Description
Wanting to build a drone that actually flies, most tutorials put you off early: a flight controller board costs real money, the code is a framework you cannot read, and one crash writes off the whole board. ESP-Drone pushes that down to an ESP32 and an MPU6050 — coreless motors, plastic propellers and a small lithium cell, all cheap parts you can buy anywhere, so a crash costs a propeller. Firmware and schematic are open.
The control path is just as simple. The ESP32 brings up its own WiFi access point and a phone becomes the transmitter, so there is no separate radio or receiver to buy. Stability comes from the MPU6050's gyroscope and accelerometer feeding a PID loop, and the codebase is small enough to read file by file — which is the real value of it as a first flight-controller project: nothing is hidden behind a library. The project later grew into the LiteWing platform with height and position hold.
Direct WiFi control: the ESP32 hosts its own access point and a phone app acts as the sticks, removing both the transmitter and the receiver from the bill of materials and making parameter tweaks easy during testing.
Attitude stabilization: six-axis data from the MPU6050 drives attitude estimation, and a PID loop sets the speed of the four motors to hold the craft level — the closed loop at the heart of the project, readable and modifiable.
Cheap common parts: ESP32 for the controller, MPU6050 for the IMU, coreless motors and plastic propellers for thrust, all stocked everywhere and trivially replaced.
Hardware documentation: the repository includes the schematic, so you can lay out a board or wire it up directly instead of designing a flight controller from scratch.
Documented flash offsets: when using the ESP32 Flash Download Tool the three binaries have stated addresses — bootloader at 0x1000, partition table at 0x8000, the application at 0x10000 — with no guessing involved.
Grows into LiteWing: the same line of work produced the LiteWing platform with height hold, position hold and a matching positioning module, giving the project somewhere to go next.
Tutorial and video: Circuit Digest carries a full written build guide and an assembly video covering part selection, wiring and flashing, which makes following it end to end practical.
The control path is just as simple. The ESP32 brings up its own WiFi access point and a phone becomes the transmitter, so there is no separate radio or receiver to buy. Stability comes from the MPU6050's gyroscope and accelerometer feeding a PID loop, and the codebase is small enough to read file by file — which is the real value of it as a first flight-controller project: nothing is hidden behind a library. The project later grew into the LiteWing platform with height and position hold.
Features
Direct WiFi control: the ESP32 hosts its own access point and a phone app acts as the sticks, removing both the transmitter and the receiver from the bill of materials and making parameter tweaks easy during testing.
Attitude stabilization: six-axis data from the MPU6050 drives attitude estimation, and a PID loop sets the speed of the four motors to hold the craft level — the closed loop at the heart of the project, readable and modifiable.
Cheap common parts: ESP32 for the controller, MPU6050 for the IMU, coreless motors and plastic propellers for thrust, all stocked everywhere and trivially replaced.
Hardware documentation: the repository includes the schematic, so you can lay out a board or wire it up directly instead of designing a flight controller from scratch.
Documented flash offsets: when using the ESP32 Flash Download Tool the three binaries have stated addresses — bootloader at 0x1000, partition table at 0x8000, the application at 0x10000 — with no guessing involved.
Grows into LiteWing: the same line of work produced the LiteWing platform with height hold, position hold and a matching positioning module, giving the project somewhere to go next.
Tutorial and video: Circuit Digest carries a full written build guide and an assembly video covering part selection, wiring and flashing, which makes following it end to end practical.
