Ok, I’ll admit, diving into the world of drones by building my own drone AND transmitter from scratch, probably wasn’t the best idea, but here I am. For this project, I designed and 3D printed a drone transmitter with a custom circuit board and an acrylic faceplate so I can show off all my fancy electronics!

I had to implement a sort-of custom TX communication protocol using two Arduino Nano’s that were communicating via NRF24L01 modules, and it actually ended up working great!

In the future, I’d like to make this project much more universal so it can work with any flight controller, and so it transmits using a standard protocol, but for now I simply used PPM as the RX protocol. Unfortunately, that means the drone must have a flight controller that supports PPM via an analog pin, which can be difficult to find.

In the end, I was actually amazed with how well this transmitter turned out, and I definitely plan on rebuilding a more advanced on in the future, but for now I need to learn how to actually fly a drone!

If you’re interested in building one of these, instructions for this project can be found down below. Enjoy and thanks for supporting this channel!