Teaching with Drone Lab

About these notes

Drone Lab is a workbench seen from above. A student takes a customer's job, picks a frame, motors, a flight controller board, a camera, a battery and props from part cards, and puts them on a cutting mat at real scale. Three tabs run across the top: Jobs, Build and Test. Build is seven steps down the side: frame, motors, flight controller and ESCs, camera and extras, battery, check the motors, props.

Test has two halves. The thrust stand runs one motor and prop at each throttle and reads thrust, current and power. The test flight arms the whole drone and hovers it until the battery reaches its landing voltage. A strip under the bench always shows the weight, thrust to weight, hover throttle, hover time and cost, each beside what the job asks for.

Nothing is scripted. A drone flips because a prop is on a motor that spins the other way, stays down because it is too heavy, or sags because the battery cannot give the current. The message says which, and names the motor or the part.

Two periods: a tiny whoop, then a 5 inch

1. The first job (10 minutes) On the projector, read the First hover card: a tiny drone a class can watch, two minutes in the air, thrust to weight 2 or more, a $160 budget. Each student picks the 65 mm whoop frame and follows the steps: the 0802 motors, the whoop board, the 1S 300 mAh battery.
2. Props off (5 minutes) Check the motors. Spin each one. Two turn the wrong way for their corner, and Swap two wires fixes each. Ask why builders do this with the props off. The help says it: a prop can cut you if a motor starts by surprise.
3. Make it flip (5 minutes) Have everyone put one prop on the wrong way on purpose: a CCW prop on the rear right motor. Test flight, Arm and hover. It flips the moment it lifts and the message names the motor. Fix it on the Build tab and fly again.
4. Read the strip (10 minutes) With the right parts the whoop weighs 29.1 g, lifts 2.7 times its weight, hovers at 52% throttle for 3 minutes 10 seconds, and costs $140. Ask what each number would do with the bigger 1S 450 mAh battery, then try it.
5. Hand it over, take another (15 minutes) Hand it over marks the job done. Gym show wants four minutes and a camera; Under the line wants a 3 inch drone at 0.55 pounds or less with everything on board.
6. Second period: a 5 inch (20 minutes) Freestyle wants thrust to weight 7 or more, six minutes of hover, and $360. A 5 inch freestyle frame, 2207 1950KV motors, the 30 x 30 stack, an analog camera, a 6S 1100 mAh battery and 5.1 inch props weigh 581 g, lift 9.7 times that, and hover 6 minutes 57 seconds for $327.
7. The thrust stand and the battery chart (20 minutes) Run the motor on the thrust stand from low throttle to full and find where grams per watt are best. After a test flight, the chart under the result shows the same drone with every battery that fits: more energy, more weight, and a line that flattens.

What students get wrong, and where the app answers it

The jobs and the repair shelf

Eight customers, each with targets and a budget: First hover and Gym show (tiny whoops), Under the line (a 3 inch drone at 0.55 pounds or less), Freestyle and Film the game (5 inch), Field survey and Carry it (7 inch), and Heavy lift (a six-motor camera drone). Film the game adds an action camera and a balance check. Field survey needs GPS and 11 minutes of hover, which only the Li-ion battery reaches, and only with props that do not ask too much of it.

The repair shelf is six customer drones that arrive built, each with one thing wrong and a complaint in the customer's words: it flips on takeoff, it spins in place, short flights, it drifts forward, a new stack and now it flips, it cuts out on climbs. The fix is whatever makes the test flight pass. Middle and high school get a hint after a failed test; the CTE course level does not.

What the app simplifies, on purpose

• The test is a hover in still air. There is no forward flight, wind, or flight controller tuning.
• Hover time is the hardest number. The thrust stand part of the model is within about ten percent of a published table for a 5 inch motor and prop. A hovering drone uses more than the stand shows, and that extra is fitted to the hover times makers list for real drones, not measured. Treat hover times as close, not exact.
• The wires, screws and mounts are one number: a third on top of the carded parts for carbon frames, a few percent for a whoop.
• Heat is a simple rule. A motor or speed controller asked for well over its rating overheats on the first climb; real parts heat up over many seconds.
• A battery asked for more than twice its rating on a climb fails the flight. That line is the app's own, chosen to make the lesson visible. Real packs sag and wear rather than stop at a line.
• The puffed battery on the repair shelf holds half its charge. A real puffed pack mostly sags harder under load, and it should never be charged or flown.
• The parts are typical, not brands, and the prices are typical too.
• The rules it mentions are for the United States, and only where a build meets them: the 0.55 pound registration line for recreational flyers, Part 107 for paid work, line of sight, and not flying over people.

Middle school, high school and CTE course

The level changes the words, the sheet's questions and the hints. It never changes the physics: the same build reads the same numbers at every level.

The sheet, the setup and the code

The Sheet in the app's header is the write-up: the parts, the numbers, the motor check, the thrust stand rows the student saved, and the questions for the level. Hand in needs an answer to every question and says how many are left. Print gives it on paper.

Setup is for the teacher: the level, which jobs and repairs are on the board, one job for the whole class, budgets on or off, the sheet's questions and questions of your own. Save the project and hand it out as the starter. Print answer key gives one passing build for every job and what is wrong with every repair. It is one answer, not the only one.

Code is where a student works out the flight time themselves, in JavaScript. The starter divides capacity by current. The lab runs it on thirty drones it has not shown them and says how far off it was. A second step hands them the battery's voltage curve and resistance and asks for a model that steps through the flight.

Flying the design

Inside Drone Lab the test is a hover. A student who is signed in and has saved a design can open the Drone Simulator, choose Customize Drone and pick the design. It flies there with the build's own thrust to weight, weight, balance and battery time, with the keyboard or with code. A design that failed its test flight in Drone Lab does not load, and says why.

With a real drone in the room, weigh it on a kitchen scale and compare with the strip, then time a hover. Expect the real one to differ: propellers, batteries and builds vary. The gap is worth a conversation about what a model is for.

Standards

• MS-ETS1-1 to MS-ETS1-4: the job card as criteria and constraints, competing builds evaluated against it, test data analyzed, and a model that generates data for iterative testing and modification.
• MS-PS2-2: the change in an object's motion depends on the sum of the forces on it and its mass. Thrust against weight, in one direction, changing one thing at a time.
• HS-PS2-1: Newton's second law for the climb, net force over mass, in one dimension.
• HS-PS3-3: a device that converts energy, judged by grams of thrust per watt on the thrust stand.
• HS-ETS1-2, HS-ETS1-3 and HS-ETS1-4: smaller problems inside a design, tradeoffs among weight, flight time and cost, and a computer simulation of a problem with many criteria.
• State drone and unmanned aircraft courses: a supplement for the design and build side. It is not preparation for the FAA Part 107 exam.

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