With their six-propeller design, hexacopters stand out for their stability, payload capacity, and flight redundancy. This makes them a powerful choice for aerial photography, precision agriculture, industrial inspections, and emergency response.
With competitive price and timely delivery, Wing Flying sincerely hope to be your supplier and partner.
Their advanced aerodynamics and intelligent flight systems allow smoother operation and greater adaptability in challenging conditions.
In this guide, we’ll explore the different types of hexacopters, their key features, and how they work, helping you understand how to choose, build, or optimize a hexacopter drone for both commercial and recreational use.
A hexacopter operates through a carefully orchestrated interplay of six rotors, a flight controller, and electronic systems to achieve stable, controlled flight.
Each of its six motors—mounted on arms arranged in symmetrical "X" or "H" configurations—spins a propeller to generate lift.
Half of the rotors spin clockwise, while the others spin counterclockwise, neutralizing rotational torque and maintaining balance.
By adjusting the speed of individual motors, the drone executes precise movements: increasing thrust on rotors diagonally opposite one another tilts the hexacopter forward, backward, or sideways (pitch and roll), while varying the speed of clockwise vs. counterclockwise rotors enables rotation (yaw).
The flight controller, equipped with gyroscopes, accelerometers, and barometers, continuously monitors orientation and altitude, making micro-adjustments to motor speeds up to hundreds of times per second to counteract wind, maintain hover, or follow pilot commands.
Hexacopter drones aren’t one-size-fits-all. Whether you’re filming blockbusters, inspecting wind turbines, or racing through FPV courses, picking the right model requires balancing performance, budget, and use case.
Your use case determines everything. Ask yourself: What's your primary goal?
Determines what you can carry (cameras, sensors, sprayers).
The JOUAV PH-20 is designed to carry multiple payloads simultaneously, making it highly versatile for a wide range of applications.
More rotors generally mean faster battery consumption, so flight time is a crucial factor:
If aerial imaging is a priority, assess the camera’s resolution, stabilization, and compatibility:
Safety is critical, especially for industrial applications.
Outdoor operations require drones that can withstand harsh conditions. Consider:
Check out this video of the JOUAV PH-20 being tested for waterproofing in heavy rain:
Hexacopters are technically capable of reaching altitudes between 5,000 and 6,000 meters (16,400–19,700 feet) above sea level. However, practical performance is constrained by air density, which diminishes lift and motor efficiency at higher elevations.
For example, industrial models like the JOUAV PH-20 typically operate at 4,500 meters (14,800 feet) in optimal conditions.
The operational range of a hexacopter depends on its communication systems and battery life.
Consumer-grade models, such as the Yuneec Typhoon H, have a range of 1–5 kilometers using standard radio transmitters.
Professional drones like the JOUAV PH-20 leverage advanced transmission technologies to achieve ranges of 15–30 kilometers.
Consumer models have a flight time of 15–25 minutes, while industrial models can fly for 30–75 minutes. Flight time depends on the payload weight—adding 1 kg typically reduces it by 25–40%.
The lifting capacity of a hexacopter depends on its design, motor power, battery capacity, and frame strength.
Consumer-grade hexacopters typically carry payloads of 1–2 kg, while industrial models can lift 5–15 kg. Heavy-duty hexacopters designed for specialized applications, such as cargo transport or LiDAR mapping, can carry 20 kg or more.
A hexacopter has six motors, arranged symmetrically to balance thrust and ensure redundancy. This configuration allows the drone to remain airborne even if one motor fails.
Here's a comparison table between hexacopters and octocopters:
I know what you’re thinking. That’s a whole lot of words and I’m not even sure this page is what I’m looking for. Let me summarize:
If you want to learn how to build your own drone, you are in the right place. There are many types of people that may be interested in this new drone world. However, this guide is dedicated for the nerds (and I mean that as a compliment).
If you are one of these hobbyists (euphemism for nerd), allow me to be your guide in your journey of building a diy drone. Think of me like a Gandalf, and yourself as a Frodo. This is all too apt an analogy, as your new drone hobby might turn into an addiction much like a ring that you never want to take off. So be warned. I digress.
