From The Ground Up
This website is dedicated to teaching you how to build your own quadcopter from the ground up. From choosing the right parts to programming your own flight controller, everything will built done from the ground up. No pre-programmed flight controllers, no software libraries, no problem.
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The real 'Do It Yourself'
Getting Started
In this section, I'm going to briefly talk about the organization of building a quadcopter. On the right is a flow chart I made of what I think are key topics. The greyed out areas are components which I will cover, but are not required for a functional quadcopter.
The first thing you should think about when building your quadcopter is the hardware. You can't just go out and buy random motors and props and batteries and expect it all to come together. Your motors need speed controllers, your speed controllers need a battery and a microcontroller, your microcontrolle needs sensors and everything needs to be compatable and fit on your frame. In the hardware section, I will explain in detail how to ensure that your parts play nice.
The hardest part of this project will be the coding. For starters, we will go through how to get your sensors to communicate with your microcontroller, and your microcontroller with your motors. Then, we can achieve flight stability with a few useful equations and control methods. We will use PID control, which works great. After stability, I will explain a few more advanced topics, such as state-space control and autonomous flight.
What you can expect
To follow through with building your own quadcopter without substantial education in electrical engineering, computer science engineering, mechanical engineering and other related fields is not an easy undertaking. There are core concepts in all of these fields that can not be avoided, and must be understood to finish this project. I will do my best to present these ideas in an easily digestable manner, but it won't always be easy. My suggestion to you is to start off with the mentality that this will not be easy, and it won't always be entirely enjoyable. The only thing I can guarantee is that it will be rewarding in the end.
What I expect from you
My target audience for this website is the self-motivated high schooler, or early college student. You should have a firm grasp of trigonmentry, calculus and physics. You should probably have experience in coding, whether that be using C/C# for arduino or Java for the Raspberry Pi. It will help a lot of you know about Systems & Signals and basic transfer functions/control theory, though I'm not expecting it. I will spend a lot of time detailing the electrical engineering side of things, so if you already know about circuits you can breeze through most of that.
All in all, the only REAL requirement is that you know how to use the internet. Just look up what you don't know, and put time into it. You can learn almost anything online now.
Good luck!