The development board

The airPy project is based on the pyboard, a development board capable to run MicroPython (see MicroPython official website for more information).

Anyway the pyBoard alone is not capable alone to flight a drone, some more components are required:

An inertial measurement unit (IMU)

SBUS interface (for connecting SBUS RC receivers)

After a quick investigation i decided to use the MPU9150 IMU sold by Drotek mainly because it is not so expensive and there is already an available Micropython driver (it is available on GitHub).

In order to work the SBUS interface should provide and inverted signal. Unfortunately the pyboard doesn’t provide this kind of feature so I used a transistor and a couple of resistors to do the job.

I then soldered all the component on the MicroPython protoskin available in the official store (and also some pin headers to make easy the connection of other standard drone components).
You can see the result in the following images.