As a part of my personal interest I have decided to built a Drone. Before deciding, I have done a lot of review in the domain of existing UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles).

If you are a newbie like me, the first thing that I can suggest to you is to join the following group My First Drone Beginners Group . It helps to feel that you are not alone. There are a lot of helpful people who can help you at the struggling moment.

First thing that I want to do was building every piece of my drone by myself. Thus, I find it useful to buy a Raspberry Pi2 and 3D print the each printable piece. Existing drones were expensive to me, especially a programmable versions. But if you have a lot of money and do not know where to spend, you can go for a fully programmable DJI Matrice-100 with 3.500 euros cost , or a DJI Phantom 3 between 600 to 1300 euros cost.

My choice is neither of them. I am going to build a DJI F550 like Hexacopter(6 motors). I want a bigger version and decided tonight. If you are interested in Quadcopters(4 motors), DJI F450 style is fine all well.

So I searched for some 3D print methods and sample projects the create my own frame. Just to let you know there are quite a lot online 3D frame print projects where you can inspire from. Following website seemed interesting to me Thingiverse. I like this frame 3Dhubs. But that time, I was thinking of building a quadcopter. But now I will go for an Hexacopter.

As a remark for 3D printing, there are certain things that you should be careful about.

1 )The material (there are types of plastics - strong,flexible...so on)

2 )The size of the piece that you would like to print wrt printer.

3) Total price. (Existing place charge money wrt time it takes to print material*bigger size counts for bigger time+material cost+guidance*optional)

I did research about 3d print , found a printer as well. The cost consists of material cost, printer usage and if necessary guidance. There was a printer available in my university in use which is cheaper. FABLABs look as good option if you are neither from university nor from institution.

Still 3D print is something in my Drone List. But a secondary goal. I am a student. Thus, I find buying a frame cheaper than 3d printing it. For online shopping Hobbyking and Amazon are good options. At least , I used those ones and satisfied with delivery. I bought a Raspberry Pi2 from Amazon and a Naza M-Lite Flight Controller from Hobbyking. I only had problem with transportation during my order from Hobbyking. I prefered to pay 15 euros for transportation with UPS. But it was a total mess. They destroyed my cargo. In addition to this , UPS bill was included a 30 euro extra tax cost for a 70 euros product.

As a lesson learning you can write it down as ; cheap transportation (airmail - post) does not take the attention of tax chargers. For the small sized cargos , they wont check the cost of product to charge huge tax.

To sum up 3D print part, i suggest to buy a cheap kit or frame online, in the case you have budget constraint.

While I was searching every detail, I figured out that there are 3 level of detail in which a drone owner can be in.

The first one is to do every single detail buy yourself. Buying an Arduino or Raspberry and writing all the code by yourself from scratch. As I read estimated time for that is around 1 year if you don't take it too seriously. Raspberry Pi has an operating system in which you can start to code. Some people suggest this detailed way of working for a painful but robust learning.

Some other people prefer less level of detail and buy a ready-to-fly drone. They suggest to buy a mini drone with 50-80 euros and primarily learn how to fly and how to crash with radio controller.

My choice is mid level detail. I decided to buy a flight controller first. This is to create an autonomous drone. It will have GPS module to provide the capability of location calculation to come back. My preference is to buy each pieces wrt my budget.There is an option to buy a kit which includes each an every necessary pieces to construct the drone.

After ensuring a robust fly, learning some acrobatic movements :) I am going to enhance capabilities and put more intelligence. A camera and some sensors to process environmental information , some machine learning for a better fly then it is cooked :)

If I could achieve all those steps in 6 months, I may approach to write my own flight controller on Raspberry Pi. Before that I want to concentrate on creating an AI Drone. Let's see.

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I collected some suggestions with respect to flight controllers.

There are 3 model that I am gonna show.

3DR Pixhawk Pixhawk is very suitable for a robust start. But the cost is around 250 euros just for flight controller.

DJI Naza My current preference is DJI-Naza M-Lite, because it is compatible with my budget and a professional one where you can upgrade to M2 and V2 Versions later on .

HK Pilot This is a cheap flight controller that is available in Hobbyking,

I will be sharing other pieces in detail once I complete to buy. Most probably I will write another post as Part 2 to include must-known informations.