Quadcopter frame build
in Diy / Engineering / Research / Uav
I dusted of some old quadcopter hardware and have begun rebuilding my beloved ‘drone’. My last platform was a bit crowded as I crammed everything in an old CD spindle on top of the original top plate. However, this added weight and the internal layout was rather messy making maintenance difficult. On top of that I want to keep the centre of mass as low and central as possible, not stacking things up high.
So, I decided to redo the bottom and top plate to accommodate all the electronics in a nice and orderly fashion. After some initial fighting with FreeCAD I managed to get some drawings out.
FreeCAD drawings of quadcopter parts[/caption]
I have access to the Harvard engineering facilities (thanks Don) where they have a high powered CO2 laser cutter. So today I made the first prototypes of the top and bottom frame plates out of cardboard. Below you see the laser cutter at work.
The cardboard is amazingly stiff so this allowed me not only to check the location of all the mounting holes but actually build the frame. Although it is not flight ready it does give me a far better idea what the final result will be and where I can improve upon it. Go go for cardboard prototying I would say.
Assembled cardboard quadcopter centre plates[/caption]