What's in the box?
This year, your kit will include:
- A Raspberry Pi Zero 2WH, along with a case and battery power supply
- Cables and adapters to connect the Pi to a standard HDMI monitor (the Pi Zero uses a Mini HDMI port)
- A fisheye (160 FOV) camera
- A 64gb MicroSD card with the Aerospace Jam SDK pre-installed
- An MPU-6050 gyroscope and accelerometer
- A geared DC motor and a motor controller, plus a rechargeable Li-ion 9V battery to power it
- A TF-Luna LIDAR module
- A barometric pressure sensor
- A few neodymium magnets (for picking up payloads)
- Several 3D printed parts (which you don't have to use!) to hold various sensors and components
- A sample payload to test your drone with (that will be identical to those used on competition day)
- A breadboard and breadboard wires
And, last but not least, your actual drone kit, its radio, and its controller.
Don't feel overwhelmed by all the components! Our journey will be step-by-step. For now, you can set the sensors aside. Our first mission is to assemble the heart of our drone's brain: the Raspberry Pi.
This guide focuses on the microcontroller only, but all future guides assume you've already built your drone kit - you can do so by following either the included instructions from the manufacturer, or the instructional videos produced by Prof. Mortensen.
This guide is designed for beginner teams. If you're confident in your programming ability, you might just want to skim the intro to the SDK, or install a fresh copy of Raspberry Pi OS on your MicroSD card. Regardless of if you used the template project and SDK, you'll still be scored on your codebase, so make sure to track it with some kind of VCS (e.g. git).
If you're planning to use a programming language other than Python, using the SDK is not recommended. If you need help with this, please reach out on the Discord.