Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Is there a way I can make it fly and still control its altitude when it's not on the dowel?

It would be very difficult to the drone fly without the dowel. Drones are really unstable so they require a lot of parts and code balance themselves so its a bit out of the scope of most people.

Hi - check out the later videos in this playlist for one about automatic balancing (still mounted in a dowel so it can only rotate in one direction) and manual free-flight control with joysticks: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlBV ... ly4pmOB41p. As bth80 mentioned, drones are inherently unstable, meaning they will flip over very easily and they are VERY hard to control manually. It is perfectly possible to build your own free-flying drone, but our project series is just intended as a starting point to teach you the basics. You can go look up other directions online for how to build a complete fully-functional drone, but that is a much more advanced project - we'd recommend completing more of our projects first.