I have been wanting to drop small skydivers from my Mini3 Pro drone. I first added a XIAO ESP32C3 board with a RC servo and used the vertical position of the camera to trigger the servo and drop the object. It worked well but found I had to have the object well below the drone because the IR landing sensor's caused it to be eractic and climb. By adding another pushrod to the servo I added a small piece of cardstock to block the leds until I made the drop. This worked well unless you didn't make the drop then it got confused on landing so I just grab it and shut it down.

Another problem was I could not change the position of the camera when in the filming mode. I got around that by recording on the TX but I didn't like not being able to use the Mini3 video.

Since this will all be done withing a 100 meters I just took another XIAO board and made a transmitter to send a drop message with Espnow protocol. This works great so I removed the little hall effect sensor as shown in the pictures and just used the Remote TX.

If you choose to use the Hall effect sensor the wire used needs to be very small gauge (38) to prevent the camera from detecting interference of it's movement Note the position of the 3x1 mm magnet, it must also not restrict camera movement and of course needs to trigger the hall sensor when the camera is rotated vertical.

The servo arm has 2 .8mm pushrods, one to create the latch and the other below it to slide the IR led blocker in and out.

The assembly weighs about 25 grams with a 200mah lipo. I can easily lift and additional 100 grams to weight. I didn't test the limits of drone. It's of course unacceptable to drop anything from an RC aircraft that in any way could do anyone or thing on the ground any harm or damage. This will put the Mini3 pro over 250 grams, I of course only fly it indoors but if outside you need to comply with all the over 250 gram rules for your location.

Source code is provided, do as you wish. I only made a single drop but it would be easy to make a double drop with one servo, several posts in the rc community show how to do it.

Study the pictures and you'll figure it all out.

I hope this is useful or it gives you and idea of your own. The code was partially AI generated and could surely be improved or more function added.

Cheers Kisssys

Category: R/C Vehicles