Lowering Barriers to Entry for Fully-Integrated Custom Payloads on a DJI Matrice

Consumer-grade drones have become effective multimedia collection tools, spring-boarded by rapid development in embedded CPUs, GPUs, and cameras. They are best known for their ability to cheaply collect high-quality aerial video, 3D terrain scans, infrared imagery, etc., with respect to manned aircraft. However, users can also create and attach custom sensors, actuators, or computers, so the drone can collect different data, generate composite data, or interact intelligently with its environment, e.g., autonomously changing behavior to land in a safe way, or choosing further data collection sites. Unfortunately, developing custom payloads is prohibitively difficult for many researchers outside of engineering. We provide guidelines for how to create a sophisticated computational payload that integrates a Raspberry Pi 5 into a DJI Matrice 350. The payload fits into the Matrice's case like a typical DJI payload (but is much cheaper), is easy to build and expand (3D-printed), uses the drone's power and telemetry, can control the drone and its other payloads, can access the drone's sensors and camera feeds, and can process video and stream it to the operator via the controller in real time. We describe the difficulties and proprietary quirks we encountered, how we worked through them, and provide setup scripts and a known-working configuration for others to use.