For the final project in high school, we had to conceptualize and build an embedded system. The heart of the project had to be a microcontroller, and all printed circuit boards (PCBs) had to be custom-made. All libraries for the built-in peripherals of the embedded microcontroller also had to be written from scratch.

Goal

Each student had to define a project within the scope of one school year. In my case, I decided to build a hexacopter running on an STM32 microcontroller. The drone needed active stabilization on all three rotational axes and RGB lighting to indicate different operating states.

Learnings

From this project, I learned how to build a C++ application in an embedded environment, how PID control loops work, and how drones implement motor mixing.