camera.
You guys are dealing so well with the awful latency that I suggest a long range experiment with a mobile phone on cellular network as an FPV cam (and maybe ELRS for control).
Try flying a drone located in Italy when you are physically in Detroit. I did that with Skypersonic and it was soooo much fun. Tons of latency. Almost had to fly in angle mode to keep from crashing.
I did manage to fly manual mode, but, it was very difficult.
I started with the kk board. Which was nice because you didn't need a configurator. Then thr kk2 came out and we had a screen on the board to do our pids
Flies about as well as my DJI Naza flight controller that was controlling my first acrobatic quad with SimonK firmware
Going back to the roots of quadcopter technology..
WHAT THE PURPOSE OF THAT HUGE GOPRO PRINT?? AND WHERE TO GET IT, THANK YOU
Im new to this, the props are supposed to spin at zero throttle? 4:47
Can you upload the arduino code? I'm curious about the coding too!
Oh, yes. My first drone aside plane was tricopter on MultiWii. It had aluminium arms like 300mm with 9inch props. It flew like a cow but was capable to take off with cam and capture some video. Thank you for reminding me this old days.
my first drone used the Paris v4 multiwii board. I bought it pre-soldered because I didn't have a soldering iron at the time. My second board was an Eagle something and it had dip switches to select number of motors and layout plus a normal and acro mode. then the kk board and about six kk2 boards I still have the Paris and a couple kk2 boards.
Awesome work guys 😊😊😊
Can we install OSD on arduino?
My man gave him the Contra code 🤣🤣🤣🤣
great fun....... i remember working up the courage to try get minim osd going, 5 boards later i gave up,
I also had lots of problems with minimosd boards.
@@LetsFlyRC Rotor riot = pure fun ! Greetings from Ukraine!:)
omg! guys I was just at Bill Frederick Park flying with friends for my bday. hoping to see you guys and vanover. Did meet some UCF students with their hexacopter trying to make it deliver food.
Kiss still uses mostly the Multiwii configurator, my first build was Microscisky which was a brushed Multiwii and on the first flight it burnt a fet and I almost cried.
we love drones
It's interesting why you had problems with yaw. I am working on an "old-school" Miltiwii tricopter now (using Miltiwii 2.4) and the tricopter needs a very large stick deflection right to yaw right, while yawing left is easy. Maybe there is a bug in the code?
Man, I love this lol. I just started flying drones exactly a week ago, but I've hacked together microcontrollers and shit for years. I followed this trend a long ass time ago, and I really wish I would have gotten more into the drones. Really cool to see this again, and I think I'm going yo put some stuff together today lol.
afaik, which might be outdated as heck: multiwii depends on other sensors to improve calibration and filtering on the gyro, even if you aren't actually using them directly for stabilisation.
I have a few Tricopters on Multiwii, they fly nice. If you just cruise around and fly smooth they are fine both Los and fpv. I recently converted a tri to Betaflight and am still tuning the yaw. It's ok but Multiwii is closer to being very good on the stock PID's.
They're called Texas speed bumps.
I started with the multiwii, nice to remember ancient times
From time to time i asked myself why it was so cool those days to just roll or flip, well now i remember, because it was just a thing those days ya 😂👍🏻 I remember when a friend came up with a copter that has airmode on it, it was soo mindblowing that the props kept spinning 😂 ohh man those days
It's so much fun to build something like this even today. It all comes down to saving few μs in a loop just to finish in 4 ms for ESCs or else things start falling :D
Now, I'm so excited to write FC for Raspberry Pi Pico
The flying up hills both ways got me laughing 😂
Nothing beats good old nostalgia, right!^^
cheers, friends
Is it possible to build a drone with reverse and having the throttle in a separate location, maybe where the tilt camera wheel would be?
I'd love to see what responses you could get from an esp32 or pico or something that has a slightly higher clock speeds and would it be able to read the gyro a little quicker
just shows how much fc and the firmware is doing. my quad with cheap motors, source one frame and f7 fc flies so damn good, it does what you tell it, and even in high winds when you let go the sticks it holds its angle absolute solid.
ive thought about building a quad with no fc and jjust usig mixing just to see how impossible it would be to fly.
I tried starting with multiwii but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work, so someone eventually recommended the naze32 to me, which is what I ultimately started with
Had a sick idea for a episode I would love to see. Make a few identical builds and try to bind them all to the same model and try to get them to fly in formation 😂 would be fun to see if it could work
Would it be possible to have a quad without a flight controller at all? Just have it use motor mixing in the radio and the ESCs run straight off of PWM from the receiver? So it would be a fully manual drone with no PID loop at all to help with stabilization.
Unfortunately, it's not possible, a quadcopter is technically an example of a Non-Linear system, meaning that naturally the change of its output is not proportional to its input, also at the same time there are too many disturbances from the environment that influences the system. So in practice, it cannot stabilize on its own, and if we humans act as stabilizers of those systems, we cannot react fast enough, that is why we need some kind of controller that can react fast enough to change the system, like an embedded system.
@@dubber889 At at the very least that sounds like a hilarious video to me!
Great video. Drew flies that fc better than I fly modern. Total legend. Dillo don’t care
It's amazing to see so much technology advancement, from the ancient and somewhat sketchy 8-bit flight computers to now, very nice superscalar in-order Cortex M7 microcontroller if you are thirsty for CPU performance, even port our favorite flight software on to Texas Instruments VLIW DSP if you are mad enough to design a powerful flight computer on a $15 - 20 VLIW DSP. What an exciting time we live in.
Worth noting that some arduino boards now come with onboard IMU - for example the Arduino 33 IOT.
You didn't had to use pwm for reciever, ppm and some serial protocols(even sbus) were available in MultiWii 2.4
Yeah, I saw the ppm later in the build process. I didn’t see sbus, maybe I missed it. It was after I had already wired everything up PPM. Originally, I was trying to use the first firmware version, but, couldn’t get it working.
@@LetsFlyRC you would however need an external inverter for sbus and also if you are using a atmega328 based board with 1 UART then you would need to unplug the reciever to configure the board. With a little code tweak one can add ibus too.
It's obsolete but fun to try
Quad might be too small. When i flew my multiwii it was on a 450 deadcat frame (later upgraded to a KK2). It wasn't very agile so i guess the gyro could keep up.
The Yaw was pretty bad, especially as i was coming from a 450 helicopter, and yeah, i still have a couple of Y frames (a full size and a miniquad).