Learn how quadcopters actually work by building one from scratch.
Full Stack Flight is an educational series on building a quadcopter ecosystem from scratch: flight controller, airframe, transmitter, communication protocol, and telemetry tools, all custom and built entirely in Python! Made for aspiring engineers and curious makers who want more than a black box. Code, hardware, and explanations you can actually understand!
The Centauri Ecosystem
QUADCOPTER
The star of the show! A custom 3D-printed airframe with a Raspberry Pi Pico running a MicroPython flight controller. It reads pilot commands, senses motion, and adjusts all four motors through a 250 Hz PID loop to keep you flying.
TRANSMITTER
The pilot's control interface. A Python program reads an Xbox controller and sends commands through a Pico-powered HC-12 radio. A terminal dashboard shows inputs and pre-flight telemetry, with wireless PID updates for easier tuning.
LINK
Validate radio communication before taking flight. A small handheld device passively listens for Centauri radio communications. Check reception over distance, without risking your quadcopter on a long-range flight.
ANALYSIS
Turn flight data into understanding. A Python script decodes binary telemetry into readable CSV files, revealing battery voltage, motion, pilot inputs, and motor outputs. Plot flights, troubleshoot problems, or overlay telemetry on video.
Centauri is a flight ecosystem built from the ground up: a custom airframe and flight controller, a pilot's transmitter, a shared radio protocol, and tools for testing communications and analyzing flight data.
Together, they cover the whole journey, from pilot input to motor output to understanding what happened in the air.
My goal in designing Centauri was to make every part of it understandable, so anyone curious enough to look under the hood can learn how a real quadcopter works, and build one themselves.
Build it yourself!
Building my own quadcopter from scratch was a steep climb for me. Full Stack Flight is what I wish I had on along the way: every layer of the system opened up and explained so anyone curious enough can learn and understand how a quadcopter really works by building one!
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01
Read the series
Browse the chapters -
02
Gather the parts
View the parts list -
03
Join the community
Join on Discord -
04
Build and fly!
Get the code
Want to build Centauri together? I'm putting together a small, fully virtual cohort to build Centauri together, start to finish. It isn't open yet, but you can share your interest and help shape it.
Educational Series
A comprehensive breakdown of how Centauri was designed, built, and tested from the ground up. It walks through the full system in a practical way, covering the architecture, hardware, software, transmitter, communication protocol, and telemetry analysis, with the goal of making the engineering behind it understandable enough for anyone to learn from and build on.
Building a Quadcopter Ecosystem from Scratch
Chapter 1: The Centauri Ecosystem
Chapter 2: Defining a Communication Protocol
Chapter 3: Designing a 3D-Printed Airframe
Chapter 4: Hardware and Electronics Package
Chapter 5: The Flight Controller
Chapter 6: Transceiver Platform
Chapter 7: The Pilot's Control Interface
Chapter 8: Unpacking Flight Telemetry for Analysis
Chapter 9: Closing Thoughts
Join the Community
Join our community of makers learning from and building Centauri, sharing their progress, swapping ideas, and helping each other out along the way. Whether you're deep into your own build or just getting started, you'll find people happy to help!
Join us on Discord
Hi, I'm Tim!
I work in software by day and in my free time I love building crazy robotics projects and sharing them with like-minded people. Coming from the software world, I started in robotics with zero hardware know-how. Everything I know about motors, sensors, and flight came from teaching myself, piece by piece, mistake by mistake.
Building a quadcopter flight controller from scratch was my engineering Mount Everest for years. I finally got there in 2023 with Scout, and then rebuilt the whole thing, top to bottom, as Centauri.
Getting there was harder than it should have been. Nearly everything I found online was either a black-box product or a wall of complex mathematical theory. I built Full Stack Flight to share this the joy of robotics and flight with people like me! Curious makers that want to build and understand what they're building.
If you're building something, I'd genuinely love to hear about it. Come say hi in the Discord!