Homemade trcopter drone

[Stumble]

Hey Chaps,

 

I'm currently in the process of making a drone as a project for school. I've decided on making a tricopter as it has multiple advantages over a quadcopter and its cool to make something a bit less popular. I believe it will help me learn more which I'm always up to. However, theres less info online for DIY tricopters so that's why i'm coming here to see if any of you guys have experience with this kind of stuff.

 

I'm making the main parts by using a 3d printer to print out my body in plastic. I modeled it in Autodesks Fusion 360 (Which I'm new with). The model should be done printing by Monday when I get back to school so if it worked, I'll try take some pics and show you all.

 

Here are some pictures of the models:

It probably has a lot of flaws, and I probably didn't make it the best but all good. I'm learning.

 

I made it so that the wings can fold in when not in use. Otherwise it will be way to big to carry around anywhere. From the front of the little "Electronics Box" to the end of the tail is about 500mm. The arms/wings are laid out 120 degrees to each other. The slot in the bottom can fit two of the battery's that I'm using (I think 2400mah 14.7V) and I have cut holes all around to help with all the wiring that connects to my Arduino Nano which I'm going to use. The little servo at the back controls the twist of the tail to counter the torque generated by the spinning motors.

 

I have a few questions about that.

 

First off, how much twist is required? I think I read somewhere that the yaw mechanism needs to be able to twist about 45 degrees or something like that. Also, I've heard this term "Tail tune" and I haven't been able to find out what that means.

 

This probably isn't the best place to post this all, but i just wanna check in case one of you know about all this. I might also inspire one of you guys to try something like this yourself.

 

I've got a lot of coding to do, and I'm new to it all

 

Wish me luck.

 

 

Salute!

Stumble.

[angus26]

Good luck! I hope all goes well! I’ve never seen a drone like that, but it’s all about the learning process. Definitely show some pictures once you get a final product! 

[Stumble]

3 minutes ago, angus26 said:

Good luck! I hope all goes well! I’ve never seen a drone like that, but it’s all about the learning process. Definitely show some pictures once you get a final product! 

 

Thanks,

 

The idea was to make one which looked half decent. Don't get me wrong functionality is the most important, but ones which have thousands of cables zipped tied on do look a bit untidy.

It will also protect the electronics a bit.

 

Here are two very interesting videos on drones.

 

 

 

S!

[Stumble]

Some of the parts got printed. 

 

Print quality was not as great as I was hoping, but it will still be fine! The main body was printed with support material on the inside, but as we found out by printing the arm (Yellow one) making it hollow is still plenty strong and helps with weight reduction. 

I can't wait to have it all put together and flying!

 

I think I'll be using that 1800mAh battery as it's a 45C and will work for my motors (they draw 25 A each) where as the 2200 mAh battery is 20C. However I could hook them in parallel and that could work. I need to do some testing later on and decide depending on performance.

 

They costed about $70 NZD each. 

 

S!

 

Edited August 17, 2018 by Stumble
Added some stuff about batterys

[angus26]

When do you think it will be all printed out and ready to fly? 

[Stumble]

2 hours ago, angus26 said:

When do you think it will be all printed out and ready to fly? 

Considering I don't get to work on it all that often ( it's a school thing) probably still another couple weeks, maybe months.

[Stumble]

Will get em to ya soon.

[Cybermat47]

What year of school are you in? I was in highschool just last year, and I never got to do anything like this. Mostly because my school was more focused on making sure we followed their political agenda -_-

[angus26]

5 hours ago, PB_Cybermat47 said:

What year of school are you in? I was in highschool just last year, and I never got to do anything like this. Mostly because my school was more focused on making sure we followed their political agenda -_-

I’m fairly certain this isn’t relavent to what we are talking about. Political agenda or not this topic is just about making 3d printed drones. 

