The Thopter Foundry

August 5th, 2023

By: Vincent Lam

For this build session, we focus more on our power distribution and its relation to our drive system. At this point, we had also realized that we will require a drone operator license, even if the drone is operating autonomously 😦

First, we took a look at the ESCs and realized that these ESCs had Battery Eliminator Circuits, which would regulate the ESC’s output voltage, which in this case is 5V/3A. We looked further into this and found that our BEC was likely to be a Linear BEC, rather than a Universal BEC. This is likely to be a disadvantage for us, as motors may operate higher than the manufacturer’s suggested input voltage value, which would allow the motors to spin at a higher RPM at the cost of potential heat damage to the motors. 

The last order of business was to decide how to send power to the on board computer using our 11.1V Lithium Polymer battery without frying it. We had thought about the possibility of using voltage division to send a lower voltage to the Arduino, or using a voltage regulator to achieve the same effect. In the end, we had decided to use a separate 3.7V LiPo battery to power the Arduino since that is the exact voltage it requires.