This is incredibly impressive. I'd love to hear more about what relevant skills & knowledge you started with, and how you worked out what you'd need to know to complete the project. How much customisation did you need to make to Ardupilot? Is your drone's control unique, or somehow standardised?
It doesn't look like it required any AP customization, AP will do VTOL out of the box.
Yes, one of the challenges though is airframe structural integrity when building it yourself. Need to have good enough understanding of multicopter and fixed wing plane design
Yes it really depends on the transmitter protocol. I was using SBUS, simple, cheap, familiar from my previous project. But limited to < 1 mile or so I believe, but ELRS and other protocols allow tens of miles or more.
Yea def! You could also get into questions of cruise speed with level altitude vs in a dive etc, and you burn through batteries fast when max-performing quads!
Exactly! Didn't even mention cruise vs dive. But the latest WR for a quad doing 347mph I think, is just insane, even if drawing multi hundred amps for a few seconds only.
Oh wow, that’s even higher than this one I saw from last year @ 298 MPH for a quadcopter, but I’m not sure if this is the same criteria for the WR or build limitations etc?
I'm curious how this compares to foam-frame designs. Being able to customize it is obviously a big advantage, as is the non-solid-infill of 3d-printed parts. I think for stiffness, 3d-printed frames don't work well for quadcopters compared to carbon fiber, but they sound like a nice alternative to foam for fixed-wing. I think the stiffness concern comes up in quads mainly when they do high-performance maneuvers that…
PLA is pretty bad compared to foam when it comes to planes, as it's very heavy and very brittle. Any semi-hard landing will break parts off, and heavy planes fly badly. The big advantage is that you can just print the part again, which almost makes PLA worth it. ABS would probably be better, as it's much more durable and lighter, but it's still much heavier than foam, and printing ABS isn't great.
I used single wall foaming PLA which has filament density of ~0.45 g/cm3 at 250 degree nozzle temp, about 64% lower than normal PLA. But it is even worse for impact resistance than normal PLA. Weight was the primary driver for this plane
I reviewed and purchased a smaller drone, from WHISPR. Through that, I looked at similar VTOL drones, which OP is demonstrating. In theory, they're cheap: https://www.uavmodel.com/products/makeflyeasy-hero-2180mm-ua... This one has a maximum climb rate of 3 degrees. Which means you'd need to plan a route that's continously climbing, and tacking back and forth to avoid going steeply. So you would probably combine flig…
for processing, I setup opendronemap: https://www.opendronemap.org/ There really is a full open source hardware/software path, which is heartening.
This actually has decent flight time! Could probably push close to 3 hours if using higher energy density (and cost) battery cells like the silicon anode ones I used.
Ukraine has dozens of drone producers, many are capable of producing 10k+ per month. This one is quite expensive (2000$) and more is for home-grown terrorist (like 3d-printed firearms)
"like 3d-printed firearms" is this even a thing lol??? I thought manufacturer already have a safety in place like printer that refuse to print money for that
Yes, this is a thing. Supposedly such a thing was used in a recent attack. 3D printers are not able to determine intended operation of their printed output from their print job inputs, whereas counterfeit money has no legitimate purpose, so anything that looks “close enough” for an automated system to detect is probably close enough to fool a human if passed to them as if it were the real thing. I think preventing counterfeit money is a broad enough social good/benefit that a broad cross section of industry, government, and private individuals and groups have decided to work together to make it harder to produce. I don’t see who is harmed by this, besides people trying to print their own currencies for their own purposes, some of whom aren’t trying to make counterfeit copies of actually-existing currencies, but I think they are already going to have to worry about the counterfeit problems themselves if their currency is used outside of controlled conditions by trusted parties.
Nice work! This is very impressive and you’ve shown real resilience and perseverance to work through the challenges you encountered while building this.