This guide is based off my course on how to make your own drone. If you’re interested in learning more about this subject, the course features 6 hours of video lectures in a structured curriculum.
It is the perfect course of college students and drone entrepreneurs, or anyone with a DIY attitude who is interested in flying robot things. Students have used this course as a launch pad to create their own drone applications, so I highly recommend checking it out if you are trying to develop a new drone innovation.
But I digress ????
As number 2 shows, this guide will arm you with the knowledge to find your own parts instead of just soldering together electronics from a pre-assembled list of parts that comes in a drone kit. As the saying goes “Give a woman a fish, she will eat for a day. But teach a woman to fish, and she will eat for a lifetime”, or something like that.
You may already have a particular type of drone you would like to build in mind, like a small FPV quad or a larger octocopter to lift a payload. The beautiful thing about the drone hobby is that the anatomy of a drone is just about the same for any type of drone you would like to build.
With this in mind, this guide is intentionally generically written, so it can be used as a reference for any type of drone.
If you’d like to build the drone featured in this guide, checkout this raspberry pi drone parts list.
Now let’s get into some diy drone engineering!
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There are two main things to note about the frame of your drone. The first being how many arms there are. Each arm will normally have one motor, which will have one propeller. For this reason, drones with multiple motors are simply referred to as ‘multirotors’.
Tricopter: A drone with three motors.
Quadcopter: A drone with four motors.
Hexacopter: A drone with six motors.
Octocopter: A drone with eight motors.
Quadcopters are by far the most popular, so we will be focusing on how to make a quadcopter in this guide.
The second thing to know about frames is the size. Frame sizes list the farthest distance that two motors are from each other. For quadcopters, this normally means measuring the distance between two diagonal motors in millimeters (sorry Americans).
Nano Drone: 80-100 mm
Micro Drone: 100-150 mm
Small Drone: 150-250 mm
Medium Drone: 250-400 mm
Large Drone: 400+ mm
If you want to make a drone from scratch, selecting the frame size is going to be your first step.
There are two main types of motors: brushed and brushless. Your cheaper ready to fly drones will be using brushed motors, and that’s because they are using the cheaper motor. While cheap, they wear down and break much faster than brushless motors. Brushless motors last much longer and are the preferred motor of choice for diy drone builds.
There are innumerable amounts of brushless motors out there. To help you determine what motor will go best with your build, most manufacturers give you some information about the product. The two most common specs are the size and KV rating.
Let’s look at a particular example.
Here the motor size is . That is really representing two numbers and should be shown like this: 22-13.
The 22 is the width of the stator in mm, and the 13 is the height of rotor in mm. Typically, the wider the width, the more torque the motor have.
Another spec that comes with brushless motors is the KV-rating. On our example motors, it is 935KV. Don’t confuse KV with kilo-volts. Here KV rating means RPMs per one volt of input.
So if we supplied 1 volt to a 935 KV motor, it would spin at 935 RPMs. Two volts input would cause RPMs etc.
Lower KV motors produce much more torque, so can spin larger props at slower speeds to get lift. Larger KV motors produce much lower torque, but spin smaller props much faster to get lift.
Typically larger drones use low KV motors, and smaller drones use high KV motors.
The last thing I’ll say here is most manufacturers will show you the specs of parts that should be used with the motor, which can prove helpful in selecting parts once you’ve chosen your motors.
Our example motor comes with the following helpful information.
The next part in this make a drone guide is the props. Propellers will always come with a four-digit number like , or or .
The first two digits communicates the diameter of the prop in inches (Yay Americans!). So an prop will be 8 inches in diameter.
The last two digits represent the pitch, in inches. The example has a 4.5-inch pitch, and the prop has a 3 inch pitch.
Pitch is a little less intuitive to understand than diameter. Qualitatively, the higher the pitch the more air will be pushed down. A prop with a pitch of 0 inches would be like spinning a butter knife.
To understand what the pitch actually means let’s use an analogy. Screws have pitch as well. If you turn a screw one rotation into a piece of wood, it will dig itself into the wood at some constant depth.
