Piotr Domanowski - 27th of February 2024
If you are looking for useful tutorials and resources to build your own drone, then you are in the right place. We can teach you how to build an underwater drone (or ROV) – it works just like a flying one, except underwater. Sounds good?
In early 2018, we were skimming through countless online tutorials and courses on DIY drone building. At first, it was a real pain because there is just so much involved, like: 3D printing, electronics, programming – it can become very overwhelming very fast. At a certain point, we absorbed so much knowledge that everything just clicked, and we started to deeply understand this seemingly super-complicated topic. After over 5 years we’ve become somewhat of experts on building our own drones – so we started to share our knowledge in our unique online course. Now, we want more people to start building their DIY drones at their homes.
Getting good at any technical field always requires time and experience in various projects – designing and building electronic devices, like drones is no different. The more time and effort you put in – the better you get. The good news is that improving your drone building skills does not to be tedious and overwhelming. It is actually very fun! Imagine – you start with a couple of electronic components on your workbench – and for a couple of weeks you’re building your drone step-by-step. Each step allows you to get just slightly better at a different technical skill and you see your drone slowly coming together.
One could say it’s a journey of sorts. Of course, some of the time something will not work, and you’ll need to spend a couple of hours figuring out a random issue – but that’s a perfectly normal part of the process.
It can also be more inexpensive than buying a commercial grade drone! For example: building your own drone, like our CPS 5 drone is one the most budget-effective ways to start playing with an underwater drone! And hey – at the end of the day, when you completed your build – you get your fully functional drone, and you understand it from the inside out. Trust us when we say that you can’t get this knowledge from any book.
To start building simple DIY drones, you really need a couple of simple tools, most of which you probably already have. A soldering iron, a hand drill, a multimeter, a LiPo battery charger and some wires will probably be just enough for you to build a simple DIY drone. Each build requires a slightly different set of tools, so it’s not possible to answer this question for each one of the cases. Of course, you will also need some workspace, but a normal desktop is more than enough when you start. For more advanced projects, you will of course need more advanced tools, like 3D printers or laser-cutters.
But for your first build, we recommend getting a detailed plan for building your DIY drone – like our CPS 5 online course, where you can build your own drone with detailed assembly guides and beginner-friendly support we provide.
To get you started, you can sign-up below for a free CPS 5 training and we’ll mail you Bill of Materials for free (we included a complete list of tools, supplies and components required).
When you register for the free CPS 5 training, we will send you the Bill Of Materials for free, which lists everything you’ll ever need when building the CPS 5 drone.
No, you don’t need a degree, building your own drones sounds difficult at first – but after you get some basic training in the field anyone can do it. For instance, most of the people who build our DIY drones are makers, interested in 3D printing who have built something in the past. But some of them have never even built anything like this – for example, the youngest person who has built the CPS 5 drone was only 14 years old!
Kate Leroux
“Building the CPS drone is a great experience for a variety of skill levels”
Kate also said: “Filip and Piotrek are enthusiastic teachers, and they answered quickly and encouragingly when I hit a few snags along the way. I now have a functional underwater drone that I built myself, something I’m very proud of.”
Your DIY underwater drone is a tool and a toy, like any other ROV. You can take it to your local lake just to explore how deep is it or on a boat trip with your family. You can also use it as a tool – for example, one of our students used his drone for exploring one of the largest natural underwater tunnel systems in the world, in Picos de Europa.
We too had lot of adventures with our underwater drones. One time, we even took our DIY CPS 5 drone to explore a flooded mineshaft and reached a depth of 130 meters (see the photo below).
So, in general – whatever you’re up to that requires being underwater, your DIY drone will help you with that.
Yes, it’s hard. It’s very hard to design your DIY drone from scratch and then to build it – this took us about 3 years. When you don’t have one comprehensive resource to learn from, you often need to learn from multiple random unrelated tutorials (also known as tutorial hell) and in the end, don’t learn anything useful.
Building your own drone gets much easier when you have instructions, list of tools & components, proper guidance from someone who has done it before, and you are willing to spend some time troubleshooting. Then, you’ll know exactly what to do and you’ll be more competent for your next build. When you have guidance, even if you have no experience, it is possible to build your own drone, like the CPS 5, at least 40 times faster than we did when we began our journey.
This depends on whether you’re designing a completely new DIY drone or building a design, which already exists. For our DIY drone, we optimized the building and 3D printing
process of the drone to the point where you can build it in about 3 weeks.
When you need to design a completely new DIY drone, depending on a complexity of your design, it may even take you up to 3+ years to design and build it yourself.
We’ve been building DIY drones for 5+ years now. We can teach you how to build your own drones by showing you how to build your own CPS 5 drone. It is our flagship DIY drone that we’ve been constantly improving for the past 3 years.
Sign up using the button below for a free training in which we’ll show you the exact steps you’ll need to take to finish this project.
NOW IT’S YOUR TURN TO BUILD YOUR OWN DRONE!
