Here at ataary we are all about non-traditional education, so we developed our own curriculum with the goal of becoming a Design Technician (on the way to Engineering) capable of designing and constructing an advanced drone or robot. The linked curriculum is in stages Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced; and is all free with the option to pay for certificates for professional use. There is also a Perplexity Space available pre-prompted with the learning goals and outcomes to use as a tutor along the way, and a subreddit for discussion, sharing project, and assistance. This curriculum does require the use of a 3d Printer, some basic tools, $100-200 in parts, and assumes you have at least a high school education.
Our goal is to actually construct a drone or robot after the first stage, and then upgrade or re-design our creation along the way or after each subsequent stage. By the end, we hope to have a drone or robot capable of autonomously delivering a package on a round trip journey.
Courses are split between two main resources, Alison and Autodesk. Both resources are free with the option to pay for certificates if you need them. Alison provides much of our general education understanding, topics like electricity, trigonometry, troubleshooting, etc. while Autodesk provides our tutorials for Fusion 360, our chosen CAD software for this curriculum (which is also free for personal use). All the courses will be linked individually within the course page, we do not use affiliate links, so these are based purely off our use of the courses.
We do have the Alison coursework all lumped together into a curriculum so you can access it easily, but it cannot be linked without a direct email. If you are interested just reach out at [email protected] and we can send you the link to join (again, no affiliate links, just trying to help).
While the courses are in a semblance of preferred order from their respective source, bouncing between sources may provide a break and keep things fresh along the way. Obviously skip topics or jump ahead if you are beyond a particular course.
Our examples and design will be based on a small tracked robot with camera and a fixed wing drone (airplane) design, and be based around a Raspberry Pi Zero 2w for the controller. That said the curriculum should lend itself to a variety of drone, robot, and controller types, but as we go we will be including examples of our design for reference.
Perplexity Tutor Link – ataary Design Tech subreddit
Follow the link for the Basic Design Technician program, it should take approximately 75 hours, and in our example cost about $150 in materials for the project drone.
Intermediate Design Technician
Coming Soon
Advanced Design Technician
Coming Soon
Base Components List
These are the base components for our projects, our examples will be based off these plus some additional boards as things become more complex.
These can be sourced from a wide variety of vendors but we tend to favor Adafruit and Pimoroni for their exceptional community, support, and documentation. That said we do end up getting some items from Alibaba or even Amazon when we have difficulties finding them elsewhere.