Let’s now imagine that we placed the pitch of our prop onto a screw, so the screw now has 4.5 in pitch. One rotation of the screw would cause it to dig into wood by 4.5 inches. We can now see that the higher the pitch of a prop, the more substance (air) it will move.
Higher pitch props are normally used with low KV motors since they provide more torque. They can spin slower since high pitch props are pushing a lot of air per unit of rotation. Lower pitch props are used with high KV motors since they spin much faster. Accordingly, they have to spin faster since they are pushing less air per rotation.
The company is the world’s best drone torque measuring supplier. We are your one-stop shop for all needs. Our staff are highly-specialized and will help you find the product you need.
If you are using a brushless motor, you will need an electronic speed controller. Brushed motors do not require an ESC because they only need a simple DC voltage input.
Brushless motors on the other hand require an input of three out of phase voltages. Don’t worry, this sounds scarier than it is. All you have to do is supply the ESC with a DC input voltage, and it will automatically generate three out of phase voltages that connect to the motor, causing it to spin.
Your manufacturer will tell you the range of input voltages your ESC can handle, so keep an eye on that.
Typically your ESC will come with three outputs, and you will solder some male bullet connectors to the ends that will attach to the female bullet connectors of the motors.
Your battery powers everything on your drone. Choosing the right battery is crucial to making a drone.
Almost always the battery of choice for drones is the Lipo battery. This is for its attributes of high capacity and high output current.
A typical Lipo battery will come with specs like this: mAh 4S 50C
Let’s start with the 4S part. A battery pack is a bundle of individual little batteries, called cells. A lipo cell always has a voltage of 4.2V when fully charged, and 3.7V when depleted. So the 4S means that four of these Lipo cells were placed in series. Since batteries connected in series add voltages, we know the fully charged voltage of the total battery pack is:
(Cell count)(Fully charged Voltage)=(4 cells)(4.2V)=16.8 Volts
Moving onto the mAh spec. This is a measure of capacity, and capacity is normally measured in Coulombs of charge. Think of capacity like the volume of a liquid container; it simply represents how much charge is in the battery.
SUPER NERD STUFF ALERT. SKIP TO C-RATING IF YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT UNITS!
But wait! mAh has no units of Coulombs in it! It actually does, but it’s just hidden. Let me explain.
1 Amp = 1 Coulomb/second = 1 C/s
1 h = 1 hour = seconds
m = milli = 1/
So subbing in our variables into mAh:
mAh = (1/)(1 C/S)( s) = Coulombs
So mAh is the same thing as saying Coulombs.
The next part is the C-rating
The higher the C rating, the higher the output of current can be for that battery.
To find out the maximum current output your battery can handle, take the C rating and multiply it by the capacity of your battery in units of Ah.
The C rating has units of inverse hours (1/hour)
3 Ah*50(1/h) = 150 A
So this hypothetical 50C battery could output 150A of current!
Now there is some confusion on what the C rating actually means. Some manufacturers’ C rating simply means the maximum burst current you could output for 30 seconds, and others use the C rating to indicate the maximum continuous current output. Check with your specific battery manufacturer to determine which C rating they are using!
The power distribution board is where your main electrical components will connect. The main things you will solder to your PDB are your ESCs and battery connector.
When you plug in your battery to the PDB, it provides power to everything attached, so this is where your ESCs will be drawing their current from.
A flight controller is basically the brains of the drone. It is essentially a hardware hub that all your drone parts will attach to. Things like the ESCs, GPS, Telemetry, RC Input and many other components.
All flight controllers should come equipped with a gyroscope and accelerometer (IMU), which together help to automatically balance your drone without any manual input.
All flight controllers are controlled by the firmware. Depending on the flight controller, you may have access to flash new firmware to the board. Firmware can either be closed source (property of a company that the public cannot see), or open source (the public can see the code and make modifications).
If you’d like to make a drone with open source firmware like ArduPilot or PX4, be sure that the board you are buying is supported.
GPS modules can be bought for pretty cheap. Typically they use the UART or I2C protocol, and most of GPS modules intended for drone use come equipped with a magnetometer as well.
