Origin
When building hobby airplanes and drones there is an infinite combination of motors, propellers, speed controllers, batteries, etc. you can put together, so often is hard to predict how each arrangement will perform and the advantages and disadvantages of each setup.
This prototype is designed to streamline the process of testing and documenting the characteristics of each combination by measuring the thrust outputted by the propeller and the RPM while monitoring the current and tension of the used battery.
Web dev?
One of the parts I'm in charge of is of course the software. We are using the NodeMCU-32S microcontroller with the Arduino framework as the brain of the operation to read and control every sensor on board. The interesting part is that besides displaying information on the integrated OLED screen it can also connect to a WiFi network to host a web server locally. When you enter the given IP, you're prompted with a dashboard containing real-time graphs and a set of controls and from where you can command each and everything. Pretty neat!
As I said, this project is still under development, I'll shortly be posting updates. Is also worth mentioning that since everything runs directly on the microcontroller you can't access anything online. However, you can compile the code yourself with the instructions on the GitHub repository.
