Droduino

Droduino started as a hands-on student project in 2018, conceived and built by a team of three in our school’s fablab. Over several months, we built and soldered a lightweight carbon-fiber racing frame, and integrated an Arduino Pro Micro combined with a pre-made flight controller to handle stabilized flight, battery-warning buzzers, and all command inputs directly from the RC transmitter.

We outfitted the drone with an FPV camera and RGB LEDs, streaming live video to a head-mounted display so pilots could experience true first-person flight. Balancing weight and center-of-gravity, optimizing wiring in tight spaces, and tuning the Betaflight settings on our flight controller were among our biggest challenges.

The result was a responsive and fast drone that immersed users in their own flights—every roll, pitch, and yaw felt immediate through the headset. Droduino remains a highlight of our fablab experience, showcasing how collaborative hardware prototyping and low-level firmware development can come together to create an exhilarating FPV racing platform.