Build Your Own Amazon-Style Delivery Drone

After many, many years of delays, Amazon is finally using drones to deliver packages. The novelty is still strong, but Amazon is only performing drone deliveries in very select locations. If you aren’t in one of those places, the only way to sate your curiosity is by watching videos of those deliveries on TikTok. But as we all discovered over the weekend, TikTok is no longer accessible in the United States. Therefore, your only real option is to follow Iloke Alusala’s Instructables tutorial to build your own delivery drone.

While the logistical aspects of delivering packages by drone at any kind of scale are quite tricky, the physical concept is very simple: it is just a drone with enough payload capacity to carry a package and a mechanism to release that package.

Payload is crucial, so you’ll need to start with a drone that can carry more than its own weight. Most consumer drones have limited payload capacities, because they aren’t designed with such considerations in mind. Of course, if you build your own drone from scratch than you can make it as powerful as you like.

In either case, this won’t work at all unless you have some access to and control over the drone’s flight controller. In most consumer drones, that will integrate the radio receiver. To follow this guide, you need to be able to access a free control channel on that receiver, because it is what you’ll use to trigger the mechanism that drops the package.

Alusala’s design calls for a DFRobot FireBeetle 2 ESP32-E development board for that job. A channel on the drone’s radio receiver signals to the ESP32 when the pilot presses a button on the transmitter, and the ESP32 responds by spinning a small DC micro gearmotor (with integrated driver) from DFRobot.

That motor actuates the release mechanism, which Alusala designed in Autodesk Fusion 360 CAD software. They took advantage of Fusion’s generative design — a feature that will automatically produce 3D geometry based on the input parameters. That is a very powerful tool, as it can optimize the design to use a little material as possible, which is very important for a drone. The mechanism’s parts are 3D-printable and attach to the bottom of the drone’s frame.