Kinetis Drone: Frame Construction with Graupner Race Copter Alpha 250 Q

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Yesterday I started with something I had in my mind for a very long time:
to build my own DIY drone based on a Kinetis 🙂

Kinetis Quadrocopter Drone

Kinetis Quadrocopter Drone

I did some research over the last months and learned a lot about how to build drones and quadrocopters. Yes, you get excellent ones for the money, but hey: it is all about learning new things ;-). I was on the search for a good quadrocopter frame, so I visited a store in Lucerne, and finally found one which I wanted to use: the Graupner Alpha 250Q.

It comes all the frame parts, 4 brushless DC motors and ESC’s, and has a compartment to store battery/electronics. The Alpha 250Q is intended for first-view race events and as FPV (First Person View) copter, but this is not what I have originally in mind. I want to develop and use my board, firmware and remote control. And this kit is ideal for me as it fits my needs.

The kit comes with all the frame parts, bolts, 4 motors and ESC (Electronic Speed Controllers). I added a battery (14.8V, LiIon, 4S, 26.6Wh), extra rotor blades and an adapter cable for my charging station:

Quadrocopter Graupner Alpha 250Q

Parts for Quadrocopter Graupner Alpha 250Q

The frame is made of carbon fibre which holds the four brushless DC motors:

Base Frame with Motors

Base Frame with Motors

The motor wiring and the four ESC’s are placed in a special compartment on the underside of the drone. Here it still looks a bit messy:

Engine Control Units

Engine Control Units

But everything gets covered under a bottom plate:

Base Plate

Base Plate

Here a picture with battery in the compartment and a possible place for the FRDM board:

FRDM-K22F with Quadrocopter

FRDM-K22F with Quadrocopter

I have not decided yet on the FRDM board I want to use. For now I consider the FRDM-K22F board, as it has a powerful ARM Cortex-M4F on it and connectors for Bluetooth and nRF24L01+:

Freescale FRDM-K22F Board

Freescale FRDM-K22F Board

💡 Note that the SD card connector shown in the picture is not on the board by default.

As IMU I plan to use the FRDM-STBC-AGM01 9-Axis Inertial Measurement Board:

FRDM-STBC-AGM01 Board

Initially, I plan to write my simple firmware. But I consider as well to port the OpenPilot framework to Kinetis. As most of the time: using Open Source software and tools :-).

Happy Droning 🙂

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15 thoughts on “Kinetis Drone: Frame Construction with Graupner Race Copter Alpha 250 Q”

  1. Great news, I have been considering this too. We have bought most of the items and made our own frame, one 3D printed entirely on plastic and one mixed with aluminium u-tubes. Will try to follow this closely. We were planning to use an open-source firmware, we bought the board too to start from a working assembly. Building one with Kinetis will be awesome.

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  4. 450 Euro? Die spinnen wohl.

    What are you planning to use for wireless control? I’ve never used the nordic radios or bluetooth, but I thought the range on those wasn’t all that great.
    The radio control standard seems to be 2.4 GHz now.

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    • got the chassis with 4 motors and 4 ESC for less than 190 Euros :-).
      I’m using right now bluetooth to remotely control (with a shell) the FRDM-K22 board. I want to use that for now as a simple in-house communication channel. The nRF24L01+ I have used in other projects, and open-field it has a range of around 200-300 meters. There are variants with better antennas which I believe go up to 500 m. I was thinking to buy a normal remote controller with a receiver, will see how it goes.

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  5. Hi Erich,

    I was planning on porting some existing flight control firmware to one of Freescale’s Cortex-M4 offerings (K64F) with the AGM01 so that it could be deployed to the UDOO Neo once that arrives. I would do the controller in MQX classic with the provided MQXLITE sensor fusion libraries, and then use the MCC library to communicate with path planning algorithms (ROS) on the A9 core. The PX4 API seems to be very well designed for this: https://pixhawk.org/dev/tour

    I am curious as to your choice of OpenPilot as it seems a bit dated. A PX4 firmware (https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/tree/master/src) port could be fairly smooth if we can get it running on an M4 board. There is already a config here: https://github.com/PX4/NuttX/tree/master/nuttx/configs/freedom-kl25z

    Angus

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    • Hi Angus,
      I have not finally deciced on the flight controller software, but so far I was leaning towards OpenPilot, because it is using FreeRTOS which has many great features and tools, and because it is widely used. The other option is the PX4 firmware which you mention too. We are using PX4 in other projects. It is a great firmware if you use it with the PixHawk hardware, but seems to be very complex, and not easy to port to a different board/hardware. NuttX would be yet another hurdle to overcome. Again, I’m still evaluating options, and thanks for your comments too! But for sure we won’t use something like MQX as it is proprietary and not open source, and only could be used for Freescale devices.

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      • Hi Erich,

        I completely follow your reasoning, FreeRTOS should be perfectly compatible with the Neo as well. I’d be excited to see the sensor fusion library ported from MQXLITE to FreeRTOS also. I’ll be getting started on a drone soon and will be happy to share any generic code others may find useful.

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