If manual control is desired at any distance larger than a few meters a set of bright LED lights is a must for orientation. We equipped one drone with lights for the debugging process as follows: the two LED in front are white, the two LED in the back are red, and the two LED on the sides are green (it is an X frame hexcopter).

Assembly

The six LEDs are connected in parallel, each with its separate resistor and drawing power from the 5V regulator (BEC).

• The red LEDs need a 47 ohm resistor each for 61mA
• The white and the green LEDs need a 32 ohm resistor each (made by a 47 ohm parallel with 100ohm) for 62mA each.
• Total power consumption is about 365 mA
• The spreadsheet for resistor calculations is attached below
• We need a better source for the resistors (Digikey?)

Components

• ​Super Bright LED - White 10mm
• ​Super Bright LED - Red 10mm
• ​Super Bright LED - Green 10mm
• ​Resistor Kit - 1/4W (500 total)