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Show HN: I made a 3D printed VTOL drone

tsungxu.com

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Re: Show HN: I made a 3D printed VTOL drone

#101

Post by yapyap »

energywut wrote: post #54

I have ~200 acres of land I fly a drone survey mission to map. Today, that piloting is done by dronelink and a DJI drone. The challenge is that it's about 3 hours of flight time, give or take, to cover the space, and a given battery is good for about 35 minutes of flight time. I have 4 batteries, which means I basically need to be refilling my batteries as quickly as I consume them in order to keep flying continuousl…

How often do you need to do this mapping? if it’s every day it would definitely be worth it to look for another solution, if it’s every 6 months or so this seems tedious but doable.

Re: Show HN: I made a 3D printed VTOL drone

#103

Post by arijun »

froj wrote: post #95
energywut wrote: post #54

I have ~200 acres of land I fly a drone survey mission to map. Today, that piloting is done by dronelink and a DJI drone. The challenge is that it's about 3 hours of flight time, give or take, to cover the space, and a given battery is good for about 35 minutes of flight time. I have 4 batteries, which means I basically need to be refilling my batteries as quickly as I consume them in order to keep flying continuousl…

I think this fixed wing drone https://ageagle.com/drones/ebee-x/ would fit your usecase.

How much is it? The pricing section is blank for me

Re: Show HN: I made a 3D printed VTOL drone

#104

Post by abrbhat »

energywut wrote: post #54

I have ~200 acres of land I fly a drone survey mission to map. Today, that piloting is done by dronelink and a DJI drone. The challenge is that it's about 3 hours of flight time, give or take, to cover the space, and a given battery is good for about 35 minutes of flight time. I have 4 batteries, which means I basically need to be refilling my batteries as quickly as I consume them in order to keep flying continuousl…

200 acres should not take 4 hours. It should be coverable within 20-25 minutes with 75-65 overlap, flying height 120m with something like Mavic 3 getting a GSD of 3.5cm/px. Look at optimizing your flight overlaps and height.

Re: Show HN: I made a 3D printed VTOL drone

#105

Post by lazide »

abrbhat wrote: post #104
energywut wrote: post #54

I have ~200 acres of land I fly a drone survey mission to map. Today, that piloting is done by dronelink and a DJI drone. The challenge is that it's about 3 hours of flight time, give or take, to cover the space, and a given battery is good for about 35 minutes of flight time. I have 4 batteries, which means I basically need to be refilling my batteries as quickly as I consume them in order to keep flying continuousl…

200 acres should not take 4 hours. It should be coverable within 20-25 minutes with 75-65 overlap, flying height 120m with something like Mavic 3 getting a GSD of 3.5cm/px. Look at optimizing your flight overlaps and height.

It depends a lot on the terrain type - highly repetitive terrain requires higher overlap. It does sound like they have some broken setting somewhere though.

Re: Show HN: I made a 3D printed VTOL drone

#108

Post by Karliss »

the__alchemist wrote: post #10

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…

In case of commercial systems you are paying manufacturer to do the integration work and provide polished solution anyway, so setup UX not being user friendly isn't a major concern. In my opinion bigger factor for why most commercial UASs use PX4 instead of ArduPilot is licensing and PX4 maintainer friendliness towards commercial solutions. ArduPilot is GPLv3 and more geared towards community/hobbyists while PX4 is BSD. Commercial manufacturers don't want to disclose the source for their modified version of firmware with all the value added integrations they provide (or just deal with it even if their fork doesn't have anything interesting).

Re: Show HN: I made a 3D printed VTOL drone

#109

Post by Karliss »

tsungxu wrote: post #62
3x3m3 wrote: post #48

How far can it be remote controlled?

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.

Isn't SBUS receiverautopilot electrical/data protocol instead of transmitterreceiver radio protocol?

Re: Show HN: I made a 3D printed VTOL drone

#110

Post by aesbetic »

throw14082020 wrote: post #106

Ardupilot is really cool, and a lot of people use Mission Planner with it. What do people think of Mission Planner, and are there any other software options people enjoy using? https://ardupilot.org/planner/ - the website seems down right now though.

Mission Planner is an alright GCS but awful for configuration. Use this instead https://github.com/ArduPilot/MethodicConfigurator.

And if you're looking for other ground controls, you could try out QGroundControl or Mavproxy (terminal based).

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