[Stumble]

17 hours ago, PB_Cybermat47 said:

What year of school are you in? I was in highschool just last year, and I never got to do anything like this. Mostly because my school was more focused on making sure we followed their political agenda -_-

Hey Cybermat,

 

I'm in year 11 (I think that's the Aussie year 10). Well I'm 15.

I'm making this in a new Mechatronics (Mechanics/Electronics) class at my school. We have a pretty good technology department with some pretty expensive equipment. I think we have all this because I'm at a very low decile school so the government gives us alot more money  ?

 

12 hours ago, angus26 said:

I’m fairly certain this isn’t relavent to what we are talking about. Political agenda or not this topic is just about making 3d printed drones. 

 

Haha, algood. As long as it doesn't turn into any sort of arguing I'm good with it.

 

9 hours ago, Plank said:

Good morning.

 

Hey stumble old chap, you really should do some testing of your motor and prop set up.

ie. Get all the motors on a chassis and run them up to see what the thrust is and

how much current you are drawing.

A thrust measuring jig could be made up using one of them cheap electronic scales

and a current meter is a bit more technically challenging UNLESS you buy one.

( I made mine for my digital multimeter )

You may not pull as much current as you think for basic flight!

 

Bearing this in mind....

 

I think that using two batteries in parallel may be quite the bad idea.

( one may charge the other, different discharge rates and increased risk of short circuit... )

 

Frankly I think that NOT fiddling with batteries in an unconventional way would be a good thing

until you get a few years experience with them under your belt. They are angry little hand grenades!

 

Salute!

 

Planky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm going to be using the Racerstar BR2205 2300KV brush less motors. I'm not sure which exact one it is, but here are some charts. https://www.miniquadtestbench.com/assets/components/motordata/motorinfo.php?uid=143

 

I think they produce around 1KG of thrust at 100% thrust so that's gonna be all good for what I want. Later on I will do some weighing and testing and all. At the moment I just want to get it to hover. Although that might still be a while. ?

 

 

I'll be using a Racerstar Shot 4 In 1 30A ESC instead of 3 separate ones. I have a choice of the props and I'll decide which ones to use later on depending on performance. Either Dalprop 3 Blade 5045 125mm or 2 Blade 8040 200mm.

 

As I've already said, the main board will the Arduino Nano and I BN0055 - 9DOF attitude controller. And I'll probably try mess around with a bunch of different sensors.

 

 

That's interesting stuff about the battery's, I'll look into that.

 

I'm sure all this stuff will be good enough, I'll see XD

 

 

Salute!

Stumble.

[Stumble]

Rightio.

 

I've got three majority of the parts and I'm not all that disappointed. 

 

The yellow arms definitely worked out the best. We printed it hollow but it's still plenty strong enough. There's was no warping, cracking, splitting. It just worked great.

 

However, the body didn't work as well. It's all good, but it just has a few big cracks in it. So what I did was I got a 3d pen, and used some more ABS plastic to fill in the cracks. I then cleaned it up with a Dremel and some 120 grit sandpaper. Here you can see how it's looking. I'll try take some more photos of what I have so far tommorow.

 

 

S!

 

Hopefully I'll have the body finished soon so I can start with the hardware installation. Wish me luck!

 

[Boomerang]

On 8/21/2018 at 9:51 PM, Stumble said:

Rightio.

 

I've got three majority of the parts and I'm not all that disappointed. 

 

The yellow arms definitely worked out the best. We printed it hollow but it's still plenty strong enough. There's was no warping, cracking, splitting. It just worked great.

 

However, the body didn't work as well. It's all good, but it just has a few big cracks in it. So what I did was I got a 3d pen, and used some more ABS plastic to fill in the cracks. I then cleaned it up with a Dremel and some 120 grit sandpaper. Here you can see how it's looking. I'll try take some more photos of what I have so far tommorow.

 

 

S!

 

Hopefully I'll have the body finished soon so I can start with the hardware installation. Wish me luck!

 

Cool, looking good.

[Stumble]

I haven't been able to do much recently. Been real busy with school!! Got done important exams coming up soon

 

Anyway, I've done a bit of assembling. Here's what I have so far.

