Project Cheap Drone is live.

Build the cheapest quad I can — and fly it

• 20 June 2026

  How I actually learn the hard parts

  A lot of this doesn't click for me just by reading about it. So when I have a specific question, I have Claude build me a small interactive page I can poke at until it makes sense. Here are two I learned from today — open them and play with them yourself.

  First principles · quad frames

  Why a drone frame fights back

  Most drone-build “rules” are downstream of a handful of physical realities — arms that flex, frames that ring, weight that sits in the wrong place. I wanted to feel why, not just memorize the rules, so this one lets you drag the sliders and watch the physics misbehave. When something turns Ember-orange, the frame is working against the flight controller, not with it.

  Open the interactive→Drone aerodynamics · flow

  What a prop guard really costs

  My gut said a prop guard “blocks” the airflow. It mostly doesn’t — the real story is a tiny tornado at each blade tip, and whether your guard ignores it or seals it. This one lets you flip between an open prop, a cheap ring, and a tight duct and watch the airflow, the wasted energy, and the trade-offs respond.

  Open the interactive→
• 18 June 2026

  Frame tweaks: shorter fins, fixed mounts, and legs

  A few frame fixes in one pass: I shortened the fins so the whole frame fits on my print bed in a single print instead of multiple parts, locked in the screw mounts so the controller board and the motors sit exactly where they should, and added legs just tall enough to give it ground clearance.
• 17 June 2026

  First test-fit of the board and a motor on a fin

  I test-fit the flight controller board and one of the motors onto a single fin for the very first time. It's rough, but seeing the real parts sit where they're meant to go immediately surfaced a few fixes I need to make before going any further.
• 17 June 2026

  Open-sourced the propeller's 3D model

  Same problem as the flight controller: I couldn't find an accurate 3D model of the exact propeller I'm using, so I designed one myself. I needed it to plan placement — how far each propeller sits from the main body of the drone, the clearances around it, that kind of thing.

  It's dimensionally accurate in every way that matters for laying out the build. The blade shape itself isn't a perfect 1:1 of the real thing, but for checking fit and spacing it does the job.

  The propeller is the Gemfan Hurricane 3016 3-inch. I get why companies don't always put an STL out there — trade secrets, probably — but I'd already redrawn it, so I open-sourced it for anyone who wants this specific model.

  

  
  • Printables →
  • MakerWorld →
  • GrabCAD →
  • Thingiverse →
• 16 June 2026

  Open-sourced the flight controller's 3D model

  It's not helpful that the companies making these flight controller boards don't publish a 3D model of the part. To design a drone frame around the board, I first had to model the board itself.

  It took about four iterations, but I got the height, length, and width accurate, with the screw holes in the right spots to actually hold the board in place. I 3D print each version to check it against the real device.

  The board is the GEPRC TAKER G4 45A 8-bit AIO flight controller. I've open-sourced the model so nobody else has to redraw it from scratch.

  

  
  • Printables →
  • MakerWorld →
  • GrabCAD →
  • Thingiverse →

Beacon 2