Most people who work with drones never open one up. They unbox it, calibrate it, and fly it. The software layer above the hardware is where most drone application developers live.
We wanted to understand the full stack.
In 2025, Zurisoft's founder Drew Njoke collaborated with Drobotics Systems to build a custom drone from scratch. Not from a kit. Not from a pre-designed frame. From a set of requirements and a 3D printer.
Why build from scratch
The drone market is dominated by DJI. That is not a criticism. DJI makes excellent hardware. But excellent and appropriate are not the same thing. DJI hardware is expensive to acquire, expensive to replace, and runs on firmware you cannot modify. For a business trying to build a drone-powered service in South Africa, that is a significant constraint.
Open-source hardware built for a specific application is cheaper, fully customisable, and owned end to end by the person who built it. That is the case we wanted to test in practice, not in theory.
The build
The project went through two full iterations, each one pushing further down the stack.
The first iteration ran on an Arduino-based flight controller. Off-the-shelf ESCs drove the motors, but the flight controller firmware itself was written from scratch in C++ rather than flashed with an existing stack. That decision set the tone for the rest of the project: understand the control loop by writing it, not by importing it.
The second iteration moved to an ESP32-based flight controller and raised the difficulty considerably. Rather than buying ESCs again, Drobotics designed and built a custom three-phase electronic speed controller from scratch, alongside a new 3D printed frame sized for the updated electronics and payload. Firmware was rewritten in C++ for the ESP32 platform, handling both the flight control loop and the custom ESC's motor commutation directly.
Across both builds: power distribution wiring, receiver integration, and calibration were treated as first-class engineering problems, not afterthoughts. Each stage exposed decisions that a pre-built drone hides from you. That exposure is the point.
The final build flew. More importantly, it flew the way it was designed to: stable, configurable, and running firmware we had written and understood completely, down to the ESC commutation timing.
What this informs
This build is the practical foundation behind the drone engineering curriculum Zurisoft is developing. Teaching someone to build a drone from scratch requires having done it. The decisions made across both iterations, the tradeoffs between frame materials, the motor KV selection, writing flight controller firmware from scratch, and designing a three-phase ESC from the ground up, are all now documented and structured into a learning framework designed to transfer that knowledge to others.
The goal is not to produce drone enthusiasts. It is to produce people who understand the full hardware stack well enough to design a drone for a specific commercial application, build it, and deploy it.