 

I think I'll have finished adding all the hardware this week. 

 

 

That one arm is a different color because it ran out of plastic halfway through. The blue bits were printed separately and then glued on. 

 

S!

Stumble.

 

Also, those blades on that other drone (a class mates one) are cut short. My ones are gonna be two blade ones which are alot bigger.

Edited September 4, 2018 by Stumble

[Cybermat47]

Nice work, and again, quite jealous 

[angus26]

I’m excited! This is gonna be really cool! 

[Stumble]

Derived grade exams are over! Now I have about another 5 weeks before the real exams. Anyway, Its almost fully assembled. I've gone through many parts that have broken and just haven't worked. But it seems pretty good what I have at the moment. The joining method I use seems to be strong enough. Its just glued on but I then use that 3D pen to practically weld/fuse it together then sand it flat.

 

 

That groove I cut in the wing end was to allow the wires to have plenty of clearance for when the arm folds in. That was just the beginning cut and not the final cut.

Edited September 26, 2018 by Stumble

[Stumble]

Next update! A big one.

 

I've installed the electronics and man was that a mission! I didn't plan enough before building which meant I was fighting for a lot of space where there was none.

 

As you can see from the pictures I have a 4 in 1 ESC which I mounted right at the front in the nose cone (Yeah, let's call it that). Into that, I connected the 9 wires from the three motors and had to make sure they were all spinning the right way, etc. next I drilled a bunch of holes and hot glued in the Arduino and a led which is used to tell me when to plug in the battery (more on that latter). I also had a little Bluetooth connector chip thing which I can use to connect my phone to control the drone.

Basically, I did a bunch of soldering, unsoldering snipping wires and pulling my hair out in frustration. I needed to extend certain wires an had to solder all these bits and pieces together but I kept doing it all wrong! In the end, I got there!

 

Then we tried it!

 

It was awesome!

 

I haven't actually done any proper coding yet so all we could do was set the power of each motor and twist the servo. By doing this you can see it worked! Sorta.

I obviously didn't trust letting go of the drone, but from the video you can see I wasn't holding it but just keeping it in place so it wouldn't fly away and kill one of us. And that was only at %50 throttle. 

 

I'm excited! Even though its taken a very very long time I'm actually getting somewhere!

 

If only I could do this at home and not for 1 hour each day at school.... mhmm.

 

 

Salute!

Edited October 12, 2018 by Stumble

[RAY-EU]

 

https://youtu.be/lg8Nf2nsUho

 Faboulous Drone

Trying the  Mavic 2 zoom with DJI goggles also with family  the Kids ,  is a  2K  , static visual degrees margin of 170° & + 360° But 110 ms latency ( example HTC VIVE PRO 1,5K 110° 90 Hz FPS ) of head motion drone camera with your head movements  how shown in video &  60Hz-30HZ FPS of real drone camera images with that VR practicing in fronton- tenis perimeter every week in my club closed private area  in Tibidavo Mountain , Mojuic Mountain called  ‘ Mount Jupiter ‘ in Barquino City ‘ Barcelona named in  2500 adC. of 2000 feets high & ski stations with pre asked permission  from administration direction in Pirinnees mountains of 10000 feets high is very funny like sims similar but totally immersed in realistic experience with the VR .

I have an own drone project but is on development I will try this year expose photos of every phase more later on , It will take time and €$ . Being patient thanks 

Edited January 13, 2019 by RAY-EU

[Stumble]

That's amazing! Now that's some realism right there haha. I wonder if I could implement that into my drone/hoverbot thingy.... Sounds interesting.

 

Feel free to post pictures or any updates of your own build here. Im happy to see others creations!

 

S!

Stumble.

[RAY-EU]

Just imagine think about graphene Drone of 1000 pounds with retract wings theory futuristic plan : 

 

May be , how seen with the touch  of 007 :

 

 

Edited January 13, 2019 by RAY-EU