Drone PCB Copy Service | NDA on Every Project

Drone PCB Copy means we take your physical flight controller, ESC, gimbal driver or VTX board and rebuild the manufacturing data set from it: Gerbers, drill file, BOM, netlist, and a schematic if you want one. Send clear photos of both sides plus the board dimensions and we’ll come back with feasibility, lead time and price. Boards with potted sections, shielded RF cans, or a locked MCU holding your flight firmware change the answer, so tell us up front what you’re dealing with.

Which drone boards people actually send us

Drone electronics split into a handful of board types, and each one behaves differently on the bench. A 4-layer flight controller with an F4 or F7 class MCU, an IMU, a barometer and a bunch of UART headers is a very different job from a 6-layer ESC carrying four MOSFET half-bridges and a shunt network.

The most common jobs:

• Flight controllers. Usually 4 to 6 layers, dense, with a QFN or LQFP MCU, an SPI IMU, and fine-pitch routing under the chip. Ground and power planes need careful separation because the IMU’s analog supply is often a separate pour.
• ESCs and 4-in-1 stacks. Heavy copper on the phase outputs, sometimes 2 oz or more, plus thermal vias under the FETs. Trace width and copper weight matter here more than anywhere else on the aircraft — this is where IPC-2152 current-carrying guidance genuinely affects whether your copy runs at the same temperature as the original.
• Gimbal and motor driver boards. Often flexible or rigid-flex, which means the copy has to capture the stiffener locations, coverlay openings and bend radius, not just the copper.
• Power distribution boards. Simple copper, but the current path and the shunt geometry have to be replicated exactly or the current telemetry reads wrong.
• VTX, receiver and payload modules. Controlled-impedance RF sections, matching networks, and shield cans that have to come off before anything can be imaged.

Why people ask: the original CAD is gone, the vendor stopped supplying the board, a component went end-of-life, or a fleet of aircraft in service needs spares that nobody sells anymore. All legitimate reasons to rebuild your own data.

What happens to the board on our bench, in order

1. Intake and documentation

The board gets photographed at high resolution on both sides before anything is touched, with a scale reference in frame. Every component marking is logged, including the ones that will be unreadable after desoldering. Connector orientation, mounting hole positions and board outline are measured with calipers.

2. X-ray, then teardown

Before shielding cans and BGAs come off, we X-ray the assembly. On drone boards this is mostly about what’s hiding under the RF can and whether the IMU is a BGA or a land-grid package. It also shows via structures — a flight controller with blind vias under the MCU is a different quote than one with only through-holes.

3. Component removal and identification

Parts come off with hot air, one region at a time, and go into a labeled tray tied to the reference designator. Unmarked passives are measured — capacitance, ESR, resistance, inductor DCR — because on drone boards the decoupling values around the MCU and IMU are not guessable. Laser-marked parts with house codes get cross-referenced against package, pinout and function in circuit.

4. Layer imaging and stackup reconstruction

The bare board is scanned, then the copper layers are exposed one at a time and imaged individually. Layer thickness and dielectric spacing are measured on a cross-section, which matters for any board with a 50-ohm RF trace or a differential pair. The stackup and dielectric are what set impedance, so on VTX and receiver boards this step is not optional.

5. Netlist and schematic

Every pad gets a net. The netlist from the imaged layers is then verified against continuity measurements on the original board — pin by pin on the connectors and the MCU, not sampled. If you ordered a schematic, the engineer draws it functionally, grouping the power stage, the gyro subsystem and the signal conditioning the way a designer would, not as a flat spaghetti dump. That’s the part where a proper schematic capture service earns its keep, because a netlist alone won’t help you modify the design.

6. Output and check

Gerbers, drill, aperture data, pick-and-place, BOM and netlist come out of CAD, then get compared back against the original: dimensional check, layer-by-layer overlay, connector position check. Acceptability of the fabricated result is judged against IPC-A-600 and IPC-6012 class expectations you specify — Class 2 for most hobby and commercial airframes, Class 3 if the aircraft flies in a regulated or safety-relevant role.

What to send us, and what you get back

Getting a real quote instead of a vague range takes about five minutes of your time:

1. Photos of both sides, whole board in frame, on a dark background, focused, no glare. Straight down, not at an angle.
2. Board dimensions in mm, plus board thickness if you can measure it.
3. The main chip marking — the full line of text on the MCU and, on an ESC, the gate driver and FET markings.
4. Layer count if you know it. If you don’t, say so; we’ll figure it out from the X-ray.
5. One line on deliverables: Gerbers only, Gerbers plus BOM, or the full set with schematic. And whether firmware is part of the job.

What comes back from us: a feasibility answer (including anything we think is a risk), a lead time, a price, and a note on how many sample boards we need. Two identical units help — one can be sacrificed for layer imaging while the other stays intact as a functional reference for testing.

Deliverable tiers

The firmware question on flight controllers and ESCs

A copied board with an empty MCU doesn’t fly. If you own the design and the source or hex file is gone — the developer left, the build server died, the repo was never backed up — we can attempt to read the program memory out of the original part. Common targets on drone boards are STM32 F0/F1/F4/F7 flight controllers, ESC MCUs in the STM8 and 8-bit families, and the small EEPROMs that hold PID and calibration settings.

Feasibility depends entirely on how the part was locked. An STM32 sitting at RDP Level 1 is a different proposition from one at RDP Level 2, and we won’t tell you a specific device is guaranteed readable. On 8-bit ESC controllers it comes down to which lock bits and security fuses were programmed at production. We’ll evaluate the actual part and tell you honestly whether it’s worth attempting.

You need to hold the rights to the design, and you’re responsible for compliance with applicable IP law. Every project runs under NDA, and we don’t retain your data after handover.

Where drone boards get hard, and where we’ll say no

Honest list, because the surprises cost you time:

• Potted and conformally coated sections. Common on commercial and agricultural drone power boards. Coating removal is possible but slow, and aggressive potting compound sometimes damages the copper underneath during removal. We assess before we commit.
• RF sections with unmarked matching components. A 5.8 GHz VTX output network with unmarked 0201 parts is genuinely difficult. We can measure values, but a copy that hits the same return loss usually needs a tuning pass on the first article.
• Rigid-flex gimbal harnesses. Reproducible, but the fabrication side is fussier and more expensive than most people expect. Bend allowance and stiffener placement have to be right or the flex cracks in service.
• Custom-programmed or house-marked ICs. If the original vendor used a masked or house-coded controller with no public equivalent, the board copy is straightforward but the part isn’t sourceable. That’s a redesign conversation, not a copy.
• Single-sample jobs where the sample must survive. Layer imaging is destructive by nature. If we only get one board and it has to come back working, some steps aren’t available and the netlist relies more on probing than on imaging.

Cost tracks the same things every time: layer count, board area, component count, whether there are BGAs, whether there’s an RF section needing impedance work, whether firmware is involved, and how deep a deliverable set you want. A 2-layer power distribution board is quick. A 6-layer 4-in-1 ESC with a locked MCU is a multi-week project with more than one unknown.

If your board is closer to a motor drive than a flight controller, our motor control board duplication work covers the same commutation and shunt-sensing patterns. Boards intended for salt-air payload work overlap heavily with marine electronics board reconstruction, where coating removal comes up constantly. And for ground station or telemetry test rigs, see how we handle test and measurement instrument boards.

FAQ

Can you copy a drone flight controller without the schematic?

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