Details on the drone kit specifics will be provided in September to all teams at the same time to make the competition as fair as possible. Please feel free to ask questions about the materials provided, but we may withhold specifics that would give one team a competitive advantage.

The kit will include:

• Drone
  • off-the-shelf system (teams will not be building a drone from scratch)
  • with one set of spare props and prop guards
  • with 2 additional batteries
• Microcontroller (Arduino based)Breadboard
  • Bluetooth and/or wifi communication
  • USB cable
  • Battery (9 Volt)
• Sensors
  • LIDAR
  • Metal
  • IR
• Connector wires
• Non-lead solder
• Battery safety bag (for all lipo batteries – charging and storage)
• Safety goggles

The kit will not include (needs to be provided by school):

• Soldering station and supplies (we will be providing a recommendation in the $50 range)
• Materials to mount the microcontroller to the drone
• Spare drone parts including propellers and/or motors
• Spare components if something is damaged (if you need to replace something, please contact us to make sure you’re getting the exact replacement — the wrong components may disqualify your team)

Software “stack”

While teams will not be limited on the types of software and coding tools that they use, we will be providing training in Arduino’s C-like language using the standard Arduino integrated development environment (IDE). We are still working out the details on how teams will be able to communicate with their drone during the competition. It will either be wifi or Bluetooth based. We are committed to using opensource and/or free commercial tools for software development and no costs will be associated with the software tools that we use.