I want to build a quadcopter for college project with camera for surveillance and photography etc. Since this is a college project and since I am an electronics student, I wish to do more from my part instead of going for a kit. At least, I wish to program the flight controller myself.

However, the problem is I have no experience is embedded system programming but I have been checking some tutorials about it lately.

From reading some posts and consulting a project centrer, they are not very confident about assisting in building from scratch citing balancing problems.

the time frame is 1 month and budget is around 40K.

What should I do?

what are your intentions to build this copter apart from surveilance, is just to have a view from above enough for you?
40K budget is just great for the project, i believe a gps lock can also be done within the 40K budget,
you can go with aeroquad setup, this will gives you what you need as a "self programming the FC".
so what balancing problems are you talking about, you mean the accelerometer/gyro calibration or the props,
a straight built frame will be good enough provided the motor is mounted just right enough. a few mm of offset will be taken care of by the FC, apart from this, there isnt going to be any other balance problems with this copters if you mount all stuffs symmetrical.
there are lot of opensource HW, Firmware available for this aeroquad,
there are lot of multicopter experts in this forum, just hang around here, you will get lot of info.

Ashok.P

Mainly, i plan to add camera for photography, if not, just record and live transmit the view to a PC along with other little environment info like temperature, pressure, humidity etc.

 The aeroqaud setup you mentioned seems to be from an international site which I can't afford to take the risk considering the delay in shipping and possible custom duties issues.

To all those I referred in person, especially the project center which we enrolled to learn programming, says that getting the quadcopter thing fly and be stable is a hard task and they recommend to buy a rtf quadcopter model and replace it with self programmed flight controller.

I'm not happy going this way since it challenges the authenticity of our project work.

Can you refer me where to start with learning how to program flight controller?

hello i also made quadcopter with camera for my final year project.... i also tried to prog flight controller( miltiwii ) but failed coz.. it require lots of time tuning and setup.. so i use kk2.1... which works great...

thanx

@gunnu what else did u add to quadcopter?

 one keychain camera rs. 650 from ebay
 kk 2.1 flight controller
 2200mah battery wolf pack
 2212 motors sunny sky
 1045 props
 30A esc simonK firmware
 turnigy 9xr with frsky module
 x525 glass fibre frame..
 

Okay..that's cool. But what did you say when lectures reviewed the project?

he doesn't know anything about this field...  

i think i knew a guy who has aeroquad board, seems like hes dropping the project due to lack of funds,
its almost done, you can get the board and complete it if you have some idea in arduino, he is quite good with arduino too, so maybe he could help.!!!!

@gunnu....lucky, hope i can make it out like that

@v2 eagle seems like it is not going to help since i'm just a beginner in arduino. may be i should go with what everyone suggested.

Hello zuchit, Welcome to the forum

Where are you in Eranakulam? And where are you studying ? (PM me .)

Is this your final year project?



This surely is not the case - My suggestion don't go near any project guidance centers
Me too have build a quad from scratch for my project, that too with self made flight controller- It is not an impossible task 
http://www.rcindia.org/multirotors/custom-fpv-quadcopter-build/  (Build thread of my quad) 

For simplicity, you can make your own Frame, and flight controller - and If you are novice in the programming part, use any open source firmware like Multiwii, Aeroquad, APM .......