Why not just say from scratch instead of no prior experience, is it to brag
This person made it from scratch with no prior experience, so the bragging rights are well earned.
Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience
81–90 of 98 posts
Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience
#82Cool project! For a DIY beginner, what would be a good starting point for a "normal" drone/octocopter project?
Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh no doubt. I'm no drone expert!
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But people do 3d print frames for drones and gliders. It's undoubtedly worse than carbon fibre, I guess, but I found it interesting enough to share that you can buy especially lightweight filaments designed for aeronautic stuff.
Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience
#84I find it very hard to believe that someone who has never done any CAD could design that with Fusion 360 in a day. I do lots of 3D design with Fusion and there is a serious learning curve. It's not something you can pick up in a day. She is doubtless much smarter than me, but that's not credible.
Did you look at the parts and content, or just leap to this assumption?
My first couple days with Fusion had similar outcomes, and this is totally credible. There are extremely talented YouTubers that have information-dense guides through many features. It's totally plausible with that and having a mentor showing you a tool to succeed here.
Why add negativity to something cool? There is a build log! It's well done and tangible! It's not slop! Celebrating is always more fun than humbugging.
Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience
#85Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience
#86Something I've wondered for octocopters - could using a ring instead of arms be beneficial for weight? 6.28r < 8r, but then again the arm radius is usually less than the full circle, and some components want to be centrally located, etc. I could imagine holding the central components in tension via light filaments (carbon fiber, nylon, etc) in tension, vs having to have rigid structure, but the small factor between 6…
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We all have access to AI.
If we want to ask AI we will.
Some people prefer asking actual people since - especially here - there are experts that can answer that question.
LMGTFY was a snarky and rude answer, but typically led to an actual source. "Here's what AI said" is even ruder because you aren't saying "here's the obvious place to find the actual answer", you are saying "I'm not an expert either, so here's a completely unvetted, but plausible sounding answer"
Just saying to ask AI is the most useless and rudest response of all. It adds nothing. At least pasting the AI response in is an (misguided) attempt at being helpful.
Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience
#87Nit pick: The name "octocopter" does not make sense. "Helicopter" is a compound word made of "helico-" and "pter", which means "screw-wings". "Octo-" means eight, "-co-" means nothing. "Octopter" would be a correct compound word meaning "8-wings", but that would be ambiguous, so the object discussed in TFA is better named just "8-propeller drone".
This is quite a common linguistic phonomenon, where a word is rebracketed to form a new suffix, even if it doesn't make sense with the original etymology. See also -holic (alcoholic -> workaholic), -thon (marathon -> danceathon) or -gate (Watergate -> partygate). Termed a "libfix" from liberated affix
>phonomenon
I guess this was a typo, but fits perfectly. Kudos!
Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience
#88I find it very hard to believe that someone who has never done any CAD could design that with Fusion 360 in a day. I do lots of 3D design with Fusion and there is a serious learning curve. It's not something you can pick up in a day. She is doubtless much smarter than me, but that's not credible.
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Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience
#89This is cool as sugar! I have to ask though, how many end mills did you go through milling G10 fiberglass and carbon fiber‽ I've heard the dust from carbon fiber is second to asbestos for inhaling.
Asbestos is dangerous not because it's asbestos, but because it makes small and sharp fibres that embed in the lung tissue.
Carbon Fiber (and even fibreglass) can make fibres that small and sharp. So yeah, responsible dust handling is key.
The good news is that Asbestos easily puts off those small fibres just by being handled. CF and FG need to be damaged or machined to do it, handling the material after the dust has been dealt with is fine.
Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience
#90I find it very hard to believe that someone who has never done any CAD could design that with Fusion 360 in a day. I do lots of 3D design with Fusion and there is a serious learning curve. It's not something you can pick up in a day. She is doubtless much smarter than me, but that's not credible.
Hi, I’m Karolina!
I get it!! I’d probably have some doubts if I saw this online too.
To be fair, I definitely did not get good at Fusion in a day (I’m still not very good at Fusion). The Day 1 CAD was all flat shapes -- all I had to do was use the line, curve, and pattern/mirror tools and then extrude those shapes to my body plate / arm thickness. Same with the screw holes -- I didn’t know there was a hole tool and was just drawing circles, patterning them, and extruding them backwards. It still took me forever, I started super early in the morning and worked on it until ~2pm, knowing it would probably take a MechE major 30 mins to do the same thing.
I also do have mentors in the form of eng majors who can give me verbal feedback / advice / show me which tools to use / get me unstuck. To me, it was very important that I was the only one actually doing the CAD so I could learn, but I definitely have had super amazing mentorship along the way to teach me and point me in the right direction. The motors and props are just 3rd-party components that I imported (still took me ages to figure out how to constrain them right). I went to the machine shop after and that took forever too, especially figuring out how I’m supposed to arrange the plates for printing in Fusion (but I had people to help me out there, they were not going to let me use a CNC mill alone with no exp lol)
I made the GPS / receiver mount way later in the process because I was so intimidated by the CAD for it (literally taped my GPS and my receiver to the drone for the first flight instead), and it took me days (also such a simple component, but the stuff that’s not just an extruded 2D shape is way harder for me).
I’m definitely not superhuman and it’s probably going to be years before I feel truly confident in Fusion :))