For the past month, whenever I’ve got some spare time, I have been chasing the unusual goal of building my own drone. It all started on my daily task of trying to get my students engaged on my academy lessons in the superficially boring subject of Automatical Systems. Despite the subject sounding really intriguing and interesting, when you start learning it at the University of Málaga, well, it is just joining boxes and getting some strange algebraic functions that have lots of esses floating around. Some students may find it cool, most of them find it boring and just a subject where you have to memorize the steps to get to the problem’s result. As it normally happens, even though the classes are well taught, the objective being studied gets lost behind the theory.

But how can something that is automatic be boring? That can’t be! Well yeah, grass grows automatically and it is boring to watch, but c’mon, I’m not talking about that.

I had to do something about this! I could not withstand all this indifference towards the beauty of engineering. And then, it came into my mind…

How about building a quadcopter and showing the inner mechanisms using the tools given by the professors at the University? That way, my students would be (hopefully) thrilled to enter my class avid of knowledge, knowing that someday some warlord would want to be allies with him for his familiarity with unmanned flying objects. Wouldn’t that be cool…

So, as an ambitious student myself, I took the task/burden of searching and investigating sources that could assist me on my journey; then, after countless webpages, several articles under paywall and forums, it hit me: this was going to be no easy feat… Alas!

Well, that’s why I started writing this blog (although I suppose it should be better called a diary). Stay tuned for updates about all the prototypes I destroy! And maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two from my experience. I sure have learned a lot in the past weeks!