You should have your GPS/magnetometer module lifted up in the air to get away from the magnetic fields being produced by your drone’s electronics.
If your GPS is too close to the electronics, it could be causing incorrect readings producing some funny flight.
You want to build a drone with a good GPS module. Look for one that has the M8N u-blox chip. These are much better than some of the other GPS modules available on Amazon, and cost around the same.
An RC controller will consist of a transmitter (the thing being held by the pilot) and a receiver (to receive the commands from the pilot).
The receiver will plug into your Flight Controller.
You have some options with the RC controller. Cheaper RC controllers have a lower number of channels. However, the minimum number of channels you should use is probably five or six for a drone.
Every drone will take up four channels automatically with the Roll, Pitch, Yaw and Throttle control.
Your excess channels can be used for more unique control, like changing the flight mode of your multirotor.
Telemetry is also used to wirelessly communicate with the drone. You definitely want to build a drone with telemetry.
There will be one module attached to the drone, and another to a computer (sometimes referred to as a ground control station GCS). This is typically plug and play.
The GCS can then communicate with the drone remotely. It can both send and receive information.
For example, the GCS could track the drone’s position on a map, determine how fast the drone is moving, see battery voltage levels and many other things.
It can also be used to command the drone, meaning you wouldn’t actually need an RC controller to fly it.
While this is something that is possible and something that is actually done, telemetry is mostly used for receiving data back from the drone.
Before you start to actually put the parts together and build a drone, we need to know how to find the right parts. The process of choosing the right drone parts is a mixture of both art and science.
The primary metric we will be looking at is the Thrust to Weight ratio, from hereon referred to as the TW ratio.
We all know how to think of weight. It is the force that we are being pulled to the ground with.
Drones also have weight, and can only fly if they can produce an upward thrust that is greater than their weight.
So a TW ratio of 2 means that the drone can produce twice as much upward force than its weight.
You should aim for different TW ratios depending on the application of your drone. For this reason, having a target TW ratio is the first step in the process of designing your own drone, as you will select parts to achieve that target.
If you are wanting to fly an aggressive FPV drone, TW ratios of 4 and above are typically used, but I’ve seen as high as 11.
For drones designed to carry a payload, TW ratios around 2 are normal, but you could fly with as low as a TW ratio of 1.5.
If your drone has a TW ratio of 1, well, you won’t get very far.
To estimate TW ratio, you need to start by estimating the weight of your drone.
This means going through the part list above and adding up the weights of the various components (like motors, ESCs, flight controller etc). You should start with the frame you’d like to build and select parts from there.
Let’s say your estimate of weight for a drone you wanted to build was 1,000 grams. If you had a target TW of 2, this means you would need thrust of 2,000 grams. For a quadcopter, this would mean thrust of 500 grams on each motor.
Estimating thrust of a motor is a function of battery voltage, prop size and motor choice. Change one of these variables and you change how much thrust you will generate.
I like to choose motors from manufacturers that provide thrust tables. Thrust tables have empirical data that show you how many grams of thrust you would have for different variables.
An example of a thrust table can be seen below for the eMax kV motors.
For simplicity, let’s say the maximum thrust of this motor was actually the highest thrust amount shown on this table. We’d have a maximum of 670 grams of thrust if using a prop/11V battery, or 490 grams if using prop/11V battery.
So if we used props, we could produce grams of thrust (490g * 4 motors) at 11V. If using props, we could produce grams of thrust (670g * 4 motors) at 11V.
With a TW of 2, having grams of thrust with grams of weight would put us pretty close to our goal.
If you’d like to see a more in depth look at how to select parts for a drone build, my course on how to build drones covers this in detail!
This guide should have given you some confidence to go out and try and make your own drone. If you are still feeling a little wary of starting your own drone building journey, definitely give my diy drone building course a look.
It covers all of the content outlined in this page, but in much more detail. It also guides you along the drone building process with a list of pre-selected parts if you are wanting to build from a parts list.
As an added bonus the drone built in this course uses a raspberry pi, and who wouldn’t love that?
Let me know if you have any questions or comments below.
Happy flying!
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