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Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

karolina.mgdubiel.com

61–70 of 98 posts

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#61
This is very impressive! I researched fault-tolerant octorotor control using RL in grad school for a NASA project. Perhaps this may be helpful[1, see section 8.3]! The field is moving fast, so there may be better or more suitable approaches out there now.

For folks who are interested in UAV physics, I wrote up an explainer[2].

[1]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RTEVRd0XCWLuDXY2nkbmYuOaa5x...

[2]: https://iahmed.me/post/drone-physics/

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#62
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your first point. The milled fiberglass the author used is a much better UAS frame material than anything from a filament 3d printer due to stiffness and related considerations.

Oh no doubt. I'm no drone expert!

[flagged]

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#64
post #33

People are so jealous. This is cool as hell.

Something happened recently that attracted a whole bunch of quite ignorant and frustrated people to this site.

Don't forget bot AstroTurf, and several con artists attempting various scams. =3

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#65
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something happened recently that attracted a whole bunch of quite ignorant and frustrated people to this site.

So many activists of different kinds.

Activists have political ambitions, but most LLM nonsense is just engagement farming. =3

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#66
post #28

You know you're doing a great job, OP, when the peanut gallery here has nothing more substantial to add than to critique your em-dashes; greek-latin root word mix-ups despite the common vernacular having moved on from that; and lack of title brevity. Congratulations --- this is a super cool project. I wonder if you've considered using ultralight filaments and 3dprinting the frame? PLA is stiff but brittle, and I know…

> the peanut gallery here has nothing more substantial to add than to critique

The comments in this thread are overwhelmingly positive by now. Watch out for the contrarian dynamic! (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

Needlessly negative comments tend to show up first in a thread, while positive responses emerge over time. (Why? well, I have my theories: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...)

It's a fine thing to counteract that with a positive comment, but if you can, please omit the snarky bits (such as in your first paragraph). I know they're tempting, but they tarnish the positivity and substance that you correctly want to see in the discussion - and in the end they "bond" (in the molecular sense) more with the negative posts than with the outright positive ones.

Your second paragraph on its own would make a much better (indeed excellent) post - and that is the best way to combat the negativity.

(I know my reply here is itself an instance of the thing I'm talking about - responding negatively to the negative bits. Sorry!)

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#69

Amazing: I'm watching lots of homemade builds atm. I've got a question: why CNC milling and not just FDM 3D printed parts? TFA doesn't talk much about it except saying she went to a machine shop. > 2. CNC milling forms out of G-10 fiberglass (arms) and 5mm carbon fiber (body) TFA also says this: > The solution for this is to 3D print a 0-tolerance assembly jig to hold the arms in perfect position while the center of…

Stiffness. Important for how the frame behaves under load and buffetting etc.

^^ This was why I opted not to 3D print the whole thing :)

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#70
post #28

You know you're doing a great job, OP, when the peanut gallery here has nothing more substantial to add than to critique your em-dashes; greek-latin root word mix-ups despite the common vernacular having moved on from that; and lack of title brevity. Congratulations --- this is a super cool project. I wonder if you've considered using ultralight filaments and 3dprinting the frame? PLA is stiff but brittle, and I know…

Hi! Thanks for your kind words. I actually had no idea this got posted here, I'm Karolina, and this is my project! Really cool to see some feedback here! I went with CNC cutting over 3D printing just because I wanted to avoid any stiffness/vibrational issues. I don't actually have any prior drone experience, so I wanted to play it really safe with that.
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