RCC student Allan Inestroza builds drone from scratch

A student enrolled in the Industrial Technologies program at Robeson Community College has his eyes on the sky.

Allan Inestroza built an FPV drone that can go up to 200 miles per hour as his project for the capstone course. The drone comes complete with a flight controller, electronic speed controller, motors, frame, propellers, batteries, receiver, and GPS board.

And if that’s not enough, as he built it, he also installed a video transmitter, attaching a Go-Pro video camera, connected to special goggles that he wears to fly it. The camera transmits the video to the goggles.

He also added software to program the flight controller “because you have to tell the drone exactly what type of components you have and what type of communication they are receiving and sending.”

“Whenever I saw his presentation, not only did he get an A, but he impressed me, and I’m a hard person to impress,” said Matthew McKnight, an instructor for the industrial electronics program at RCC. “I knew then that we needed to get a spotlight on this young man because he is going to go places and do great things.”

Matthew McKnight, left, stands with Allan Inestroza, who built a drone from scratch.

As part of the capstone course, students have to design and procure all the equipment they need to build a project worthy of a two-year degree to show what they have learned during their time in the program.

“This is my final year,” said Inestroza. “This project was very fun… I wanted to make a drone, it is a hobby just to record video, and this is something that I wanted to do.”

During a test flight of the drone, Inestroza showed off the device he made from scratch.

The drone was fast as it launched and took flight, disappearing from plain sight, however you could hear it buzzing around as Inestroza maneuvered it back closer to home base.  

“There is some wind blowing right now, but since I have complete control of the drone, I can compensate for the wind movement,” Inestroza said during the test. “There are drones where basically if there is a like a lot of wind, you can’t fly, but with this kind of drone, you can still fly them, it’s just that it’s going to tend to deviate to whichever way the wind is blowing.”

As Inestroza brought the drone back down from the flight, he said, “This is just a really fun program to be in, the teachers are great, they teach you how to take complex systems and turn them into simpler problems… I feel like I was really prepared to make something like this.”

“At first I thought it was going to be really tough,” said Inestrova. “You just have to do your job… You have to put the work in and do the research prior because research is everything in trying to find out exactly what to do and then doing it.”

At just 20 years old, Inestroza will soon graduate from the RCC Early College with a high school diploma and associate of applied science degree in Industrial Technologies. He hopes to one day become a software developer. He plans on transferring to NC State University to major in computer science, a degree that seems fitting given his mastery of technology so far.

Inestroza uses the flight controller and goggles to control the flight of the FPV drone he built from scratch as part of his capstone course project.