Design your own Flight Controller.
A complete walkthrough of designing a custom flight controller, covering component selection, schematic, layout and firmware. Based on boards we've designed, built and flown ourselves.
- FC Blueprint guide
- $39.90
- KiCad design files
- $9.90Free
$39.90
excl. VAT, calculated at checkout
62 builders have this guide
Read a free sample
This guide is not affiliated or associated with the Betaflight or ArduPilot projects.
AI is a great place to start. A board that flies needs more.
Designing with AI alone
- Trust. Great for quick answers, but it will confidently suggest parts or values that aren't compatible with your firmware and will break your board.
- Experience. Strong on general theory, but lighter on the drone and FPV specifics that decide whether your board will work as intended.
- Direction. Answers whatever you ask, but it won't surface the questions you didn't know to ask.
What you get with the guide
- Trust. Every part, value and decision is verified and tested on real hardware.
- Experience. Written from designing flight controllers for our own builds.
- Direction. One clear path that walks you through every decision in the design.
What you walk away with
- How to design a flight controller from start to finish, from picking the components to a finished PCB layout
- How to confidently choose the right components and build a complete schematic
- How to lay out the PCB for clean routing, then order it and flash custom firmware
- A verified, tested design to compare against when something on your own board doesn't work
Content
Architecture of a Flight Controller
Explaining the architecture of flight controllers by building a system diagram including the two-stage power regulation and how the MCU connects to sensors, OSD overlay, connectors, and ESC.
Learn from validatedDesign Files
The guide provides tested design files that are referenced in the chapters and available for download. The integrated KiCad viewer lets you explore the files while building your own design.
The cost of doing it alone
- Working out which components and firmware actually work togetherDays of reading
- Designing the schematic and PCB layout from scratch30+ hours
- Re-ordering boards that don't work the first time$80–150 each
That's a month of evenings and a few wasted board orders before one finally flies.
A weekend instead of months, for less than a single failed prototype run.
Who this Guide is for
This guide gives technical insights and practical tips but doesn't provide tool-specific tutorials, so some prior experience with PCB design and EDA tools like KiCad is recommended to get the most out of it.
- You fly off-the-shelf flight controllers and want to design your own.
- You've built a DIY board on perfboard or a breakout and want a proper PCB.
- You've designed a few simple PCBs and want to tackle something more demanding.
- You want design decisions backed by a real, tested board instead of guesswork.
- You want a click-by-click tutorial on how to use KiCad itself.
- You've never designed or built a basic PCB before.
About the Author
Since I started flying drones I wanted to design my own hardware optimized for my custom builds. Making my first Flight Controller was a frustrating process and took months of research.
This guide is everything I wish existed when I started. Everything you might find in forums scattered across the internet, but compressed into one clear path that walks you through every decision.
Lifetime Access
Buy once and get lifetime access to the guide, design files and every future update we make.
- 8 Chapters
- KiCad project files
- Lifetime updates
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Lifetime price
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30-day money-back guarantee
Read a free sample firstCommon Questions
- Do I need prior PCB experience?
- Some prior PCB design experience will help you get the most out of it. The guide focuses on the decisions behind the design, not on how to use KiCad itself.
- Does this cover KiCad specifically or is it software-independent?
- The design is created in KiCad but the concepts and design decisions are software-independent and applicable no matter what you use to design your board.
- What format is it?
- The guide is in a text format with integrated graphics and interactive design files, hosted on our website.
- Do I get updates if you add new content?
- Yes, you get lifetime access to the guide and all future updates we make to it and the design. "Lifetime" here means for as long as we run the guide on our website — it's not a fixed number of years, and we'd give notice before retiring it.
- What if it's not for me?
- We offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you're not satisfied, contact us within 30 days of your purchase for a full refund.